Bob Verini is the Los Angeles-based theater critic for Daily Variety dissects the task of writing sex scenes.
“It took me three hours … but, you see, when it was over, I had really done something—something worthwhile— something only I could have done. Who else would have cared enough to do it right?”
There’s a true artist speaking, by golly! You can imagine Cole Porter uttering these words upon finishing the lyrics for “You’re The Top,” or Richard Avedon after printing his Marilyn Monroe portrait. (Actually it’s American Gigolo’s Julian Kaye explaining how he was able to give an older woman, “somebody’s mother,” her first orgasm in 10 years. But, hey! Artistry is where you find it.)
In any event, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anyone’s expressing this kind of pride of craftsmanship about the writing of a movie sex scene. Far from “something worthwhile,” it may be the most thankless and least-respected screenwriting chore of them all, with a variety of reasons why this is so.
For one thing, the specifics of a sex scene are often little more than a road map: Make a left at that fork, spin around the cul-de-sac and then take the straight route up the highway. And no matter how you approach it, there’s a nagging sense that you, or someone, has been there before. How different can sex be, anyway? Some writers are probably held back by a puritanical streak while others may be frustrated because the full orgasmic experience can’t be depicted outside of XXX video. (Journalist Neil Fulwood observes that hardcore-porn stories like Boogie Nights and Body Double always see to it that their characters climax while still coupling so as to avoid what, in all reality, would be the very visible “money shot.”)
The real problem is that the writer is surely the least important part of the sex scene as it will appear in the finished film since the principals—the director, the actors and the D.P.—will be all too ready to throw out the blueprint and just see what happens on the set. One of the most famous of all sex scenes, that of Julie Christieand Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now, never appeared in the script. Total improvisation. Larry Kramer never scripted the Alan Bates/Oliver Reed nude wrestling in Women in Love, either. Instead, he inserted D.H. Lawrence’s original text both to appease censors and to reassure Reed, already nervous about how in the staging he would, um, stack up against his co-star. (Evidently Bates won that battle as well as the wrestling.)