“Two Bitches in a Car”

It took me about thirty monthly reads of Vanity Fair’s glorious and dishy look at Callie Khouri and the making of Thelma & Louise to notice that the author was Sheila Weller, who is better at writing about bad-ass women than pretty much anyone. And then it all made sense.

The script was infused with her own personality, a model for the older protagonist. “Callie’s got a great acid tongue and was wise beyond her years,” says Amanda Temple, who was producing with her then, the two of them working on “horrific” Mötley Crue and Foreigner videos in “the era of excess, macho guys, big hair, and spandex pants,” when “everyone was snorting away their lives.” Temple recalls “casting sessions when a particular director — a huge movie director today, who will go nameless — said, ‘I want more girls with bigger tits, Callie! And less clothes!’ Callie doesn’t suffer fools, and there were a lot of foolish people around in those days. Callie and I used to say, ‘You get what you settle for.’ Sometimes she’d say, ‘I’ll show them one day.’ ”

MAKE THEM BLEED, Callie. You are allowed to talk about Nashville, too, naturally. We suggest you start with Anne Helen Petersen’s roundtable.