There are many ways a Hollywood story can end, from a script in the waste bin of somebody’s assistant to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. When a film becomes a classic, it simply rolls on. But as good a place as any to pause in the story of Thelma & Louise might be Oscar night of 1992.
It gave the filmmakers a chance to reunite, walking the red carpet as the underdogs of the occasion. Ridley, ever his mother’s son, felt “bloody silly” in his starchy tux. Geena embraced the spectacle and cheerfully vamped her way onto the Worst Dressed lists in a white dress by a costume designer that made her look like a cancan dancer with the front of her skirt hitched up. Susan, serene and beaming in a simple black tunic, was eight months pregnant with her third child. Laddie had begged and scrounged for tickets so everyone on Pathé’s young and giddy team could crash the party.
Callie made it an occasion. She brought her husband, her mother, her brother and her agent, and they all dressed beforehand in a snug Santa Monica house that Callie and David Warfield had bought with her earnings from Thelma & Louise. This was back before Oscar attendees served as walking billboards for designers, so Callie wore a vintage beaded navy blue dress that a friend had reconfigured with a different skirt. She and her little entourage didn’t have far to travel in their limo, but traffic was so jammed that they barely made it to the hall in time to see the host, Billy Crystal, make an entrance trussed up as Hannibal Lecter in a spoof of the evening’s favorite, the sinister thriller The Silence of the Lambs.
It was Thelma & Louise that most of Hollywood had been too spooked to make, but the community rewarded the movie with six nominations. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis both were up for Best Actress, their performances so equally matched that they were sure to split the vote and hand the prize to Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs, which also carried off the statue for Best Picture, as expected. Adrian Biddle was nominated for cinematography, as was Thom Noble for editing. Both lost to Oliver Stone’s JFK. Even though Thelma & Louise didn’t make the list of Best Picture nominees, Ridley Scott did for Best Director, but he was spared his heart-popping terror of public speaking when Jonathan Demme won for Silence instead. A scandal of the night was the snub of Barbra Streisand for directing The Prince of Tides, even though it was nominated for Best Picture. “Seven nominations on the shelf,” Billy Crystal sang in his introductory medley. “Did this film direct itself?”
That left the former waitress and video producer from Paducah, Kentucky, to carry the banner for Thelma & Louise. Callie was thrilled, nervous and happy to share the moment with her family. But even as she settled in a forward section just behind Hollywood’s biggest power brokers and stars, she didn’t realize that if she did take home the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay that night, this one would be historic. Beginner that she was, she would be the first woman working without a male partner to win in sixty years, filling the long-empty footsteps of the pioneering Frances Marion.
Callie had been borne along through some warm-up contests—the Golden Globes, the Writers Guild—oblivious to the possibility that she could prevail, and then she did. Each one took her so much by surprise that she hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech and had to wing it onstage. This time, Callie had drafted some remarks, in case of an emergency. But still she couldn’t wrap her head around the possibility that the stodgier Oscar voters would choose her over veterans like James Toback for Bugsy, Lawrence and Meg Kasdan for Grand Canyon, Richard LaGravenese for The Fisher King and another newcomer, John Singleton, who wrote the groundbreaking Boyz n the Hood.
Okay now, here’s the big one, Callie told herself as Robert Duvall and Anjelica Huston took the stage to present her category. This is where they give it to the real writer.
When her name rang out, nobodies and literary renegades everywhere could delight in Callie’s triumph. So could anyone who wanted to see movies that weren’t easy to categorize, or hear what a woman might have to say. Even the fainthearted souls of the movie industry let out a shout that reverberated from the first parterre to the nosebleed seats of the auditorium. Laddie, Ridley, Geena, Susan, Becky Pollack, Greg Foster, Diane Cairns—all scattered throughout the hall—led the cheers, most of them thinking how fitting it was that the person who had started their whole wild ride would be the one to receive its crowning honor.
Callie bounded to the podium, steadied herself to face millions of people watching around the world, glanced down at her crumpled notes and then realized her rookie mistake: she had written the speech in pencil. It turned to invisible ink under the lights.
Her remarks were endearingly unpolished but from the heart. “Ridley, I couldn’t thank you in forty-five years, let alone forty-five seconds,” she began, “so I won’t try now.” Once again her words could be read as cryptic, but her smile in his direction was warm. She told Geena and Susan she loved them and thanked her family, assuring the crowd that her husband hadn’t been the model for any of the characters. She got a laugh with the quip “In fact, my brother was—just kidding.”
Then Callie Khouri withdrew to the wings, trailing all the unresolved issues her movie had raised. One line lingered in the afterglow. “For everybody that wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma & Louise,” Callie said, “this is it.”