Just wondering if you think the day is coming when a “real” Hollywood film, with name actors and script and budget, will ever contain explicit, X-Rated scenes?
I mean, they have come a long way with frontal nudity (both male and female) being no big deal anymore, and there have been some pretty hot sex scenes that leave little to the imagination - but I don’t think there has ever been any really close up of two people having sex where you actually see all the naughty bits in action.
I can see there being limitations at first - for instance, which theaters would show it and would the full, uncut (so to speak) X-Rated versions only be included in DVD’s that you could buy at adult stores? Shown only on adult pay per view?
There have been a few porn films that achieved cult movie status (Deep Throat and Behind The Green Door for example) but those were not exactly big budget, Hollywood productions. Still, they went on to make quite a bit of money over the years.
I am not saying this would be a good thing - but just wondering if you think the day will arrive when a major studio will release basically an “X” rated film?
I doubt it. The X Rating is something films work very hard to avoid and it’s doubtful Hollywood wants to limit their potential audience.
Also, you wouldn’t be able to find actors and actresses willing to do it (other than those who do porn). Nudity in films is not as common as it used to be in the 1970s. Back then, an actress knew that, if she appeared nude, it would only be seen in theaters within the context of the film. If it appeared on TV, the scene would be cut out. If you felt it was right for the character, you could do it and it would show up for a few months and the pretty much vanish.
Now, it’d be screencapped and put all over the Internet, completely out of context with the role as in “Nude Photos of Big Name Star!” That’s enough to make any legitimate actress reluctant to do the role.
Also, it’s one thing to simulate sex with a stranger for a movie, but it’s another to actually do it. It can lead to issues with your home life.
The porn movies that achieved cult status were years ago. Nowadays, no one really knows one from the other (or cares).
You may have some independent filmmakers try it (I don’t know how explicit the oral sex scene was in The Brown Bunny was), but mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t want to touch it.
It seems to me that movies are mostly pushing towards being PG-13 or R. I think we’re actually starting to ramp downward now that anyone can get their explicit porn on the net. Actresses previously would pose nude in magazines, now most don’t even bother. From what I hear, most actress Playboy centerfolds are actually covered now.
Shortbus had penetration. None of the people engaged were well known but the movie was legitimate and had a release into actual theaters. If I recall, the lead actress (Sook-Yin Lee) masturbated and parts were visible but didn’t engage in any sex.
Antichrist had visible penetration but it was simulated.
There is too much of a stigma for A-listers to engage in it. Thats my opinion anyhow.
It’s more likely that what is considered “explicit, X-Rated scenes” will change over time.
There are many scenes in current big-budget movies that would have been considered shockingly explicit in the 50’s or 60’s. (There was much discussion at my high school of the shocking nude scene with Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate in 1969; that would be a rather tame scene in a current movie.)
So mainstream films will probably never contain X-rated material (too many theatres won’t show them), but some of what is currently considered X-rated will likely be R-rated or even GP in the future.
There’s a scene in “The Brown Bunny” (2003) where Chloe Sevigny’s character gives her boyfriend, played by Vincent Gallo, a blowjob, where there’s no question that it was real. I think that’s as close as you’re going to get.
The Brown Bunny wasn’t the only “serious” film that featured explicit sex. The previously mentioned Shortbus, Nine SongsLust, Caution, Intimacy and others all better than The Brown Bunny.
The thing is, an actor uses his or her body. It’s their tool. And the current generation doesn’t have anywhere near the baggage their parents had. They don’t seem to even consider oral sex “sex” - it’s now considered “fooling around”. Sex is just “hooking up”.
At some point a director will make a film that will feature sexually explicit scenes that are so essential to the plot they cannot be deleted, that will get so much buzz that people will go out of their way to see it. It will be the breakthrough. Probably not while the people who are currently parents are alive, but it will happen. It’s just reasonable.
I read/saw somewhere that the X rating had a stigma that meant no legit production house would go near it. Accordingly, the American movie rating people invented a rating for essentially the same thing that avoided the stigma. First movie to use the new rating was Showgirls, which was a box office bomb, thereby killing the new rating stone dead.
Bottom line (heh) is, ISTM, that a huge part of the moviegoing crowd is teenage kids. If your audience cannot get in unless they are 18 or whatever, you deprive yourself of that portion of the market when a modest workaround would allow them on board.
