[ Home ]
Sex in Screenwriting
"Open Your Eyes! Protect Your Daughters!"
"Secrets Revealed!"
"Throbbing with Urgency!"
"Penetrating Insights!"
A Meditation on the Ins & Outs of
By Mystery Man
*Part One....................................................................2
Part Two...................................................................11
* Originally appeared in the Nov / Dec '08 issue of Script Magazine.
Copyright, 2008, Mystery Man
Otto Preminger and United Artists did with their 1953 film, The Moon is Blue. The Code denied the Seal because the script contained the words "seduce," "pregnant," and "virgin." Not only that, a film distributed without a Seal into the heartland of America ran the risk of prosecution for breaking local obscenity laws. Otto's film was banned in Kansas, which got challenged, and went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court who reversed the decision.
During World War I, Americans were concerned about something called "social hygiene," umm, you know, venereal diseases, and filmmakers like Ivan Abramson put together little movies, like Enlighten Thy Daughter from 1917, which explained the "facts of life." This, if you can believe it, evolved into underground sexploitation films of the '30s - '60s, which were showcased in tents or run-down theaters called grind houses. Even then, the celluloid gypsies of the '30s and '40s had to come up with reasons to include all of that
Part One
Hello, Script readers. Let's skip the introductions and go straight to the sex, shall we?
Because I have a few questions for all you virgin screenwriters out there. As we look forward to the new year and beyond, how should we view sex in our specs? Can sex be crucial to a story?
It seems to me that in films, as in life, sex complicates things. People get all confused and distracted when breasts, butts, and bushes flash across the screen. So let's see if we can unveil a few secrets about sex in screenwriting. To do that, we first look to the past.
Starting in the 1920s until the mid-60s, the rather prudish Hays Production Code overshadowed every creative writing decision in every production of every film. If your film didn't get a Seal of Approval from the Production Code, you were in trouble. Some tried to distribute their films without a Seal, just as
envelope-pushing sexuality in their films in case they got hit with a lawsuit. Their reasoning? "Education." Or it was "a morality tale."
They'd have lurid titles like Sins of Love (1932), Road to Ruin (1934), Slaves in Bondage (1937), Mad Youth (1939), Secrets of a Model (1940), and Confessions of a Vice Baron (1943). The posters would scream "Open Your Eyes! Protect Your Daughters!" "Girls Enslaved Into Lives of Shame!" "A Throbbing Drama of Shackled Youth!" The stories, of course, always ended badly for those who, uhh, misbehaved so that there would be an acceptable "balance" of moral condemnation. The narrative might be a policeman investigating a seedy party that went wrong or we'd have a man sitting in jail telling a story with regret about the things he'd done. By the 60s, they'd have voice overs literally condemning what you were seeing on screen or they'd speak passages from great works of literature or play the music of Bach to make it more difficult for prosecutors to convince jurors
that a particular film had no redeeming value.
Fascinating to me, however, was a haunting film from 1965 by Sidney Lumet called The Pawnbroker, which helped bring some change and revision of the Production Code. The film, following many heated confrontations, was released with a Seal and with nudity because the fleeting shots of breasts were actually crucial to the story. In one scene, a prostitute visits Sol Nazerman, a pawnbroker
and Holocaust survivor. She says, "I'm good pawnbroker. I'm real good. I've done things you havent even dreamed about before. Just twenty dollars more. Ill make you happy, like you never know." She takes off her top. "I gotta get me some money. Look. Look. Look..." And her breasts trigger Nazermans memory of the tragic fate of his wife at the hands of Nazi rapists. We're given flashbacks via French New Wave quick cuts of his wife (topless) in a cell, men looking in, a Nazi guard entering, and then back to Nazerman throwing his hands onto his face. There's also a lengthy flashback in the concentration camp. A German soldier asks, "Willst du was sehen?" meaning, "Do you want to see?" He's cruelly forced to witness heinous acts, and the soldier's "want to see" question parallels the prostitutes "look" commands. For Nazerman, sex has become a source of trauma. Nazerman snaps back, covers the girl with a raincoat, and gives her twenty dollars.
