Dying of Politeness by Geena Davis

Author:Geena Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

The Blond One

Back in 1987, Jeff made a movie called Vibes. Its director was Ken Kwapis, and he and Jeff became friends. And thank God they did, because something Ken said ended up profoundly changing my life, my career, and even my way of looking at the world.

All from mentioning a script he’d read called Thelma & Louise.

“Every actress in town is after it,” Ken said. “You gotta read it. It’s the best script ever.” My agent got ahold of a copy for me, and Ken was right—this was the best script I’d ever read. It was smart, funny, and dark, and very moving—written by a woman, about women, with two—TWO!—strong female leads.

Its author was Callie Khouri, then a line producer for music videos, whose close pal Amanda Temple just so happened to be married to Julien Temple, who had directed me in Earth Girls Are Easy.

The backstory to the movie was almost as compelling as the script itself. Both Callie and another friend, Pam Tillis, had been mugged one night; and Callie had clearly had no luck, as before that unfortunate incident with Pam, she’d also been mugged at gunpoint while being escorted to her car by Larry David, of all people. The idea for the story subsequently came to Callie while she was driving to work: “Out of nowhere I thought, Two women go on a crime spree. That one sentence!” she later told Vanity Fair. Once she’d finished the script, she shared it with Amanda, with the idea that Amanda would produce it and Callie would direct. What they initially thought would be an inexpensive indie movie hadn’t attracted funding, but it eventually landed in the hands of Ridley Scott, who, together with his producing partner, Mimi Polk, bought the rights from Callie for half a million dollars.

Ridley had directed some huge movies by that point in his career—Alien and Blade Runner, to name but two. But in trying to hire a director to make Thelma & Louise, Ridley came up against some entrenched preconceptions about the movie, and about women. Ridley told Vanity Fair that one director he spoke to said, “Listen, dude, it’s two bitches in a car,” to which Ridley said, “Why are they bitches? Because they have a voice?” In trying to sell the movie to other directors, Ridley realized he was “talking [himself] into it” and he decided to just make the damn thing himself.

Ridley saw the movie as an epic odyssey (“It’s their last journey, so the last journey should be epic,” he said in a later interview). Susan Sarandon appreciated what he’d done: “Ridley took this little thing and placed it in this heroic landscape,” she told Vanity Fair. “He put it against John Wayne’s backdrop.”

Ridley understood that the movie was a major statement of female empowerment. “Women’s equality has never been a question for me,” Ridley said. “Women are my equal, and some of them are smarter than me. I still didn’t fully understand the grotesque nature the male can be to the female.

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