The custom at Pathé was for everybody to celebrate over dinner after a test screening. Following a nail-biting trial run to see whether ordinary Americans took to a film at a typical suburban multiplex in Illinois, the director, editor and all the key studio executives repaired to a favorite restaurant, Gene & Georgetti, a clubby, old-school steakhouse in downtown Chicago. There they feasted on rib eye, sautéed spinach and the restaurant’s famous garbage salad, served family style with lots of red wine. No amount of alcohol could numb the pain at the first reaction to Thelma & Louise.
Creative people tend to disparage the test-screening process, tend to claim it dumbs down the daring aspects of their work, but it’s still a punch in the gut if the audience doesn’t approve. When only 20 percent of the crowd rated Thelma & Louise a must-see on the night of October 29, 1990, the dinner plunged into gloom. What had gone wrong? How could it be fixed? And how was the studio supposed to market this potential turkey in the face of an audience accustomed to something else entirely?
At a loss at how to pitch this movie all along, the guys in the Pathé marketing department had looked to a string of test screenings for answers. Everyone at the studio loved the finished film, but a female-buddy dramedy? It fell outside all the usual marketing templates. In the female realm, Pathé had found success with some Goldie Hawn movies, says Greg Foster, who set up test screenings for the studio, and had learned that those movies “worked, sort of, but we had to pretend they were bimbo-ish.” There was no use pretending Thelma & Louise checked that box. The marketing department knew how to address the kind of crowd that enjoyed action set pieces like car chases and truck explosions, but no one could predict how it would react to the more subversive elements.
“Most movies were made for somebody like Geena Davis’s husband, Darryl,” says Foster. “That was our audience. So if that kind of guy didn’t like the movie, whatever it was, we were screwed.” With an offering that made fun of core moviegoers, the studio had to hope there was some other audience out there, too, one the marketers didn’t fully understand or know how to reach.
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FINGERS HAD BEEN TIGHTLY CROSSED that one would show up at the Cineplex Odeon Cinema in Arlington Heights, Illinois, one of Laddie’s favorite locales for gauging the mood of Middle America. Ridley Scott, Thom Noble, Laddie, Becky Pollack and a slew of Pathé executives scanned the mostly white crowd of 330 that trooped in on that Monday night. Fewer than expected had accepted the offer of free tickets to a movie mystifyingly billed as a cross between Bonnie and Clyde and Beverly Hills Cop, but starring women. Younger men were conspicuously underrepresented.
To say that the filmmakers were anxious was an understatement. They understood the danger they were courting with a film that had scared off everyone who bought into business as usual in Hollywood. Even Sam Cohn, Susan Sarandon’s agent, had flown in from New York to see how his client fared in this singular turn. Becky Pollack paced in the lobby, as nervous as anyone had ever seen her. She’d believed in the power of the movie when she saw it complete in London, but she couldn’t be sure how it would play. “The trick was not to undermine what worked, but also be able to listen to the audience if that’s what we needed to do,” she says. “The danger was, if you had a bad audience, how lethal would that be?”
The crowd responded politely from the start, displaying enthusiasm for the humorous scenes. There was an audible gasp when Susan shot the rapist in the parking lot. Greg Foster, from his perch in a back row of the theater, thought people weren’t opposed to what she’d done, but they weren’t quite sure what they were in for yet. Clearly, the movie was something they hadn’t seen before. Soon women, especially, were laughing again. Okay, they’re with the movie, Foster thought. It’s new, it’s different, they haven’t been conditioned for this, but everything is good. They applauded like crazy when the truck blew up. He relaxed. We’re gonna make it, he thought. They’re with the characters. Then the police cornered those characters, Susan hit the gas and Thelma and Louise flew into the Grand Canyon. “And you could hear it—‘Oh my God,’ intermingled with clapping and gasping and . . . and . . . it was just emotion,” says Foster. “The audience was invested in those characters. It had been provoked. It was responding to this movie. I’m sure some responded incredibly well, and some responded not so well, but the movie was the impetus to release strong feelings, whatever those feelings were.”