Of course, not every sex scene (or in this case, an almost sex scene) has to be tragic to be crucial to a story, but I believe this helps to point us in the right direction to learn a deeper truth about sex in screenwriting today and that is:
A SEX SCENE IS ONLY AS GOOD AS ITS CHARACTERS.
It's like what bad boy writer, George Bernard Shaw, once wrote, "A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy." Exactly! And how do you do that? Through characters. When I read a sex scene in a script, I'm not usually moved by the mechanics of the act itself. I'm drawn to the emphasis on the characters in the scene and if the writer is doing something interesting beyond the clichéd emotion of euphoria. That's the difference between exploiting sexual instincts and elucidating the poetry, tragedy, or comedy of sex.
So let's explore some of the ways sex can be crucial to a
story. It can, first of all, be a way to get to a truth about a character. Chinatown was all about obtaining truth through knowledge of sexual behavior. It opened with Jake revealing to a man photos of his wife having an affair. The story moved on to what may be Mulwray's affair with a young girl and ends with a devastating revelation. I'm sure you know the story. If you don't, youre not much of a screenwriter. Hehehe... In any case, there is a scene in a bathroom with Jake and Evelyn, which precedes the sex, where Jake removes the bandage off his face. She's shocked by his deep physical scar, just as Jake will later be shocked by her emotional scars.
Then, he allows her to dabble peroxide on his nose in a moment of trust. Jake notices a black mark on the green part of her eye. She tries to shrug it off as a "flaw in the iris," "a birthmark of sorts." Uh huh. Interesting that we have two characters both avoiding talking about the past (Evelyn and her father, Jake and Chinatown) while both have deep scars to share. Then, we cut to Jake and Evelyn lying in bed having obviously had sex, and were given more subtle clues to the murder mystery. The
phone rings. She answers. She tells Jake she has to leave. Jake mentions that he recently met with her father, which gets a subtle, yet important reaction. Evelyn is visibly shaken, has to cover her breasts with her arms, and she quickly goes to the bathroom. Some scars can only be seen when were naked emotionally and physically.
Sex can be a way to chart a character's arc, too. A characters attitude toward sex is one way in the beginning of a film and completely different by the end. Masturbation was the vehicle to showcase Lester Burnhams character arc in American Beauty. You may recall the opening sequence where Lester tells us in voice over that hell be dead in a year and that he's already dead spiritually. Were given a scene where we're to look pitifully at Lester jerking off in the shower, which will be, as he says, "the high point of my day." Later, when Caroline catches Lester masturbating in bed, she becomes furious. Lester tells her, "I've changed. And the new me whacks off when he feels horny!" In the beginning, masturbation illustrated
how fantastic her love life must be. However, when you finally get her into the bedroom, you are revealed just how totally cut off she is from her emotional and sexual roots. She will not stop talking about the ratings and the network and the TV shows. But she will pause briefly for an orgasm:
She busily removes her shoes, unbuttons her blouse, whisks out of her slacks down to her bikini panties. She scours the walls for a thermostat.
DIANA
Christ, it's cold in here... (turns up the heat)
You see we're paying these nuts from the Ecumenical Liberation Army ten
thousand bucks a week to bring in authentic film footage on their revolutionary activities, and that constitutes inducement to commit a crime. And Walter says we'll all wind up in
federal prison...
how desolate he was, but later, it signified the new, assertive, independent Lester Burnham.
A sex scene can also be a way to reveal different sides of your characters. It can, on the one hand, illuminate a character's hypocrisy, as an individual says one thing in public and does something quite different in private. On the other hand, you can have a character that simply behaves one way out in the world (timid) only to be completely different in the bedroom (tiger). I love the scene with Faye Dunaway and William Holden in Paddy Chayefsky's Network. This woman was so passionate and so sexy in the office that a guy can only wonder
Nubile and nearly naked, she entwines herself around Max, who by now has stripped down to his trousers. The two hungering bodies slide down onto the bed where they commence an affable moment of amative foreplay.