The arc of liberalisation of movie depiction of sex visible from the 50s through to the 70s can’t be extrapolated forever. These things tend to come in cycles of conservatism and liberalisation. It is now, for reasons expressed upthread, pretty much career poison for an actor/actress to be involved in an explicit movie, and that is for reasons derived from the social culture of the hour.
I don’t see mainstream films going X in any sizeable way for the forseeable future. Shortbus, etc, are the relatively rare exceptions that prove the rule. They haven’t led to a rush in explicit movies. Showing kids explicit sex is always going to squick people out no matter what rating you call a movie, so I don’t see the sort of bracket creep anticipated by t-bonham coming to pass.
I don’t think there’s really any need to see actors actually having sex. Simulated sex is good enough, and with prosthetics and CGI it can be made nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.
“The actor’s body is his tool” may be true, but it’s also true that they work with costumes, props and makeup. I mean, we don’t need to see them actually getting sliced open when they play a hospital patient, do we? Or actually taking a shit when they sit on the can?
I don’t want to see it in my mainstream movies. There’s already a perfectly acceptable place for it in porn, it doesn’t need to bleed into other entertainment.
However, I would like to see porn attempt some decent writing and acting occasionally.
I dunno; I can imagine horror films spearheading a movement toward legitimacy for the NC-17 rating (X is no longer an MPAA rating, and will never be on a Hollywood movie). First a rating for violence and gore, maybe some indie pics with more-than-usually explicit drug use, a sexploitation-style slasher pic, some more art house flicks, and then a modestly budgeted mainstream film. Maybe in ten years or so.
I don’t think so. See, I don’t think Hollywood will last forever; as technology advances, sooner or later I think movie making will go over to mostly or completely computer generated. Not soon; the technology needs to get better and cheaper and the movie watching public will need to adapt to the idea; but movie making as we do it now is so expensive that I don’t see it lasting once a viable alternative appears. And without all the need for infrastructure and actors, there won’t be any reason for the industry to remain centralized; you’ll have people and groups scattered across the country making them instead.
So; unless Hollywood does it relatively soon, within say 20-30 years then I don’t think it will still be around as a movie making center to do it at all. And I don’t think they’ll do it that soon.
I keep hearing this, but is it really true? Has anyone ever done any studies comparing the amount of nudity in films made between the 70s and today? Because I have seen some pretty graphic movies in the last few years, that go way beyond the dropped towel nudity I’ve seen in some of the 70s films I’ve watched.
The novel was written back in 1970, the last time people seriously thought that having real sex in Hollywood films might become possible in the near future. Even as a wild satire, Southern shows why that probably couldn’t happen.
A lot more simple nudity did happen, though. That’s what people are talking about when they say there was more. Major Hollywood films with major actresses had regular nudity. That doesn’t seem to happen as much. Nudity appears in art films, or direct to cable Skinamax films, or foreign films. But major Hollywood actresses don’t strip in major movies very much.
Your history’s a little off. The first film to have the NC-17 rating (the new, non-stigmatized “X”) was Henry & June, which came out in 1990. Showgirls wasn’t released until 1995, and was the last wide theatrical release to bear the NC-17 rating; it was such a bomb that it effectively killed the rating.
No one’s going to release NC-17 movies anymore, even though the rating still technically exists; most theaters won’t show them, and most newspapers and television stations won’t advertise movies that carry the rating. The thinking these days is that it’s actually better, if your preferred cut of the film receives an NC-17 from the MPAA, to simply release the movie as “Unrated” if you can’t re-cut for an “R”.
Right, a digital fig leaf. It’s like “body doubles” - a more successful actress has the clout to make a less successful actress do something she is not willing to do. But the end result is the viewing public thinks they saw more successful actress do that thing. It’s bullshit. Give me an actress like Kate Winslet, who has the courage to use her body in films like Holy Smoke or The Reader appearing completely nude, yet still remain “family friendly” enough to do Flushed Away between those two. I have no doubt that, if the director gave her a script that required explicit sex (say, a blow job) for the film to work, she’d be willing to do it. And with her talent and the level of respect she receives from her peers, she’s be able to get away with it.
No, but Winslet pissed herself in Holy Smoke (although that take was not the one that made it into the film).
Ah yes, Katherine Heigl. I like her as a comedian, but she shouldn’t have taken a role in a sex comedy if she wasn’t willing to do topless. But she is the exception, not the rule. Plenty of actresses are willing to commit to the role. Heigel is the exception.