Off the Cliff Read online

  ALSO BY BECKY AIKMAN

  Saturday Night Widows

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Rebecca Aikman

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  Photograph credits:

  Here, here, here, here, here: From the MGM/UA photographs of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing. “Thelma & Louise” © 1991 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved.

  Here: Image from the Jim McGuire collection, courtesy of the Grand Ole Opry LLC archives. For image licensing requests, contact [email protected].

  Here: Courtesy of Amanda Temple

  Here: Photograph by Larry Bessel. Copyright © 1990 Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

  Here, here: Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty Images

  Here: Courtesy of the photographer, Lauri Gaffin

  Here: TM & Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Courtesy Everett Collection.

  Here: Courtesy Everett Collection

  Here: Courtesy of mptvimages.com

  Here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here: Photo by Roland Neveu / mptvimages.com

  Here, here: © MGM / Courtesy Everett Collection

  Here, here: Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing. “Thelma & Louise” © 1991 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All rights reserved.

  Here: Mary Evans / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection. Courtesy Everett Collection.

  Here, here: Courtesy of Ridley Scott

  Here: Courtesy of Anne H. Ahrens

  Here: Jean-Claude Deutsch / Jacques Lange / Paris Match Archive / Getty Images

  ISBN 9781594206719 (Hardcover)

  ISBN 9780698405639 (eBook)

  Version_1

  For my mother,

  Barbara Aikman

  CONTENTS

  Also by Becky Aikman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE—BEVERLY HILLS, JULY 24, 1989

  CHAPTER 1

  ONCE IN TEN LIFETIMES

  CHAPTER 2

  PROSTITUTES AND EMPTY-HEADED BLONDES

  CHAPTER 3

  “NEXT! NEXT!”

  CHAPTER 4

  WIELDING A GRACEFUL CLEAVER

  CHAPTER 5

  TITS AND BULLETS

  CHAPTER 6

  UNLIKABLE

  CHAPTER 7

  THE EPIC IN RIDLEY SCOTT’S HEAD

  CHAPTER 8

  D-GIRLS

  CHAPTER 9

  PLAYING A DIFFERENT GAME

  CHAPTER 10

  THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE JOB

  CHAPTER 11

  THE CURSE OF KATHERINE

  CHAPTER 12

  WHO’S PLAYING WHOM?

  CHAPTER 13

  “GOOD LUCK, HONEY!”

  CHAPTER 14

  A FRESH EYE ON AMERICA

  CHAPTER 15

  REAL CHARACTERS

  CHAPTER 16

  “THE BLOND ONE!”

  CHAPTER 17

  THE GIRLS IN THE THUNDERBIRD

  CHAPTER 18

  HOT AS A PISTOL

  CHAPTER 19

  BAD BOYS

  CHAPTER 20

  THE KID ENTERS THE PICTURE

  CHAPTER 21

  WHAT THE FUSS IS ABOUT

  CHAPTER 22

  OWNING THE ROAD

  CHAPTER 23

  SOMETHING’S CROSSED OVER

  CHAPTER 24

  READY, STEADY, BLOW

  CHAPTER 25

  OFF THE CLIFF

  CHAPTER 26

  KEEP ON FLYING

  CHAPTER 27

  MASSACRE AT THE MULTIPLEX

  CHAPTER 28

  THE SNOWBALL EFFECT

  CHAPTER 29

  WHO KILLED THELMA AND LOUISE?

  CHAPTER 30

  A FILM OF THEIR OWN

  EPILOGUE—SANTA MONICA, MARCH 30, 1992

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  BEVERLY HILLS, JULY 24, 1989

  The lights along the side of Diane Cairns’s phone lit up, every last one of them, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock on Monday morning. This was how any Hollywood story had to begin. For the characters to be made flesh, the flesh made celluloid, for the audience ultimately to embrace or detest them, a fast-rising young agent like Cairns, lunging in the first hour of the day to get her hands on the oversize console phone on her desk, had to see those lights.

  Lights. Action. It was all on her to make the deal.

  The screenplay she had hustled out to studios on Friday was so audacious, such a departure from anything else in the movies at the time—or at any time, for that matter—that it was anybody’s guess what could happen when the studio executives plucked it from their stacks of weekend reading. Most likely? The script would blow past the couple dozen rejections it had racked up from studios, producers and other agents before Diane took it on.

  After all, this was Hollywood in the 1980s. On its merits, Diane knew, the screenplay should have triggered one of those bidding wars that fueled the industry scuttlebutt over lunches at Le Dome. The writing was sharp, whipsawing from humor to deep-seated longing. The characters were complicated, vulnerable and flawed, careening through the sorts of hairpin emotional turns that could win awards for the players who snagged the roles. The plot hurtled along from one brazen surprise to the next, yet it was simple, too: two outlaws lam it in a hot convertible after shooting a would-be rapist. The story fit safely within the cinema template of broken taboos, antiheroes and screw-the-system attitudes that Hollywood had championed since the breakup of the old-time studios.