(efficiently unbuckling & unzipping Maxs trousers) ...I said, Walter, let the government sue us! We'll be front page for months! The Washington Post and The New York Times will be doing two editorials a week about us! We'll have more press than Watergate!
Groping, grasping, gasping, and fondling, they contrive to denude each other, and in a fever of sexual hunger, Diana mounts Max. The screen is filled with the voluptuous writhings of love. Diana cries out with increasing exultancy...
(in throes of passion)
All I need... is six weeks of federal litigation... and The Mao Tse Tung Hour... can start carrying its own time slot!
She screams in consummation, sighs a long, deliciously shuddering sigh, and sinks softly down into Maxs embrace. For a moment, she rests her head on Maxs chest, eyes closed in feline contentment.
(after a moment, begins purring)
What's really bugging me now is my daytime programming...
A ROLLER COASTER NAMED DESIRE
This brings us to one of the most obvious points about a sex scene and that is, sex can be a way of gauging the health and stability of a relationship. The great Peter Ustinov, Mr. Hercule Poirot himself, once said, "Sex is a conversation carried out by other
means. If you get on well out of bed, half the problems in bed are solved." Exactly. When there are problems in the bedroom, when there's passionless, perfunctory sex on display, we know something's wrong.
Annie Hall gave us scenes filled with problems in the bedroom (usually bad timing, mood-killing mishaps, or lowered romantic interests) all of which satirized the idea that sex was the foundation upon which all contemporary relationships were built. Here, if the sex was dead, so was the relationship. You may recall the sequence where Annie and Alvy are seeing their respective therapists and revealing their differing perceptions about the same question of "How often do you have sex?" Alvy: "Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week." Annie: "Constantly! I'd say three times a week." Hehehe... Those two seemed fated to always be searching for a love that lasts but never find it, which was punctuated by Woody Allen's non-linear structure.
Shampoo boldly proclaimed that those who concealed conflicting desires were hypocrites, not that
those conflicting desires did the characters any good. Robert Towne incorporated a motif of interruptions during sex, which implied unsatisfied desires. The interruptions always happened to the lustful rake by the name of George played by a young Warren Beatty. His affair with Felicia in the opening sequence was interrupted by a phone call from another woman named Jackie. George's affair with Jackie was twice interrupted by a man named Lester from whom George was trying to secure money and who was also married to Felicia while having Jackie as a mistress. Is your head spinning yet? George is so self-obsessed that when his wife, Jill, tries to communicate with him and achieve greater intimacy, George ignores her or interrupts her.
I have to mention 9 Songs, which was written and directed by Micheal Winterbottom. This is the only film to be on the Independent Film Channel's online lists of both the 50 Greatest and 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema History. While not a masterpiece, I think it had some interesting ideas, which were explained best by Mr. Roger Ebert: "What Winterbottom is charting is the progress of sex in the absence of fascination; if two people are not
excited by who they are outside of sex, there's a law of diminishing returns in bed. Yes, they try to inspire themselves with blindfolds and bondage, but the more you're playing games, the less you're playing with each other. Their first few sexual encounters have the intricacy and mystery of great tabletop magic; by the end, they're making elephants disappear but they know it's just a trick."
YOU ARENT TOO SMART, ARE YOU? I LIKE THAT IN A MAN.
A sex scene can also be about manipulation, a means to an end. In James Bond films, it's usually a way of coaxing information out of a female spy. In Film Noirs, femme fatales are notorious for using sex to convince men to do things that are not very nice, like murder. Film Noir is the only genre where its essential to have a weak, passive, male protagonist.
Body Heat took place in a small town in Florida that had no air conditioning and seemed to be stuck in limbo, like its protagonist Ned Racine (William Hurt). Here's a guy who is grown up, hit with the reality that adulthood isn't as wonderful as
he thought it would be, and he lacked the will to better himself or move away. Thus, he became susceptible to the charms of Matty (Kathleen Turner), who used sex to convince him that life with her would fulfill all his fantasies and restore his self esteem, if only he would do this one little thing for her. In fact, she first got him to break the law by encouraging him to break into her house to have sex with her:
EXT. FRONT TERRACE - NIGHT
He pushes at [the windows] as his eyes lock with Matty, who watches from the hall. The windows won't move. Racine spins and picks up the nearest object, a wooden rocking chair. He lifts it, turns and smashes the big window. Glass showers into the dining room.
