Word: khouri
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This does not mean that Thelma & Louise is or was ever meant to be a sweet dream, a comfortable, comforting movie like, say, City Slickers. "Screenplay idea," jotted Callie Khouri in her notebook one day in 1987: "Two women go on a crime spree." Khouri, whose first screenplay this is, had the notion that if a female couple were somehow forced by circumstances to take up the outlaw life, they would, under the suspenseful impress of life on the lam, undergo the same kind of bonding process -- sweet, funny, appealing -- that male protagonists customarily experience in this kind of movie...
...Khouri's idea was, to borrow a term from old-time Hollywood writers, a nice little switcheroo -- logical, easy to explain and not too threatening in its originality. Moreover, the times were right for it. Everyone was complaining that there were too few good roles for women in American movies -- especially roles that permitted their characters to make their own decisions, control their own destiny. In fact, according to Mimi Polk, Thelma & Louise's producer, the movie did not "pitch well" to studio executives: "The script was full of subtlety that was lost in a two-sentence description." Polk feels...
...possible, of course, that the Suits were just as nervous about the story that Khouri developed as some of the film's latter-day critics have turned out to be. Hollywood is not, after all, the world capital of the new masculine sensibility...
Within the moral scheme of the movie, writer Khouri's choice of this particular crime as the motive for the women's "crime spree," instead of, say, grand theft -- auto, has other advantages as well. For one thing, it ironically restores Thelma and Louise to equality with men -- at least in one realm of action. Says Martha Nussbaum, a philosophy professor at Brown and an expert on women in antiquity: "I think the modern idea that women are gentle and sweet is parochial. Just look at Medea." The Greeks, Nussbaum suggests, understood that crimes are committed by those with...
Despite such flaws, which leave you wondering if screenwriter Callie Khouri isn't just fronting for Hugh Hefner, Thelma & Louise is a movie with legs. Long after the movie is done entertaining, it stirs up questions about why men and women remain mysteries to each other. It has its small triumphs. Susan Sarandon makes Hollywood a little safer for older actresses; she fearlessly plays next to someone 10 years younger. And at least Thelma and Louise stop short of emulating Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who use their remaining ammunition to go out in a blaze of testosteronic glory...