Day two was a whole other story. Two hundred fifty extras, a four-member rockabilly band, a fully festooned country-western bar with pools of shadow and colored lights and, not to be forgotten, Ridley’s beloved smoke machines to thicken up the atmosphere. The heroines’ fateful stopover at the joint where they met Thelma’s rapist would amount to a full-out demonstration of Ridley’s abilities to corral the elements of a big production—and a test of whether he could keep the focus on the characters at the heart of it.
At the beginning, before the story line turned dangerous and dark, the week of shooting at the Silver Bullet in Long Beach felt like a party. The location guys had managed to find an actual country-themed saloon and dance hall in the vicinity of LA. When they made a deal with the owner to use the bar’s real name, it never crossed their minds that someday the Silver Bullet might raise the hackles of critics convinced they had sniffed out phallic symbolism.
The stars prepared by focusing on the finer points of drinking and cutting loose. Ridley gave them earphones that played loud music, freeing them up to shout the dialogue across a table even when the set was quiet. Geena adopted a tip from Susan—feign drunkenness by spinning until it made her dizzy. And the two of them conspired to steep their performances in tipsy realism by persuading the prop guy to sneak real tequila into their drinks. “Just so we’d get the taste and kick in some sense memory,” Geena says. “So we were doing all these shots and takes, and we started to feel drunk, laughing that people didn’t know we actually were. When it was done, we were just rip-roaring. We asked the prop guy, ‘How much do you think we drank?” And he said, ‘Probably like a third of a shot.’”
What Ridley saw through the viewfinder looked pretty freewheeling. I’ve had it up to my ass with sedate! Thelma exclaimed over the supposed noise and the band, her eyes shining like headlights. You said you and me was gonna get outta town and, for once, just really let our hair down. Well, darlin’, look out, ’cause my hair is comin’ down!
No one was more dazzled by the extravaganza than Callie. She blended into the crowd as unobtrusively as possible—no one was eager to engage with the writer in the midst of this crush, she knew—but stopped short when she saw Susan and Geena together at the table.
There they are, Callie thought.
The feeling was exhilarating, thrilling. “It was also so weird, because something lives in your head, and then suddenly it’s outside of your head and all around you,” Callie says. But she also felt a profound intimation of no longer being especially necessary. “The train was leaving the station, fast and furious.”
—
NORRIS, ANNE AND THE WHOLE art department crew had knocked themselves out to heighten the reality of the dance hall, which looked like a large, empty, beer-stained box before they got to work. They’d turned it into a Ridley Scott playground: crate loads full of clear glassware, neon beer signs on the walls, pool tables with blue billiard lamps suspended overhead and a dance floor beckoning under red and blue lights that spun from the ceiling. Dancers and drinkers animated the foreground, middle ground and background with constant motion. “We had a lot of opportunities to backlight them,” says Michael Hirabayashi. “It allowed us to make more silhouettes to give depth to the image.”
Over the bar in the center of the room, the decorators had dangled rows of glasses under red, white and blue neon, to give off an effect like an American flag. “We were going for super Americana,” Ahrens said, “but not in a cutesy way. Just a real bar, gritty and dirty, like it had been there for forty years.” The beer stains stayed. The scene would come across as authentic, right down to the waitress, Lena, played by Lucinda Jenney, a thirty-six-year-old who had won a number of supporting roles in movies like Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July. She weaved expertly among the tables, picking up the light in a blouse embellished with a Native American design of fringe and polished paillettes.
Because this was a waitress in a screenplay written by a former waitress, Jenney wasn’t expected to play some movie bimbo in a tight uniform. The part was small but had personality, including some of Callie’s own qualities. She’d written Lena as a bit jaded, and smart about sizing people up. It’s a good thing they’re not all as friendly as you, she said to Harlan, signaling to the audience that the charm of the man who was hitting on Thelma had its limits.