Matty watches. She hasn't moved.
Racine pushes the broken window out of his way. He comes in, like a violent gust of wind.
INT. HALL
Racine crosses the dark living room fast. As he reaches Matty, she lifts her arms to match his embrace. They come together hard and tight. They kiss. And kiss again. Her hands travel over his body, as though she's wanted them there for a long time...
In other erotic thrillers, like Sea of Love or Basic Instinct, the sex scene is the moment of reckoning for some characters. Will she or won't she stab him with an ice pick? Thus, a sex scene can also be an important turning point in the plot.
GO GET THE BUTTER.
"You make me crazy. You're so damn sure I'll keep coming back here. What do you think? That an American on the floor in an empty apartment eating cheese and drinking water is interesting?"
Well, apparently it is, because I cant get around the topic of Last Tango in Paris in an article about sex in films. Frankly, when I first
saw this movie a couple of years ago, I hated it. I thought it was boring, un-erotic, tonally inconsistent, and I was particularly incensed by Paul's sexist, narcissistic, degrading treatment of Jeanne. I mean, he practically raped her twice! In preparation for this article (and after reading 12 critical essays on Tango), I'm more comfortable with the film than I used to be. When they first meet in the apartment, I no longer think it's a case of rape. He picks her up, carries her to the wall, and at any time, she couldve screamed, fought, or tried to resist him. But no, she doesn't. I think we're given a visual illustration that she was literally swept away by Brando's pain, hunger, and need for her. The butter scene still angers me, though, and it's inexplicable to me that Jeanne doesn't storm out of that apartment. Her behavior in the third act is also inexplicable to me. If anything, Tango fails to be a masterpiece because Jeanne behaved the way the filmmakers wanted her to behave, not because her character was fully developed and we could see that it was in her nature to be that way.
Sex was not the point of the film, of course. Sex was used as a means
with Hitch on what would've been his final film, called The Short Night. It was an adaptation of a book by Ronald Kirkbride of the same title. It's about an American agent chasing after a very bad British double agent who escaped from jail. While the American waits for this bad Brit to arrive in Finland to meet up with his family, he has an affair with his wife. The project was always on the brink of being shut down due to Hitchs failing health, but it was the passion of his characters and their love affair that kept him going. Heres David:
"The talk of love was a tonic for him. 'Yes, yes. That will work. Very exciting.' It was as elaborate as praise ever got: He was saying, 'I will put that in my movie.' He was off and running.
"'The lovers are seated across the room from each other,' he began in his deliberate tones. 'Their robes open as they look at one another.' He stopped, savoring the scene, repeating that the robes were open. He was starting to sound suspiciously like a schoolboy with a copy of Penthouse. 'Outside, on the bay, a tiny boat is approaching,
to escape the loneliness of the relationships that left those two characters so unfulfilled. Julian Ebb wrote that it was "sex as an instrument of power divorced from tenderness or curiosity [that] results in chaos and despair." That could be. The bigger point is that sex, in and of itself, never should be the point of a scene when it comes to quality screenwriting. The emphasis should be on the characters.
PART TWO
"Hey, dont knock masturbation! Its sex with someone I love."
- Woody Allen in Annie Hall.
I recently read screenwriter David Freeman's great book, The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock. David worked
coming over the horizon ' (the scene takes place in a cabin on an island off of Finland). 'The lovers know the husband is approaching. They can hear the sound of his boat's motor, growing louder as it comes over the horizon. They stare at each other and begin to masturbate, each of them. The camera moves closer to their eyes. The sound of the motor grows louder as their eyes fill the screen.' He's grinning now and actually stretching his legs, his cane has fallen away with the lovers' robes. 'Then, after orgasm, the man must take an ivory comb and comb her pubic hair.' Now he didn't actually intend to put this in the film. It was a private vision, playful and from the heart, a true home movie."