The car drifted downward in slow motion, Harvey ran to the lip of the cliff and then a shot appeared that Ridley had added for the test screening, a brief shot, a few seconds at most, of the two women still driving the car, a metaphorical survival, or so he intended.
Cries of “No!” and “Awe, man!” broke out. Laddie, the ever-silent Laddie, jumped out of his seat on the aisle near the back. “What the fuck is that?” he thundered. There was a smattering of tepid applause, and the crowd filed out, along with all the air in the room.
“It changed,” says Foster. “Whatever was there, in an instant, not for everyone but for a lot of people, it was gone.”
Foster couldn’t read the comment cards on the way to the dinner for fear of getting carsick. When he arrived, the wine was already flowing, but the mood was funereal. Everyone was tearing the movie apart even before he could flip through the data and frame his dismal report. The overall “excellent” score of 11 percent was well below the usual average at screenings of 25 percent. Even the most enthusiastic group, older females, trailed the norm at 17 percent. While a few, mostly women, wrote in the comments section that they found the movie an original spin on a “tired” genre, someone else wrote in the comments section: “What kind of movie is this?”
Foster whispered to Laddie, then addressed the rest of the group with the grisly results—very high poor-to-fair ratings, so-so positive numbers and virtually nothing in the middle. “It was polarizing,” he told the group. “They either hated it or loved it.” Mostly hated it.
Sam Cohn, known for an eccentric habit of chewing on paper napkins under stress, went through a stack of them as everyone started suggesting scenes to cut, with the truck driver as the first sacrifice. Suddenly it seemed to Ridley as if the character had driven in from another movie. “It was a disaster, just terrible,” says Laddie. “We said, ‘Let’s cut this, let’s cut that.’ We had the picture down to about twenty minutes.” Ridley, fast losing faith in his creation, was one of the leaders in suggesting a massacre. “He was crestfallen,” Laddie says.
Becky Pollack tried to keep everyone calm. “The preview process is a critical stage when you can become afraid and try to hedge your bets,” she says later. “You wind up destroying what you originally envisioned the movie would be.” She told the group, “We have to be careful to hang on to why we made this movie in the first place.” With so many people insisting on alterations, she was afraid the film would wind up like a sweater with six-foot arms and no torso.
Foster, who had conducted focus groups with some viewers who remained behind, was convinced that the ending was the problem, and it had affected their opinion of the entire film. What the cards couldn’t answer was what the audience hated about the end—the women going off the cliff, as everyone had feared all along, or the little snippet that followed of the women still alive. Foster sensed during the screening that there was support for the original downer, but he thought the crowd didn’t get the metaphorical intention of that additional shot, that it thought the women had somehow landed safely and driven on. Some of the comments slammed the ending for its “Hollywood spin.”
Everyone dreaded a second preview scheduled for the very next night in San Francisco. It was too late to cancel, and too late for a wholesale redo of the film. Laddie, who’d objected to the added shot the moment he saw it, suggested a simple experiment—cutting off those frames and leaving everything else unchanged. Sam Cohn seconded the plan, which was enough to sway the others. It was with heavy doubts and even heavier hangovers that the group flew out from Chicago the next morning, not before Laddie made note of the theater they’d used the night before, to make sure he never tested a picture there again.
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THOM NOBLE ARRIVED A COUPLE HOURS early at the projection room of the Syufy Century Plaza in South San Francisco, where he snipped off the offending final moments with the care of a mohel at a circumcision. Then the whole group hunkered down again in the back, walleyed with apprehension, noting that the crowd that night seemed a bit more blue-collar, maybe more open-minded and liberal.
Once the movie started, something different was in the wind. “When people in the audience realized where the movie was going, they cheered, they laughed, they were incredibly vocal,” Becky recalls. “They became unglued with the trucker. You could feel the movement in the audience. People absolutely over-the-top loved it.”
