Original subtitles

This programme contains explicit sexual scenes, very strong language,

some violent scenes and scenes of sexual violence

When I first signed with an agent,

they said, "Oh, yeah, you're going to have to get naked."

And everybody knows that winning the Oscar

represents that you're not going to get naked any more.

You're out there while the men are on the sides wearing parkas,

you're just standing there with no shirt on.

Everybody's standing staring at you.

A lot of the nudity that was asked of me was not in the contract.

I thought at the time, this is what paying your dues is.

I was afraid if I said no, that it would make me too vulnerable.

For some reason, saying no would make me more vulnerable

than being naked.

Did I have to be topless?

Probably not.

Already, as an artist, as an actor,

my body no longer belongs to me.

You were giving over your likeness to a character,

and then that character becomes something that belongs to the world.

And that's crazy.

This idea of, "Oh, I'm less of a true actor if I do nudity,"

as if it's this negative thing.

But who decided that?

Who?

Zoom in if you can.

I wanted to be naked

so there's a sense of normalcy about what our bodies represent.

Not just for trans people, but period.

All these movies that I watched growing up

chipped away at my sense of who I was,

how to know who I was, how to know what I wanted.

How do we find our desire when we're so used to being looked at?

Interior bedroom night.

This is a closed set.

So if you're not in this scene or working this scene,

please exit the stage.

What we see over and over again

is women have to fight for ownership of their own body.

Yeah, here we go.

Scene 20, take 5.

Take your robes off.

Action.

Everybody learns how to behave in sex and other things...

..from the movies.

Our notions of ourselves,

our notions of beauty, our notions of romance,

what sex is allowed to be, and who it's allowed to be with.

How to kiss, how to have sex.

How to be tender, how to be violent.

I mean, there are so many things we learn from movies,

particularly when we're younger.

It's hard to talk about sex,

but here we have all of these examples of movies

and television and now the internet to show us

what we are thinking about our relation to sex through media.

Sex education.

Don't have sex,

because you will get pregnant and die.

That's it, then, for the penis.

Let's move on to the...

..the female privates.

We are sex ed.

The TV industry and the film industry. We are sex ed.

When I didn't think I was going to make it

as a film-maker or as a director,

I really wanted to do sex education curriculums in high schools

because I just find so many things, like, so shocking

about what women and girls aren't ever told about sex.

Probably why I'm really fascinated as a director

with what happens behind closed doors.

I was raised so conservative and so Christian

that I remember watching Ace Ventura,

and it was the first time I realised that sex

wasn't just the penis going into the vagina,

because the bed was shaking back and forth,

realising that there was like an actual movement that happened.

For me, the sex scene that sticks out is Love Jones.

That was like one moment within the scene where Larenz

actually kissed her nipple,

and I was like, "Whoa!"

Like, "They're allowed to put this in movies?!"

Like, this is crazy!

Oh, this is what sex looks like.

This is how I'm supposed to look as a woman.

When I was a teenager,

I remember watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High

and there was Phoebe Cates...

Hi, Brad.

..who was the object of desire,

and so wanted and so unattainable,

and I remember thinking, like, I really want to be her.

I desperately wanted to be the object.

There's a long tradition in American movies of showgirls -

of literally showing girls.

Identical looking women opening their legs in unison.

Going back to the earliest musicals.

The idealised and commodified sexuality of women,

it's as old an invention as film.

Eadweard Muybridge was a photographer who would give lectures

and he would show very, very short sequences of motion.

When he got to the women, he fundamentally didn't know

what purposeful activity to give them to do.

And so he had them flirt fans or walk up some stairs

or walk down some stairs.

One woman is gazing longingly at another woman.

So, the men act...

..and the women are always aware of being looked at.

Jane, 30s, beautiful, but pissed.

Jane, an attractive and fit nurse in her late 30s.

Jane, 40s, looks 35.

Pretty. Hispanic. Smart and beautiful.

"We need a woman who's strong-willed but hot."

She has to be strong-willed but hot,

meaning that a strong-willed woman

is usually not attractive.

The bimbo. Hot mamacita.

Seductress. Voluptuous.

Curvaceous. Sassy.

I make you feel real nice today.

I played this one character

who was an Asian masseuse.

And I remember when that casting breakdown was being faxed to me

and was like, "Is she also a bad driver and is she good at maths?"

I mean, how many stereotypes can you roll into this one character?

You read some of these scripts and you're like,

"This is what you're going to do?

"This? And then you're going to get money to make this,

"and then you're going to put this thought out

"into the world with these characters?"

When I first started my TV writing career,

they were always looking for a female writer to hire.

It's terrible to say, but at the time I felt really fortunate.

I was like, "Oh, they're looking for a female writer.

"I could be that female writer."

But of course I wasn't putting it together

because they already have a writers' room of 11 guys.

And there wasn't a lot of interest in...

authentic female stories, I'll put it that way.

In some ways I think there's a lot of 20 and 30-something male writers

who, they'd admit,

"I'm not really sure I want to know what's in a woman's head," you know?

"I'd rather stand out here and put a gun in a guy's hand

"and I'll write that story."

In some respects, we may have been shirking it.

They were just telling their stories,

and in their stories, many times, we were one dimensional objects.

It's limited choices,

and that's just because it comes from limited imaginations.