I love that scene. I love the aching desire between those two characters combined with the fact that they can't touch each other in those few moments they have together. Plus, you have the noise of the approaching boat's motor that brings a sense of rising tension into the scene with the arrival of her evil husband and by extension, the moment when he must be executed.
It's different from all the usual sex scenes we see in films. It's rooted in the story and capitalizes on the high emotions of the moment. (A good friend reminded me of a film called Bent that had two men in love who couldn't touch each other, and in a scene, they have sex by imagining it while standing side-by-side.)
HORIZONTAL VS. VERTICAL
Let me get on a soapbox. Sex is also an opportunity for vertical writing in your screenplay. Maya Deren once made a distinction between drama thats "horizontal" and "vertical," and by that she means that the narrative is "horizontal" and the lyric is "vertical." To quote her:
"In Shakespeare, you have the drama moving forward on a 'horizontal' plane of development, of one circumstance - action - leading to another, and this delineates the character. Every once in a while, however, he arrives at a point of action where he wants to illuminate the meaning to this moment of drama, and, at that moment, he builds a pyramid or investigates it 'vertically,' if you will, so that you have a 'horizontal' development with periodic 'vertical' investigations,
which are the poems, which are the monologues You can have operas where the 'horizontal' development is virtually unimportant - the plots are very silly, but they serve as an excuse for stringing together a number of arias that are essentially lyric statements."
In one of my favorite screenplays, Kubrick's Napoleon, you can really see the distinction between that which is "horizontal" and "vertical," because in order to cover all of the important events in Napoleon's life, you have to fly down that horizontal plane at lightning speed in order to squeeze it all in before you reach page 150. And thus, you cannot help but notice those moments when Stanley shifts gears in the narrative and chooses to slow down to be "vertical," to spend just a few pages to highlight the meaning of a dramatic moment.
And the first "vertical" moment that comes to mind has to be the sequence involving Napoleon's marriage to Josephine. We've been flying through pages about his quick rise to power and his preparations for the Italian campaign, which we know will send him into worldwide fame
and headlong to becoming the next Emperor of France. But we stop for this very important love affair. We hear Napoleon's many poetic love letters to Josephine. "Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what is this bizarre effect you have upon my heart?" "By what magic have you captivated all my faculties, concentrated in yourself all my existence? It is a kind of death, my darling, since there is no survival for me except in you."
And while we hear Napoleon pour his heart out, we watch Josephine have a torrid sexual affair with Captain Hippolyte Charles.
This sequence is not just about establishing their marriage and her betrayal and how much Napoleon loved Josephine. It was also about how much he overwhelmed her with the kind of love that suffocates a human being, which in this case drove Josephine into the arms of another man. (Of course, she was indifferent to him since the beginning, but his behavior certainly didn't help matters either.) It also showed a believable contradiction in the main protagonist, which gave him depth - that is, the arrogant, powerful, confident Napoleon was also the insecure, needy, emotionally reckless Napoleon who naively wanted to be loved as overwhelmingly as he loved Josephine. We see that he completely gave himself over to her with an almost childlike honesty without realizing the consequences of his behavior, a stark contrast to the genius who meticulously calculated (and won) every battle. And by making us hear his voluminous words of love while at the same time showing us Josephine's sexual betrayal, we are practically forced to feel the sting of her infidelity just as Napoleon felt it, and we sympathize with him.
EYES WIDE OPEN, BABY
Okay, a couple of thoughts about Eyes Wide Shut.
We know that with Kubrick, his movies aren't always about the lead character's journey. He doesn't write stories like we do. He's usually thinking in broader terms and he's making statements about mankind, history, civilization, power, etc. A Kubrick story should not be judged solely by its psychology but by its sociology, too. For example, due to Bill's (Tom Cruise) interest in becoming a member of the ultra-elite, he grows uninvolved and disconnected from his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), which in turn made her nothing more than an object to be used whenever he wanted her. And her resentment of his attitude surfaced only in her dreams and when she's stoned. From that first opening shot of her slipping out of her clothes, she is presented to us as an object of desire. Everyone from the babysitter to Ziegler to Szavost praises Alice only for her looks. Her daily regimen is pretty much devoted to rigorously maintaining her looks. She's constantly looking at herself in the mirror. Of
course, these kinds of details don't exactly make for exciting dialogue and cinema (unless you know to look for these things), but it's Kubrick non-verbal way of making statements about Alice, the objectified wife.