  But there was a catch, as they say in the movies, and it was a sticky one. The outlaws behind the wheel of that convertible were named Thelma and Louise, both of them women, recognizably ordinary as the story began. Yet along the way they drove fast, drank hard, picked up a one-night stand and shed their conformist skins to embrace intoxicating freedom against the landscape of the American West. With the law closing in, they realized they couldn’t go back—Something’s crossed over in me, one said—and rather than submit to convention, they chose a shocking fate, certain to polarize the audience. . . . But that’s getting ahead of the story.

  Thelma and Louise—the characters—didn’t seem to realize at first what trouble they’d stumbled into, and maybe the filmmakers who hoped to bring them to life didn’t fully grasp it, either. The woman who wrote the screenplay, Callie Khouri, had tapped out this first and only effort late at night after her soul-crushing, behind-the-scenes job making music videos. She was so green that she surely had no idea that out of the top-fifty movies at the box office the year before, only two had been written by women without male partners; that in the previous five years, only thirteen had been, and that no such woman had won an Oscar for an original screenplay since 1932.

  Ridley Scott, an acclaimed director who still had something to prove at
the box office, had decided he wouldn’t feel comfortable directing such a women’s story, but he had signed on to produce. Perhaps because he was a Brit, perhaps because he just didn’t care, he seemed oblivious to the conventional wisdom that women protagonists ranked well below talking babies and pockmarked psycho killers in the hierarchy of the industry. Only seven of the top-fifty movies the year before showcased a woman as the main character, only five a year, on average, over the previous five years. And how many starred a couple of women together? Get ready for it: less than two a year.

  When Diane first devoured the script during her own weekend reading, she had cycled through a menu of emotions. She identified with the characters, regular gals who spoke and behaved the way women really do when they are alone. She got a charge out of the way they reveled in rebellion once they broke the bounds of accepted behavior. As an agent, she wasn’t necessarily supposed to think this way, but the story stirred up her juices, got under her skin, not so much as a viable Hollywood property, but—dare she say it?—as a labor of love.

  Holy mackerel, Diane thought as she turned the final page, it’s one of the best screenplays I’ve ever read.

  But then Agent Brain kicked in and spit out a single word: impossible. The whole thing was such a departure from the norm, she didn’t think it could ever get made. The only hope was to lure a couple of major actresses, then package them with this otherwise shaky venture. Luckily, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster jumped on board without hesitation. The two exercised as much muscle as any female stars in the brawny era of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise, and with those two attached to the project, Diane knew that the bundles she sent out to studios that Friday would land with a red alert.

  Some major studios had already passed—“I don’t get it,” one executive had said to Ridley Scott. “It’s two bitches in a car.” Now the strategy was to blitz the others all at once. This story was going to live or die off whatever happened that Monday.

  —

  BY ALL APPEARANCES, Diane had the town just where she wanted it when she hit the office, a boxy space that overlooked a nondescript stretch of Beverly Boulevard in a wing of the industry powerhouse ICM. An assistant, Bonnie Blackburn Hart, greeted Diane with a buzz of expectation. “The phone is ringing off the hook.”

  Diane took up her position behind the red industrial desk, snapped a headphone over her full head of blond eighties hair and squared her padded shoulders. Ready. Bonnie prepared to play blocking guard with a second phone on the credenza.

  Universal, Fox 2000, Disney, Hollywood Pictures—the row of lights blinked like marquees on the Vegas Strip. This was the kind of breakout moment that made careers, when some crafty, or merely lucky, agent sat on the property of the moment, the one that made everyone want to claim, “I snagged it first.” Bonnie fed the calls to Diane, and she picked them off one by one.

  “You have a great movie here.” Ah, the first caller was warm and positive, just as Diane had hoped. She fought to hold her adrenaline in check while Bonnie kept the others circling the landing strip. “I see what you see in it.”

  Uh . . . huh. Was there something off in the tone? “I knew you would,” Diane said brightly. Perhaps too brightly.

  A too-long pause. Then: “Female leads . . . Ridley’s not directing the movie . . . that ending . . . a worthy submission . . .” Yes? Yes? Diane knew all this. “But we’re going to pass.”

  Pass? Diane was flattened. No choice but to shake it off. Next call, and then the next: “We certainly talked about it at the morning meeting . . . why won’t Ridley direct? . . . female leads . . . risky . . . too risky . . . way too risky . . . they do what at the end? It’s just not really for us.”

  No. No. No. No. She was horrified, horrified. Diane viewed her job on days like this as catching a tidal wave and finding a way to guide the surfboard to the beach. Now a real monster was cresting over her head and the board was spinning, spinning, losing any connection to gravity or reality in a sickening churn. She foresaw a terrible end to this morning, to this pipe dream—she, helpless under a crushing wave, and Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster and Ridley Scott and Callie Khouri and ICM and the beautiful script body-slammed into the pilings of a jetty, an unseemly pileup of talent, glamour and misdirected clout. Wipeout.