Everybody from Ridley to Laddie to the projectionist was elated. “People applauded, they cheered, they were invested,” says Foster. “The movie played through the roof.” The excellent rating hit 30 percent, the overall positive rating 82 percent, a whopping 27 points over the norm. The must-see rating more than doubled to 49 percent. Nearly three-quarters of the viewers scored Geena’s and Susan’s performances as excellent.
Asked about their favorite scenes, the viewers singled out mostly humorous ones: the truck explosion; Thelma robbing the convenience store; the women locking the trooper in his truck; the Rastafarian rescuing him; J.D. telling Darryl, “I like your wife”; Darryl stepping on his pizza. On the other hand, Louise shooting Harlan also made the list.
As for the off-the-cliff ending, Greg Foster’s report noted that the responses were outstanding, with comments calling the finish “uncompromising,” “un-Hollywood” and “appropriate.” Although a few found it too sad, others wrote in, “They did the right thing!”
“From that moment on, we knew we had something,” Foster says. “It was everything we hoped it would be. The relief was unbelievable.”
The movie rolled through the rest of the test screenings with the same kind of charged reaction. Perhaps the Illinois audience had been a bit conservative, Foster says, but the only other explanation for such a dramatic change in the outcome was the little snip that Thom Noble made in San Francisco. “Everything about that movie had been authentic,” Foster says, “except for that little glimpse at the end.”
Apparently, the audience would be satisfied only with what Callie had envisaged all along, with what had deterred every studio but Pathé all along. The movie itself seemed to demand the dark fate she had chosen for her heroines, to reject any attempts to jolly it up, just as it rejected the cheery B. B. King song during the edit. Standing fast in the face of that first preview had saved the film. “The center of it held true to what it was always intended to be,” says Becky. “This was a special movie because it stayed where it started. It was never compromised.”
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FOR ALL THE BENEFIT OF aligning with a studio that stood by the filmmakers’ intentions, they soon felt the drag of its debt-hobbled status. Giancarlo Parretti, the Italian tycoon who controlled the company, turned off the spigot of money at the most crucial moment for the picture. For a while the processing lab held the negative hostage when Pathé couldn’t pay the bill, and no one knew whether funds would be forthcoming for advertising. Laddie was personally embarrassed when he had to postpone the release date, which had been set for March of 1991, a nice little spring-break niche for a smaller film that needed time to build an audience. The soundtrack album was doomed—shipped to stores and returned unsold before anyone could see the movie. “It was a nightmare,” Laddie says. “The check is in the mail, that kind of thing. If I was Ridley, I would have sued somebody, if I could ever find Parretti to sue him.” Laddie wrote some personal checks to try to keep the operation afloat.
Thelma & Louise was by far the best movie in the Pathé pipeline, the best shot at saving the company, so the executives moved forward with planning, unsure how long the film might linger on the shelf. The previews had not only raised the possibility that Ridley and Pathé might have a hit on their hands, but the testing also helped settle the long-running argument over how to market the film. Pathé would go all in on the female-buddy dramedy angle, whatever that was, with posters prominently featuring the two women. Comment cards from the screenings demonstrated enthusiasm for this previously nonexistent genre and for the sight of women in nontraditional roles. Fewer men had turned up to see the film, but those who did, especially the younger ones, liked it nearly as much as the women did. “This was a word-of-mouth movie,” says Foster. “The only way that people were ever going to understand it was to see it.” More sneak previews were scheduled to get people talking, and they did. “What a great, radical movie,” said one viewer’s comment in Houston. “It was like the sixties and nineties combined.” Someone in Atlanta declared, “I wish Davis had shot her husband instead.”