Kubrick also likes to make visual connections between characters in order to make statements about them. That typically requires more than one viewing to notice. (Or, thank God, you could look them up on the internet.) What's interesting to me is that you have to look past the nudity and sumptuous visuals of Eyes Wide Shut to see the details to understand the connections Kubrick's trying to make. If you notice, Kubrick visually associates Alice with all of the other women in the movie, and therefore, he's also making statements about Alice as the prostitute wife. For instance, she's identified with Mandy. They are both first presented to us in bathrooms. They both have a penchant for drugs. Mandy's final night of her life in which "she got her brains fucked out" by many men is echoed disturbingly in Alice's dream. Alice is also associated with Domino by the purple bed
sheets and the similar dressing-table mirrors, essential for any true courtesan. It could be argued that there was only one woman in that film. All the women Bill encounters are various incarnations of the one he is truly seeking - his wife.
And then there is Helena, their daughter, named after the most beautiful woman in history. The subtext of all of their interaction with her is really about her being groomed to be the same kind of high-class object as her mother. During the day, she is always with her, observing her, learning from her. She wants to stay up to watch The Nutcracker, which is, of course, about a little girl whose toy comes to life and turns into a handsome prince. The fact that this story takes place during Christmas-time is no coincidence. This is when consumerism is at its height. Later, when Helena reads the bedtime story, she recites, "before me when I jump into my bed." Alice mouths it along with her. In the dining room, Alice helps Helena with a little math problem - how to calculate which boy has more money.
shows them a Barbie doll dressed as an angel, which was no coincidence, because Helena herself wore an angel costume in the opening sequence when she asked if she could watch The Nutcracker. Helena runs down an aisle full of stuffed tigers that look suspiciously similar to the one on Domino's bed...
By the way, I think it was all a dream in Bill's head.
YOU WANT TO MAKE LOVE ALL THE TIME, HUH?
One of the books I read as research for this article was Jody Penningtons fabulous History of Sex in American Film. Those who
There's a photo of Helena in a purple dress in Bill's office, eerily reminiscent of the one worn by Domino the night before.
In the final scene in the toy store, Helena's carefully observed actions speak volumes. Alice said she was expecting them to take her Christmas shopping (even though they already have piles of presents under the tree). Perhaps the trip was so Helena could shop for her friends, which is telling, because she only thinks about herself in the store. She wants everything in sight. She wants the blue baby carriage (similar to the blue stroller we saw twice outside Domino's door). Then she grabs an oversized teddy bear. Then she
like to use their minds, as I do, will be delighted to learn that this book is all words and ideas and hardly any pictures. In any case, an over-obsession about sex can make characters blind about bigger, encroaching evils. Pennington articulated these kinds of ideas that ran through Cabaret far better than I could:
"Cabaret obliquely portrays the strange coexistence between the Weimar Republic's sexual decadence and the rise of an intolerant totalitarian regime. The film does not establish a causal relationship between the two; instead, it underscores the futility of decadent entertainment in the face of brutal repression. The Kit Kat Klub's patrons, symbolizing a populace diverted from political reality by sexual diversions, were not blinded by political ignorance but an indifference fomented by sexual excess."
By the way, the growing, extreme sexual obsessions of two lovers led to a rather inconvenient third act climax for a man named Kichizo in a movie called In the Realm of the Senses. Ouch! In her essay, "A Theory on Female
Sexuality" (1966), American psychiatrist Mary Jane Sherfey noted that "the strength of the [sex] drive determines the force required to suppress it."
