Callie Khouri

Carolyn Ann "Callie" Khouri (born November 27, 1957) is an American film and television screenwriter, producer, and director. She is best known for writing Thelma & Louise, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Thelma & Louise has since grown to be considered a classic, and was inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry in December 2016.

Her other films include Mad Money (2008) and the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect (2021). She also created the series Nashville, which premiered on ABC in 2012 to strong reviews, and ran for six seasons.

Carolyn Ann (Callie) Khouri was born in San Antonio, Texas, but was brought up in Kentucky. She is the daughter of a Lebanese-American Maronite father where her family name Khouri means "priest" in Levantine Arabic. Khouri's interest in theater 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, where she waited tables 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," said Khouri.

In 1985, she took her first step toward "film production by pursuing a position as a commercial and music video production assistant." 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. She was a member of Hollywood Women's Political Committee, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Women's Media Watch Project.

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 2006.

Khouri is a screenwriter, director, producer, lecturer, and non-fiction author. 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, 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.

Khouri described her experience filming 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."

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, 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. 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."