Thelma & Louise

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Thelma & Louise
Thelma & Louise film poster
Directed by	Ridley Scott
Produced by	Mimi Polk Gitlin Ridley Scott
Written by	Callie Khouri
Starring	Susan Sarandon Geena Davis Harvey Keitel Brad Pitt Michael Madsen Christopher McDonald
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Cinematography	Adrian Biddle
Editing by	Thom Noble
Distributed by	MGM
Release date(s)	May 24, 1991 (USA)
Running time	129 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$16,500,000 US (est.)
IMDb profile

Thelma & Louise is a road movie from 1991 conceived and written by Callie Khouri, co-produced and directed by Ridley Scott, and starring Geena Davis as Thelma, Susan Sarandon as Louise, and Harvey Keitel as a sympathetic detective trying to solve crimes that the two women find easier and easier to commit. Michael Madsen plays Louise's boyfriend and Christopher McDonald plays Thelma's controlling husband. Brad Pitt (in his first significant role in a major Hollywood film) plays a robber on parole who befriends Thelma on the road. The film was released on May 24, 1991.

1 Plot
2 Cast
3 Trivia
4 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The film follows the women as they head out in Louise's green 1966 Thunderbird convertible for a two-day adventure, fishing in the mountains, that quickly becomes nightmarish but then sees them change from victims of circumstance into outlaw heroines of the road.

At a roadside bar, Thelma meets a man with whom she dances. She gets drunk and the man attempts to rape her in the parking lot. Louise shoots and kills the attacker with a gun that Thelma packed in case of trouble. Thelma wants to go to the police right away, but Louise is worried that no one will believe their story as there were no witnesses. Afraid that the authorities will prosecute her, Louise decides to run away, and Thelma follows. Louise is determined to reach Mexico but is unwilling to do so via Texas, despite the fact that they are in Oklahoma and the fastest route to Mexico leads through Texas. It is revealed that something bad happened to Louise in Texas years ago, though it is never revealed exactly what it was. Louise decides that in order to start up her new life in Mexico she is going to need some money. She gets her boyfriend to bring her her life savings and gives them to Thelma for safe-keeping. During their travels, however, they encounter a young man who, unbeknownst to them, was a robber on parole, (Brad Pitt) JD. He and Thelma get along well, and later get intimate. During their time together JD gives Thelma tips on how to conduct a successful robbery. The next day JD is gone and so is all of the money. Louise is very upset, but Thelma improves their predicament by robbing a convenience store with her newfound knowledge. All this time the FBI has been tracking them and is getting closer and closer to their trail. Another character they encounter is a truck driver who repeatedly makes obscene sexual gestures at them. They pull over to demand an apology from him, but he refuses and they shoot his tanker truck which explodes. In the end, with the police on their tail, Thelma and Louise are cornered at the Grand Canyon. Rather than be captured or killed, they drive off a cliff into the canyon. The film ends with a freeze frame of the car in midair at the height of its arc, so that the audience never sees their fall. End credits begin over a montage of their happiest moments together during the weekend.

[edit] Cast

Susan Sarandon as Louise Elizabeth Sawyer
Geena Davis as Thelma Yvonne Dickinson
Harvey Keitel as Hal Slocumb
Michael Madsen as Jimmy Lennox
Christopher McDonald as Darryl Dickinson
Brad Pitt as J.D.
Stephen Tobolowsky as Max
Timothy Carhart as Harlan Puckett
Marco St. John as Truck driver

[edit] Trivia

Almost all of the second half of the movie was filmed in the area around Moab, Utah. The Grand Canyon scenes were filmed just north of Dead Horse Point State Park.

The film shares plot line and visual elements with other road movies, particularly the 1979 movie Messidor by Alain Tanner.

The freeze frame at the end of the film, where Thelma and Louise are seen falling into the canyon, is reminiscent of another film that ends similarly: George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Khouri won an Academy Award for a Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen; Scott, Davis, Sarandon, cinematographer Adrian Biddle, and film editor Thom Noble were nominated for Oscars. The film also resulted in Scott being nominated for a César Award for Best Foreign Film and a DGA Award.

The British Film Institute published a book (ISBN 0-85170-809-9) about the film in 2000, as part of a Modern Classics series.

Most of The Simpsons episode "Marge on the Lam" is a parody of the movie. Marge Simpson and Ruth Powers, a divorced mother who stole her ex-husband's car in retaliation to him not paying her child support, almost drive a blue convertible into a chasm but Homer Simpson and Chief Wiggum in Wiggum's police car fall in instead (unlike the actual ending of Thelma and Louise, Wiggum and Homer crash into a landfill).

Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn wanted to make a movie together and one of the scripts they considered was Thelma & Louise.
Cher was offered the role of Louise, but turned it down.
The sequence where Darryl slips and falls over the builder's supplies as he was leaving for work was unscripted, as Christopher McDonald genuinely lost his footing. Despite this he remained in character and yelled at the workmen and drove away. Ridley Scott apparently liked the result, and so it remains in the film.
Fito Paez was inspired by the film to compose a song called "Dos dias en la vida" (Two days in life), featured in the album "El amor despues del amor".
Singer/songwriter Tori Amos wrote Me and a Gun after watching this movie, being stirred to write about her own experience with sexual assault and telling no one about it for 6 years.

The song "Today 4 U" from the musical Rent contains references to Thelma and Louise.

The song "Bang" by Eve 6 on the album Horrorscope contains references to Thelma and Louise.

The song "Post-Modern Sleaze" by Sneaker Pimps on the album Becoming X contains references to Thelma and Louise in the line 'She must be a Thelma or Louise'.

The original Thelma and Louise were to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Jodie Foster, Ridley Scott was going to produce, and Callie Khouri (the screenwriter) would be directing. In the end, the pitching took so long that Pfeiffer and Foster were no longer available, and Scott had been persuaded to direct it himself.

The film poster shows a picture of Monument Valley, Arizona (as on Best of the Eagles CD cover) but the picture has been reversed left to right.

The ending of the film is parodied by Wayne and Garth in the movie Wayne's World, as one of the ways in which the movie could end, but they later decide that they don't want it to end that way, and try a different ending.