Word: khoury
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
THELMA & LOUISE Directed by Ridley Scott; Screenplay by Callie Khouri...
Ridley Scott's movie pays direct, imagistic homage to at least three of these predecessors. And first-time writer Callie Khouri remains true to convention in two important respects: her road-running pair are lovably eccentric; and they are, in the largest sense, innocents. The uncomprehending world may see them as the dangerous perpetrators of a colorful crime spree. We, however, are encouraged to understand them not as public enemies but as public victims. It's an unfeeling society that is really responsible for their wicked deeds...