Callie Khouri

Carolyn Ann (Callie) Khouri was born in San Antonio, Texas, but was brought up in Kentucky.[2] She is the daughter of a Lebanese-American father[3][4] and her family name means priest in the Levant Arabic language. Khouri's interest in theatre arts began when she took part in high school plays. Following her graduation from St Mary High School in Paducah, Kentucky, she studied landscape architecture at Purdue University before changing her major to drama. Khouri dropped out of Purdue and moved to Los Angeles, California where she waited tables [5] and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and with acting teacher, Peggy Feury. She soon realized that being an actress was not her destiny: "I can't stand people looking at me," says Khouri.[6][7]

In 1985, she took her first step toward “film production by pursuing a position as a commercial and music video production assistant.”[8] From 1996 to 1998, and from 2000 to 2002, Khouri served on the Writers Guild of America board of directors; she sat on the board of trustees of the Writer's Guild Foundation from 2001 to 2004.[9] She was a member of Hollywood Women's Political Committee, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Women's Media Watch Project.[10]

On June 2, 1990, she married David Weaver Warfield, a writer and a producer. She later divorced him, and married musician T Bone Burnett in 2009.[10]

Khouri is a screenwriter, director, producer, feminist, lecturer, and author of non-fiction. She also worked as an actress, lecturer, and waiter in Nashville. While working for a company that made commercials and music videos, she began writing Thelma & Louise, her first produced screenplay. Thelma & Louise won Khouri the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay,[11][12] a Golden Globe Award, and a PEN Literary Award, as well as the London Film Critics Circle Award for Film of the Year and a nomination for Best Original Screenplay from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.[13]

Khouri described her experience filming her first major film , Thelma & Louise in an interview by David Konow, a scholarly author and journalist: "While I was writing Thelma and Louise, it was the most fun I had ever had in my life, bar none," she says. "It was such a pure experience. There was no self-censorship there, there was no second guessing. From a creative standpoint, it was the freest I had ever been in my life. I loved every moment I got to spend time with those characters. Nothing came close to it, including winning all the awards and everything else. As much fun as all that was, it wasn't as much fun as sitting alone in a crummy office on Vine at 2 in the morning writing that screenplay."[14]

At the Oscar ceremony she said, "for everyone who wanted to see a happy ending for Thelma and Louise, for me this is it," brandishing the statue high. After winning the Academy Award for best screenplay, she felt motivated enough to continue on with her career and express "her feelings about the lack of female directors in Hollywood", not to mention that most of her career began because of her stance on women's rights.[15][16] In an interview with The Huffington Post, she stated that adult women "are a market that I feel is underserved in the entertainment population at large. I don't see the kind of women represented that I know or that I'm attracted to. I really want to try to write more nuanced, less simplistic kind of stuff, and it's hard to find a place to do that."[17]

Khouri works as a part-time lecturer of theatre arts. She has taught a master class on film-making at the Athena Film Festival at Barnard College in New York City, as well as a writing and directing course at the Arts Initiative Columbia University in New York, featuring Thelma & Louise.[27][28][29]

Aside from teaching and film-making, Khouri devotes time to feminist organizations. "Don't you think talking about it is important, making the next generation understand that things are still not right for women?"[28] says Khouri. "I feel like I owe aspiring writers at least the warning that they are picking maybe the hardest thing there is to do in the business," she says. "It doesn't matter any more how good you are. In some ways, it never really did. Bad movies get made as often as good ones, but so few movies get made now, period. If you write for a studio, you may be one of eight writers, so it's not like you can have an artistic vision of your own and achieve it solely through screenwriting. I was very lucky because Ridley really wanted to tell Thelma & Louise. He wanted to make the movie I wanted to make. But often times that's not the case at all. They think your script is a good idea and that's all. So they buy it and then they hire two or three other people to take a whack at it and it can be a very disappointing thing."[30]

According to an interview in Variety[31] Khouri takes an opposing approach toward guns in social media: "in other countries where they have violent video games but less access to guns, they have less mass shootings. I have a really hard time saying, if there were no violent games, people would stop shooting each other. I think that until they have no way of shooting each other, they won't stop." says Khouri. "We have a speed limit. Why can't we have a bullet limit? The idea that we don't need limits stricter than we have now on guns is absolutely insane. Because ultimately, people don't kill people — guns kill people, and people with guns kill people." She also argued that America has lost its moral compass and that "it's worse than it's ever been!" in the matters of gun control. She claimed that there is no quick route to end gun control because Hollywood actors such as Sylvester Stallone "make a fortune from violence. Do you think those types of movies will stop getting made? I don't," says Khouri.[32]

• Callie Khouri at IMDb
• The Dialogue: Learn from the Masters Interview