The following is excerpted from Becky Aikman’s “Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge,” which is available now.
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.
“There were directors who used their powerful positions to get girls to do things,” she would say later. “It was a skanky time. It would have been less objectionable if I had had any creative . . . oh, anything. But I was just a facilitator.”
So no, Callie did not let her mind go there that night in 1987, to the painful subject of her squandered abilities, whatever they might be. Instead, in the solitary predawn clarity and fatigue of her car, she had an epiphany, born equally of frustration, chafing intelligence, and throttled talent: two women go on a crime spree.
She would create a movie about outlaw women on the run, busting out of tedious, thwarted, humdrum lives — lives like hers — for freedom that let them finally become their true selves. She imagined it all: a movie unlike any she had ever seen, where women drove the story, maybe even got to drive the car. Written by a woman. Why not her?
What came to her seemed fully formed, not so much a plot as a feeling, that thing that would wallop people as they walked out of the theater, if by some outrageous turn of events the movie ever got made. “I saw, in a flash, where those women started and where they ended up,” Callie said. “Through a series of accidents, they would go from being invisible to being too big for their world to contain, because they’d stopped cooperating with things that were absolutely preposterous and just became themselves.”
All she had to do was figure out how to get these two normal women, living everyday lives, into this extraordinary place, this extraordinary mind-set. “We would get to see them in this full glory. And then they would have to leave, not kill themselves, because that’s never how I thought of it. But literally, they would have to fly.”
This couldn’t be a book or a short story or a poem, Callie realized. It had to be a movie, because she saw it all visually. The Grand Canyon figured in there somewhere — she saw all of it in that flash. She would write this story. And perhaps in this act of creation, she might find her own true self.
Callie tuned out the reality that no one who worked in movies would care about her and her half-formed vision. Why should they? Callie was a Hollywood nobody who knew nobody outside her circle of relative nobody friends; she was a woman in a man’s town; she had no credits, no bona fides, no cred, no hope. In a business full of boy wonders with filmmaking degrees, she was a college dropout who had never written anything more than a few unfinished short stories and a rejected TV script she had spitballed with a friend. She had this embryonic idea for a screenplay, but unlike every film school grad trying to peddle a high-concept action picture about two guys who . . . (fill in the blank), she had come up with the kind of movie that nobody actually made, that nobody had ever made. Two women in a car — so elementary it was groundbreaking.
Looking back years later, agent Diane Cairns calculated the odds that Callie’s idea would ever reach completion: “Just to write it and get it made — astronomical. To get it made well — impossible. To go through what this movie went through — once in a lifetime. Ten lifetimes.”
But Callie had only this one. Silence descended as she cut the ignition. She decided to tell no one. She would start writing dialogue on a legal pad after work.
Reprinted by arrangement of Penguin Press, part of the Penguin Random House company. Copyright © 2017 by Becky Aikman.
Becky Aikman is the author of the memoir “Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives.” She was a journalist at Newsday, and her work has also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Find out more about Aikman on her website.
