Word: khoury
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...movie industry's feminists might feel uneasy too. They look at the movie landscape and see a wasteland, where the meaty roles women get tend to be predators or sex kittens. "Hollywood is trying to resexualize its women back into submission," says Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the feminist buddy movie Thelma & Louise. "This whole idea that women are powerful because they're sexy is a crock. Sex isn't power. Money is power. But the women who do best in this society are the ones who are the most complacent in the role of women as sexual commodity...
...Callie Khouri was a bit embarrassed to tell her friends, back in 1988, that she had begun working on a screenplay. After all, in Los Angeles it often seems as though screenplays are being written by everyone who can put a noun and a verb together, and by some who can't. But Khouri felt she was on to something special. She had grown tired of seeing women portrayed in movies as passive partners, terminally ill victims or sex objects. "I wanted to write something that had never been on the screen before," she says. "As a female moviegoer...
After consulting a few how-to books on screenwriting, Khouri, a music-video producer who had made videos for Robert Cray, Alice Cooper and the Commodores, started writing. Nine months later, Thelma & Louise found its way to director Ridley Scott and, through him, to MGM/UA. During the shooting, Scott added much of the phallic imagery -- the huge trucks, the giant cacti and a chemical-spewing plane -- that has riled some of the film's detractors. He also cut scenes that portrayed the close friendship between the two title characters, including one in which each confides what she fears most...
...Khouri, 33, originally hoped to make it in the movie business as an actress. The third of four children born to a surgeon and his wife, she grew up in Paducah, Ky., and went to Purdue University, planning to major in theater. But, unhappy with the roles for women in student productions ("I can't tell you how many times I played a prostitute") and eager for more freedom, Khouri dropped out after five semesters. She moved to Nashville, where she worked as an apprentice at a local theater, then supported herself as a waitress -- like Louise -- before migrating...
Some of that frustration helped fuel Thelma & Louise. "I wanted to have it so that when you left the theater, you respected the characters," says Khouri. She is annoyed by critics who charge that her film provides poor role models for women. "They don't really want to see women operating outside the boundaries that are prescribed for them, misbehaving and enjoying themselves," she says. Nor does she take kindly to the criticism that the movie bashes men. "I certainly don't hate men," says Khouri, who celebrates her first year of marriage to writer and producer David Warfield this...