Ridley recognized these straight-shooter qualities in Jenney at her audition and hired her without looking much further. She knew others had declined to read because the role occupied too few pages, but when Lou sent her the script, it was the best one she’d read in ten years, with a part, finally, that wasn’t just “the girl.” An accomplished theater actress in New York, Jenney had run up against a whole different environment when she moved to Hollywood. “The opportunities were entirely based on my looks; it’s that simple,” she says. “I just stuffed my bra and prayed to God my ass didn’t look too big.”
Jenney projected a fresh, pretty, girl-next-door quality, but agents peppered her with suggestions, few of them about acting. “They told me to dress a little hotter and make my boobs look bigger,” she says. “Understood: get a boob job. I never did.” But she appreciated the reasoning. Once, when she played a “very booby” character in a tight costume, she was amazed at the attention she received on the set. “It’s a visual art, so to cry boohoo is foolish,” she says. “I like to look at lovely people, too. I just wish there were more stories that had parts for women, any parts for women, whatever they looked like.”
While Thelma & Louise became known as a quintessential women’s film, Lucinda Jenney’s Lena was the only other female character in the cast, besides the leads, after Catherine Keener got cut during the edit. Jenney appreciated that Susan, a female role model in the flesh, hung out with her between takes, an unaccustomed opportunity for an actress on a movie set. And Geena lived up to the name Thelma, Jenney felt. “It’s a tough name to pull off. She’s childlike yet bright. That’s a lucky thing for an actress.”
Looking back later, she says, she viewed Thelma & Louise as a little spaceship that made it through a wormhole. “At the time, I didn’t have enough perspective to realize: this is a magic carpet ride.”
—
THE ACTOR WHO FINALLY WON the steeplechase for the thankless job of Harlan the rapist was Timothy Carhart. The long list of potential heavies had included Viggo Mortensen and various action-movie veterans. Carhart specialized in making a vivid impression in small parts, like a paranoid corporate executive in Working Girl. Tall, thin, handsome, with cold blue eyes, he was “a Janus-faced guy,” says the casting assistant Brett Goldstein. “He looked likable, but then he could also look psychotic and evil, like one of those holographic pictures where you turn it and go, ‘Whoa—what is that!’ Like you see the skull under the skin.”
“I’m not sure you’re threatening enough,” Ridley had told Carhart during the audition. The actor figured he’d lost out. I can’t turn into Snidely Whiplash, he thought. But the director decided Carhart did possess an unexpected elegance that would appeal to Thelma at first.
He could appear pleasant or predatory at will, but in real life Carhart was a tender-hearted guy. Playing this role would exact a price. Nevertheless, he didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. “It’s a Ridley Scott movie,” he says. “I said I’d do anything.”
He kept himself apart from the others during breaks at the Silver Bullet and tried to play his first encounter with the two women as if convinced his winning ways would bowl them over. When Susan, recognizing the creep beneath, blew smoke in his face, unrehearsed, he was genuinely surprised.
Music and dancing dominated the scenes, which Ridley pulled together like clockwork. Patsy Swayze, a dance teacher and choreographer, the mother of Patrick Swayze, corralled the extras on the floor while Charlie Sexton, a rising young guitar player, performed with a popular local bar band called the Broken Homes. As they bashed away during a break, the extras, many of them regulars at the club, taught Geena and Susan how to perform a line dance called the tush push. Ridley had them repeat it, unrehearsed, so it would look ragged, while he sent handheld cameras up and down the rows.
Through the four days of interiors at the Silver Bullet, the mood for cast and crew was rollicking. The visuals popped, but the center of the story held. Ridley had learned that lesson on previous films. “It’s very easy to drop the ball or just get lazy or get swamped on the process of how that film looks,” he said. As the revelers stomped and twirled, Louise edged toward chucking some inhibitions, dancing with a stiff, fuzzy-haired stranger Ridley had plucked from the band. Thelma relished her momentary freedom, oblivious to Harlan’s controlling grasp. They finished the week on budget and on point.