  Diane considered plunging back in, fighting gravity and the tides, but the answers were definitive. If she begged reluctant studios to reconsider, she knew, something would be lost. They would bring in another writer to mangle the script, the dicey ending would give way to sunsets and butterflies, or dudes like Richard Gere or Mel Gibson would get roped in to rescue the ladies. Word was that Warner Bros. was interested but might want to alter the ending, and Diane’s client, beginner that she was, wasn’t willing to compromise. Only later did Diane consider: “If it was the male equivalent, with Richard Gere and Mel Gibson as the leads, would I have gotten all those passes? Every studio would have said yes.”

  Her boss, Jeff Berg, was on the line. Not only was he chairman of ICM, he was also Ridley Scott’s personal agent, and he had been tasked with contacting perhaps the best hope, Orion Pictures. Orion was a rare studio, a tasteful studio, up for greenlighting smart adult fare based on nothing more substantial than the fact that the executives liked it, damn the latest fads. The company also had first-look deals with Jodie and Michelle, and where else would they find vehicles that offered them such delectable roles?

  “I think you should know that Orion passed,” Berg said.

  God, what a disaster. Diane started framing what to say to the lineup of people who were hanging on the outcome.

  There was a slim remaining course, she realized, to guide the surfboard to safety. Pathé Entertainment, an outlier, was nobody’s first choice in those days. A sort of disadvantaged stepsibling of MGM, Pathé couldn’t swing the budgets for blockbusters and certainly didn’t have a track record for pulling them off. But the studio had made the submission list on the strength of two people. Alan Ladd Jr., the venerated chairman, was pure old-school Hollywood, son and namesake of a studio-era movie star and unabashed admirer of studio-era movies, including women’s pictures with stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. In previous posts at other, bigger studios, Laddie, as everyone called him, had backed some of the only women’s stories in the modern era, critical darlings like Julia and Norma Rae. And he trusted a young, relatively untried lieutenant, Rebecca “Becky” Pollack, the daughter of director Sydney Pollack.

  Becky had a Hollywood pedigree, too, but didn’t conform. Soft-spoken, thoughtful, she was that rare executive who preferred reading, really reading, rather than endless rounds of lunches and drinks with what she called “the chop-chop people” in town. ICM’s reasoning was that Becky, backed by Laddie, might recognize a great story when she read it and flout the accepted wisdom that women were box-office cyanide.

  Now, in the middle of this slow-motion crash, Diane realized she hadn’t heard yet from Becky, and there wasn’t a moment to waste. In one stroke of a speed dial, word would get out, if it hadn’t already, that no one else had the nerve to take on Thelma & Louise. Diane had to connect with Pathé before the grapevine did. It was perilous for her to pick up the phone instead of waiting for the call, usually a sure sign of panic, but delay could be riskier. Diane deployed her steely-confident voice, something she had mastered like a foreign language, to mask the fear.

  “What can I say?” Becky answered the phone in her gentle, low-key way. Say? Diane could only imagine. She sucked in her breath—here it comes.

  “Everybody loves it here.”

  Diane exhaled for what seemed like the first time that day. The angels sang. She thought: I have about a nanosecond to get this right. Becky is truly the only person who gets this. She is the only person who is going to make this deal. And only I know this.

  To Becky, she said, “I’m really thrilled. I thought you would love it, and here’s wh
at I’m going to tell you: Get your business affairs people on the phone now. I want this to be with somebody like you who loves it. And I want to close this deal now.” Now. As in: before anyone gets wiser. Get the contracts drawn up before Pathé hears the news or, God forbid, comes to its senses.

  At that moment, sorry little Pathé was the only studio standing between this movie and oblivion. The people committed to making Thelma & Louise didn’t know it, but they were hanging out there all on their own.

  CHAPTER 1

  ONCE IN TEN LIFETIMES

  Less than two years earlier, Callie Khouri nudged her sage green Saab into a space in front of her house on a Santa Monica street scented with fig trees. It was four in the morning, a dangerous hour to be thinking and alone, especially for someone who knew, if she let her thoughts go there, that this wasn’t the life she had in mind. Best not to catalog the ways. Turning thirty, she divvied up the rent on a ramshackle bungalow with two roommates. She had recently split with a kind and steady boyfriend. And most galling, she was utterly at a loss as to how to put her ambition to use, or even to understand what her ambition might be.

  Since dropping out of Purdue just short of a degree, Callie had waited tables, parked herself behind a reception desk, studied acting and auditioned for an agent who offered just one observation after she performed an impassioned monologue in his office: she didn’t wear enough makeup. Her current dispiriting job juggling logistics for music videos occupied the outer-planetary fringe of show business. Callie lined up equipment and hired strippers and would-be starlets to display their wares behind spandex hair bands like Alice Cooper and Winger spewing power chords up front. She swept the soundstage at the end of the day while better-paid, better-connected players spiraled off to parties pollinated with promise and cocaine.