Ridley made a few more nips and tucks to the film in response to pacing concerns from the screenings. He pared back Susan Sarandon and Michael Madsen’s improvised encounter in the motel, along with some of the line dancing at the Silver Bullet bar and the sex scene between Geena Davis and Brad Pitt, which, even trimmed from its previous spectacle, some still found too graphic, gratuitous or even offensive. With Pathé unable to pay Thom Noble, the editor was off the picture, so Mimi Polk oversaw the final cut of the ending. That’s when she substituted the freeze-frame of the car in the air, followed by the montage of happier times.
The one audience member whose reaction seemed to intimidate Ridley most was Callie Khouri. She wasn’t invited to screenings—filmmakers weren’t required to invite writers back in the day—but Diane escorted Callie to one in New Jersey, sharing a New York hotel room to save money. Diane and Sam Cohn claimed seats on either side of the outspoken writer to provide a buffer from Ridley in case she didn’t like what she saw.
Seeing Susan and Geena inhabit the roles, hearing the audience laugh, feeling the surge of emotion in the theater, Diane whispered to Callie, “Ridley really did get this movie.” When Susan played the shooting scene perfectly and the audience clapped and even cheered, the agent and client exchanged a bug-eyed look. “They cheered,” Diane remembers. “That never happens, never!” She stifled a laugh at the Rastafarian scene, knowing that it still annoyed Callie. Afterward, Diane leaned toward her client and said, “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks now. This movie plays.”
For Callie, the experience was overwhelming. Tears streaked her face. She had been afraid of feeling embarrassed at how much the movie revealed about her, or upset at how much Ridley had altered her vision, but she knew that as a movie it worked, with or without the Rastafarian and the vulgar trucker. This being a Ridley Scott version of her work, the majestic imagery and sheer commotion of it astonished her as much as everyone else. The director, she thought, had made the most commercial possible version of the script, and for that she was glad. “It wouldn’t have been the movie that I would have made,” she says, “just because I never would have had those resources—a helicopter and all those stunts.” More than that the writer couldn’t put into words.
She felt shell-shocked at the screening, she told her friend Amanda Temple later. “It was so much more heightened than we’d ever pictured it, it took some adjusting,” Amanda says. “After a while it was possible to chill and go, okay, the movie is still there, the heart is still there.”
Diane planned to scoot with Callie out of the theater to avoid any dicey back-and-forth with Ridley, but they did speak for a moment before she left, and he saw the tears. “I’ve been waiting a long time to see this movie,” Callie said to him, which was just enigmatic enough to leave him wondering.
For more than two decades afterward, Ridley remained unsure of her real feelings. “When she saw the cut, she was very emotional,” he says when he recalls that night in New Jersey. “I could never work out whether she was disappointed or whether she loved it.” ICM offered to pay Callie’s way to the Cannes Film Festival, where Thelma & Louise would cap the closing night on May 20, 1991, but it was up to Ridley and Mimi to decide whether to include the writer. Mimi reported back to Diane that Callie wasn’t invited.
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THE STUDIO HAD BIGGER WORRIES. After the joint entity of MGM and Pathé flirted with bankruptcy in April, the chief creditor, Crédit Lyonnais Bank Nederland, put Laddie in charge instead of Parretti and started to parcel out just enough cash to keep things afloat. The release of Thelma & Louise was back on, even though there wasn’t even enough money at one point to pay for the poster. Ultimately, the company was able to spring for some all-important television ads, but the publicity budget was still 60 percent less than it should have been.
More critical was the release date, which had now been pushed to Memorial Day weekend, the kickoff to the 1991 summer season. Over the next few weeks, Callie Khouri’s everyday women would face a murderer’s row of fully loaded action and comedy summer blockbusters, including Terminator 2 with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner and City Slickers with Billy Crystal. On opening day alone, Pathé’s little genre buster would run smack into its longtime nemesis, the $75 million Backdraft, not to mention Hudson Hawk, a $70 million Bruce Willis spectacular. Thelma & Louise was showing up in the middle of a circular firing squad armed with nothing but a slingshot budget, a couple of midlevel female stars and one exploding truck.