ITS MORE THAN SEXUAL ORIENTATION
In Boys Dont Cry, you may recall the moment when Teena is arrested and while she's in jail, Candace discovers her secret. Then Candace tells Lana who quickly sees Teena in prison. Teena tells her she's a hermaphrodite but it "sounds a lot more complicated than it is." Lana tells her she doesnt care if shes "half monkey or half ape" and gets Teena out of jail. They make love in the front seat of a car. Thus, sex can be the payoff to a giant setup, the deep inner goal of a character, that is, the long-awaited moment of acceptance.
Of course, sex here was not the goal. Love was the goal. And this concept sometimes gets lost because theres an over-emphasis by some in the industry on the sexual part of "sexual orientation." Why does there have to be an emphasis on sex just because a character has a different
orientation? Gay, lesbian, bisexual,
and transgender characters can have, like any other great character in literature or cinema history, depth, contradictions, goals, inner conflicts, and arcs. I've read quite a few scripts by aspiring gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers, and some have shared with me their feelings of anxiety about sex scenes. I say don't worry about the sex and focus on the depth of your characters. In that context, the sex will find its natural place in the script. Don't force it. Write that scene when you know it's crucial to your story. Because the point of a sex scene is not the act itself, it's the characters. What does the scene reveal?
SO HOW DO YOU WRITE A SEX SCENE?
It seems fitting that I'm contributing to a magazine that showcases Dave Trottier, because I'm a huge supporter of his book, The Screenwriters Bible. A sex scene is like any other scene in a script. Use action lines. Make them lean and mean. Write active verbs. Keep the action paragraphs down to four lines or fewer. Emphasize the characters. Avoid incidental actions.
I must commend Bob Verini who also wrote a great article about sex in Script Magazines 2005 January / February issue. He talked about the mechanics of writing a sex scene and pointed out how Joe Eszterhas loved using the ellipsis in Basic Instinct:
She moves higher atop him ... she reaches to the side of the bed ... a white silk scarf is in her hand ... her hips above his face now, moving ... slightly, oh-so slightly ... his face strains towards her.
I'm okay with that so long as it's in small doses. You can also write a MONTAGE, which Trottier explains in detail in his book. Verini had some good montage examples as well. I would only add Truffaut's Jules and Jim and Nichols' The Graduate.
The only film I've watched that had a sex scene that actually moved me to tears was a 2003 film called Lilya 4-Ever. Abandoned by her mother and living in poverty in the former Soviet Union, 16-year-old Lilya resorts to prostitution to
survive. Without revealing too much of the plot, there is a montage toward the end of the film in which we (looking up) view from Lilya's perspective all of these older, disgusting men having sex with her. I was so saddened by what was being done to her. I wanted to get on a plane to Sweden and save that little girl. It was such an effective tragedy in the way it condemned those horrible, underground, sex slave organizations.
MAKE A CLEAN BREAST OF IT
There's so much more territory we couldve penetrated. There's the art of seduction. Theres sexual abuses, disorders, and addictions. There's rape, infidelity, and incest. There's symbolism, sex for the elderly, and teen sex comedies. There's orgies, although I really don't know what I'd say about that. I like what Mason Cooley wrote, "Orgies are an early form of what will someday become sex by committee." Hehehe... Say, how many prominent asexuals can you list in films? Depp's Willy Wonka? Pee Wee Herman?
How about Hercule Poirot? Can
you think of a film in which a character's asexuality became the source of a conflict? I cannot.
OH, THE CLIMAX
There was an interesting article by Dylan van Rijsbergen in Sign and Sight called Sexing the Handbag.
He wrote:
"Time has come to start a new movement inventing new images of sexuality and pornography. Time has come for a new Jan Wolkers, male or female, someone who can write powerful stories of authentic sexuality. Time has come for all kinds of individuals in the media, art and literature to invigorate the tired imagery of commercial porn. Time has come for a slow sex movement, which stretches sexuality beyond the single moment of the male orgasm. Time has come to return sexuality to what it has always been: elusive, exciting, intense, playful, authentic, dynamic and sublime."
Was it good for you?
[ Click a corner to turn the page. ]