—
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY and Tuesday nights marked one of the most precipitous curves in movies, the attempted rape in the parking lot. As darkness fell on the exterior of the Silver Bullet, the first order of business was to shoot an earlier scene that depicted Thelma and Louise pulling in from the road out front. The crew added extraordinary interest to such a seemingly basic shot, wetting down the street for shine and lining up tractor trailers with their lights on, illuminating airborne pockets of exhaust. In the lot itself, where the attempted rape would go down, Norris ordered stacks of fifty-five green oil drums to block an ugly fence, then switched them out for black ones. Right before the cameras rolled, he changed his mind again and asked for black plastic sheeting to cover the whole pile, just enough to kick off reflective glints. Ridley approved tungsten movie lamps mounted on stands in the background. Even though they’d be visible on-screen, they would emit a stronger glow than streetlights to backlight the parked pickups and cars. Ridley cared more for the effect than for realism. He thought if anyone noticed the mechanics, the scene wasn’t doing its job.
It wasn’t until almost four in the morning on the second night that setups were complete and the rape scene itself was called. “We need to go quite a way down the road to make it understood what’s going on,” Ridley cautioned Geena and Carhart before they began. “We can’t just cut away.”
They blocked out the action and got down to it. Thelma, spinning from drink, Harlan groping her, Thelma pushing him away, Harlan smacking her sharp across the face and throwing her down against the trunk of a car. At first, Carhart felt invigorated to be playing a scene with an Oscar-winning actress. “Geena has the most insane talent in the sense of her belief that what is happening is actually happening,” he says. “As an actor, it becomes real for you because it’s so real for her. Which is why you want to do things with Academy Award–quality people. It was wonderful—maybe the first couple of times.”
Then the ugliness began to sink in. It got physical. It got rough. “Grueling, just grueling,” he says. When they finished, Carhart went straight home with a massive headache.
Geena tried to keep it professional, although the assault left her with bruises and cuts on her knees that were visible throughout the rest of the film. “Doing it was upsetting,” she says. “But I’m not one of those people who takes stuff home, or has big hangovers from things. It’s whatever it is at that moment. I’m always able to let it go.” Until the next time. Toward the end of the entire production Ridley would decide the scene needed a greater boost of violence to justify the rest of the women’s actions. They would have to go at it again, in a fashion that would be even more harrowing.
Before closing out the Silver Bullet shoot that night, the unit still had to tackle the scenario that most disturbed Susan—Louise’s shooting of Harlan, clearly unjustified because she had already stopped the rape by holding a pistol to his head. In rehearsals two weeks before, she had repeated her objections to performing a revenge killing. “What bothers me is, it’s not a necessary death,” Susan had insisted. “We don’t want this to be a genre where taking a life is superficial and flip.” She wanted the moral price to be evident, for Louise to recognize that she would have to pay.
Susan and Ridley negotiated how Louise would fire the gun, as if she weren’t fully aware of what she was doing. “She points her finger, but the finger has a gun in it,” Ridley explained. “It goes off—bang—which is why she startles and then realizes what she’s done.”
Moments later, Louise spits out at Harlan’s inanimate body: You watch your mouth, buddy.
Susan approved the approach, especially that line. “She’s just trying to shut him up, and because she speaks to him afterward it shows she almost doesn’t understand what’s happened,” Susan says. The way she played it, it was all on her face, the trauma that drove her to shoot, the shock that she had really done it, the horror at the realization that she’d made an irrevocable mistake.
The night ended with Thelma and Louise tearing out of the parking lot, Geena at the wheel, hysterical, her clothes torn, fake blood pouring out of her nose. “I have to run to the car, squeal back to pick her up, peel out, then slam on the brakes and hit the mark exactly next to the camera,” Geena said. “I have no recollection of how I was acting. I was just driving—it was all I could think about.”