Today, Thelma & Louise is rightly recognised as a seminal feminist film. Starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon (actresses who were in their mid-30s and 40s, respectively, when the film was made), it tells the story of two best friends who plan a girls’ weekend to escape their monotonous small-town lives. While on the road, however, they find themselves in trouble with the law – leading them to go on the run across the American West.

The film won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe upon its release in 1991, and was selected last year for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, marking it as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. However, in her new book Off the Cliff: How the Making of Thelma & Louise Drove Hollywood to the Edge, journalist and author Becky Aikman reveals how the iconic picture almost didn’t get made – because Hollywood execs thought it was too “risky”.

Thelma & Louise’s screenwriter was Callie Khouri, a Texan woman in her early 30s who had never worked on a feature film before. She sent her script to Diane Cairns, a young literary agent working in Hollywood who – according to Aikman – loved it as soon as she read it.

However, Cairns knew she would have a difficult time persuading studio executives to take a chance on the film. Hollywood in the late eighties was at least as sexist as it is now: hardly any major films were written by women without male partners, and even fewer starred two women as the main characters. Aiken says that Cairns suspected that getting Thelma & Louise made might be “impossible”.

Thelma & Louise almost never got made for this pathetic reason