{"id":25458,"date":"2025-01-13T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=25458"},"modified":"2025-01-12T14:26:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-12T22:26:39","slug":"a-question-of-intimacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/a-question-of-intimacy\/","title":{"rendered":"A Question of Intimacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On December 17, Variety<\/em> unveiled an episode<\/a> of its Actors on Actors<\/em> video series, featuring Pamela Anderson and Mikey Madison, both in the middle of the awards circuit for their performances in The Last Showgirl<\/em> and Anora<\/em> respectively. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One particular segment made the rounds in the press and on social media, when Madison reiterated a detail she\u2019d already mentioned at the time of the film\u2019s premiere in Cannes: despite being offered one, she turned down having an intimacy coordinator on set, her argument being that she had developed a trusting relationship with director Sean Baker and producer Samantha Quan (Baker\u2019s wife) over the course of a year and didn\u2019t feel like bringing in a third party. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This prompted new conversations, both positive and negative, about the implementation of intimacy coordinators. Already a staple in the world of live theater, they\u2019ve become increasingly prominent in film and television as a result of the MeToo movement, which unearthed stories such as Harvey Weinstein\u2019s demand that the 2002 film Frida<\/em> include an explicit lesbian sex scene, reportedly added as retaliation after star Salma Hayek refused to get physical with him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The profession has its detractors, including actors Sean Bean and Michael Caine and director Mia Hansen-L\u00f8ve, who described the job as the \u201cvirtue police.\u201d<\/a> Some have joked that having such a professional figure on set will make films and shows even more chaste than they already are (although a quick glance at the likes of HBO\u2019s House of the Dragon<\/em> or Netflix\u2019s Sex Education<\/em> would confirm that\u2019s not accurate). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the intimacy coordinator\u2019s role is not to censor anything. Instead, they\u2019re hired to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to scenes revolving around physical intimacy and\/or nudity. In a bizarre coincidence, the Madison\/Anderson video was posted around the same time as two other stories made the news. One was the ongoing legal battle <\/a>between Blake Lively and her It Ends With Us<\/em> director\/co-star Justin Baldoni, with the topic of unwelcome script changes for intimate scenes being one of the points of contention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other concerned the Cin\u00e9math\u00e8que Fran\u00e7aise in Paris and its decision to cancel a planned screening<\/a> of Last Tango in Paris<\/em>, which was supposed to play as part of a Marlon Brando retrospective. The institution has a complicated history with that picture, a textbook definition of a director overstepping: for the infamous anal rape scene, Bernardo Bertolucci and Brando came up with the use of butter as lubricant on the day of shooting, and didn\u2019t tell Maria Schneider about it until the last possible minute. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, while the physical violation was simulated, the shooting of the scene gave Schneider real psychological distress and significantly damaged her career (she earned a reputation as being difficult to work with, primarily because she was unwilling to perform nude again after Last Tango<\/em>). Bertolucci eventually admitted to feeling guilty about his directorial tactics (but not the scene itself), although by the time he said it, in 2013<\/a>, Schneider had already been dead for two years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prior to the introduction of intimacy coordinators, that was the standard procedure: the assumption that the director and the actors were all in sync when it comes to boundaries and consent. It was not uncommon to hear about actors having final cut for intimate scenes (such was the case<\/a> with Love and Other Drugs<\/em>, the 2010 romantic dramedy where Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are in various stages of undress), but one would also come across anecdotes of the opposite nature, like when Sharon Stone famously slapped Paul Verhoeven<\/a> for showing too much of her anatomy in the leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct<\/em> (she found out about it during a test screening with an audience). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some commenters online have (mockingly) suggested the practice should be extended to the porn industry, perhaps not remembering one of the more prominent pre-Weinstein reports of abusive conduct in the film world: in 2015, James Deen, a porn star with some mainstream cred (owing to his role in Paul Schrader\u2019s The Canyons<\/em>), suffered reputational and professional setbacks following allegations of violent behavior<\/a>, including forcibly performing sex acts his scene partners were contractually exempted from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which brings us back to one of the objections raised about the use of intimacy coordinators, namely that it supposedly kills the spontaneity of acting. Leaving aside the fact that intimate scenes are, more often than not, just as choreographed as stunts are, there is a difference between being spontaneous\/instinctive and being inconsiderate or disrespectful. The intimacy coordinator helps establish that difference, so everyone can practice safe sets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The role of the intimacy coordinator in film and television productions has recently come under scrutiny again. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":625,"featured_media":25460,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162],"class_list":["post-25458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/625"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25461,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25458\/revisions\/25461"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}