Off the Cliff

May 1, 2017
Aikman (Saturday Night Widows) delivers an informative and lively behind-the-scenes look at the making of Thelma & Louise, the 1992 female-centered road movie that became a Best Screenplay Oscar winner and a feminist phenomenon. Journalist Aikman grounds her commentary in the wider context of how women are treated in Hollywood and how implausible a success story the film was: in fact, all the major Hollywood studios except outlier Pathé Entertainment turned down the project. Drawing on over 150 interviews, Aikman brings us the perspectives and backstories of all the major participants: neophyte screenwriter Callie Khouri, British director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner), stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, composer Hans Zimmer, newcomer Brad Pitt, and old-school Hollywood studio head Alan Ladd Jr. Even though the movie was in a male director’s hands, the women’s voices are at its heart, and the ending scene, as Aikman explores, tested all limitations for what was acceptable for women on-screen. The movie should have been a promising new beginning for women in Hollywood, yet there still remains, as Aikman highlights, a dearth of female directors, screenwriters, and substantive female characters. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency.

May 1, 2017
The hidden story of Thelma & Louise.The 1991 Ridley Scott film, starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, became very popular and highly influential, but few fans know the back story. Thanks to former Newsday reporter Aikman (Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives, 2012), we do now. Drawing on extensive interviews with many of the film's participants, the author creates an entertaining and in-depth film history. In the late 1980s, Callie Khouri, a college dropout from Kentucky, ended up in California, working for a small production company. Frustrated by the "male-driven, violence-tinged" films of the time, she felt like "she had something to say, something that mattered, and she knew it belonged on film." Khouri wanted to write an authentic movie she wanted to see. Basing her main characters on a best friend and herself, she came up with Thelma, a "cheerfully scattered housewife," and Louise, a "tightly wound coffee-shop waitress." The movie started as a comedy but then went "someplace completely unexpected, someplace wilder and weighted with conflicting impulses toward emancipation and dread." Aikman does a terrific job of showing how the film found the right director in Scott--who loved the film's "romantic vision of Americana" and its "mythic grandeur"--an impressive cast (including Davis, Sarandon, Harvey Keitel, and Brad Pitt), settings, and the controversial, dramatic ending. Scott had hoped for the convertible to go off a cliff in the Grand Canyon but settled for one near Moab, Utah. The first car failed, the second just "sailed away." Thelma & Louise won six Oscar nominations, but only Khouri won, for best original screenplay, the first woman writing on her own to win one since 1924. The book is enhanced by informative, brief biographies of key players and mini-essays on pertinent topics like the history of women in film.For fans of the iconic film, Aikman provides everything you wanted to know about it and then some.

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June 1, 2017

The persistence of scriptwriter Callie Khourie in her initial writing, managing, and marketing of the script of the film Thelma & Louise (1991), is celebrated in the opening chapters of this study from Aikman (Saturday Night Widows). The author also describes the Hollywood atmosphere as misogynist, women's films of the time as poor and weepy, and the filmmaking industry as pretty much a boys' world. Aikman covers Khourie's early life, emotional inclinations, and work style: how she links up with an editor and an agent and connects with someone who can maneuver the Hollywood market. Repetitious gender-bias reminders prevail as this girl group works. An enjoyable shift in subject to the production and filming of the movie brings fascinating revelations from interviews with people of varying degrees of involvement in the work: try outs and casting, costuming, location selecting, props and equipment (dust blowers, tumbleweed, five Thunderbirds), relationships among actors (Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, director Ridley Scott, new discovery Brad Pitt). The final scene was the subject of ongoing debate, harsh and nuanced, profit and creative principle at odds. The ultimate choice is still debated in this now-classic girls' odyssey film. VERDICT For film buffs and historians, feminists, and residents of La La Land. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/16.]--Ann Fey, SUNY Rockland Community Coll., Suffern

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