You bad girl.

You'll find out.

In the very early cinema,

shockingly, you find something different.

In the late '20s, early '30s,

we did have a lot of women writing screenplays.

I mean, a lot. I would say, like, 50-50.

What you're seeing is the modern woman expressed on screen.

I don't believe in what you believe, that's all.

I don't want to get married.

I'm a doctor.

And, very importantly,

you can have a woman be very sexually adventurous.

Hold me close.

The '20s and '30s was the sexiest time

for women in movies.

The Bette Davises, the Mae Wests.

A little bit spicy, but not so raw.

You know what I mean?

The Garbos. They were naughty women.

They were dangerous women.

Your hand is shaking.

Women who starred in the movies had a lot of power in those days,

and they were box office

and they were saying, "I want to do stuff that's real."

I want to do it

and not have somebody tell me I ought to do something else.

Women and film were enjoying free expression.

And all of a sudden this vein was just cut off.

It was just gone.

The vulgar, the cheap and the tawdry is out.

There is no room on the screen at any time

for pictures which offend against common decency.

The Hollywood Production Code was invented

so that Hollywood could police itself

and, in that policing, prevent any kind of state censorship.

Goodnight. Goodnight.

Couples are sleeping in separate beds.

Keep both feet firmly planted on the floor.

Kisses were only allowed to be three seconds long,

and what the kiss would lead to could never be shown.

No sexual relations between white and black characters.

There was no sex allowed outside of marriage.

Goodbye, Mother.

But also sex outside of marriage, to the extent that it could be shown,

had to be shown as something that was tragic.

Goodbye, baby.

GUNSHOTS

We had different groups of people

locked into a certain representation.

Just hold on and suck in!

They're servants. They're the sidekick.

Turn me loose...!

Hattie McDaniel, who was crazily talented,

had to perfect the ability to play Mammy.

What's that rustling noise I hear?

Lord, Mr Redd, that ain't nothing but my red silk petticoat

you done give me.

Black woman had to be positioned in this way

in which they were sexually nonthreatening

to white women on screen.

Later on, they were hypersexual or deviant.

I suggest that, while you're on this ship,

you wear something a little less revealing.

Does it bother the captain?

Hollywood didn't have in mind black female actresses as leading ladies.

Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American movie star.

She was always cast as the Dragon Lady...

Ronald...

..the person who would steal your husband.

With the code, interracial marriage was not acceptable.

It prevented her from ever being a leading lady.

Don't do anything foolish.

Women's roles were destroyed...

Now you listen to me. You're going to marry Phil Marshall

and keep your mouth shut till you die.

..just at a time when women and film were enjoying some agency.

After my first movie, when I started going on auditions,

I hated asking for anything.

And just by dint of being there, you're kind of in this position,

you know, to say alms for the poor.

..because I forget that I'm famous...

The feedback I would get, you know, going in for, like,

these female leads would be like, "Is she sexy enough?"

Do it like Shakespeare but sexy. OK.

Right there, please. Nice to meet you.

You're being dissected immediately for your body.

And it's something about being in a long hallway

with all these girls with tight tops and mini skirts on and a big dream.

The amount of parts that say "nudity required"

or, like, "simulated sex required"

creates a situation where all women have to decide yes or no

before they even get to audition for the role.

You will lose out on work if you're not willing to do nudity.

At the big studios they called it Bikini Day.

They would write a part for a girl

that had to be in a bikini for no apparent reason.

So then they would have auditions for said Bikini Girl,

and that would be the day they could get all of the producers there

and the director there to decide on other, more important roles.

When I was younger, I definitely went to auditions

for the...the... You know...

Sexy teenager.

Lorimar presents Blake Edwards' SOB.

We were all required to come in wearing a bikini.

I was very well-endowed. And I got the part.

We were about to shoot Blake Edwards.

He said, "OK, so Rosanna, when you come in. You know what?

"Let's just lose the bikini top. OK, everybody, let's go."

And I was like, "Mr... Mr Edwards,

"you mean take my... Take my bikini top off?"

I was 19 at the time.

And he goes, "Yeah, do you have a problem with that?"

And I said, "Well, I didn't know I was going to be nude.

"I didn't know I was going to be naked."

And he goes, "Oh, man, Tony." His producer, he goes, "Call her agent."

And I just remembered, like, everybody waiting for me

and then looking, you know...

And I was such in a panic and I did it.

And I was... Felt very humiliated and very sad about it.

But, you know, this was... those days.

It was a completely different consciousness.

You were expected to do these things.

The best way to do this, to get the right head motion

and also the DP's going to have to put the camera in the right place,

is you make a fist, you put your thumb here.

You suck your own thumb,

and if you put the camera right behind them,

then you get the whole thing and it gets... Freaky.

..look of it. Wow.

I did not know that. Wow.

Yep. OK.

Today, we're going to be getting to the core of what does it mean

to be an intimacy coordinator

and, like, how does all this stuff function?

We're going to talk about the three most common types or, like, themes

in choreography, which are romance, passion, dominance.

So what sorts of touch are associated,

and then what are some, like, hints in terms of often dialogue

that we're going in the direction of this theme.

Romance typically has a gentle but solid feeling at the same time.

See how light he's being? Yeah. Yeah.

Long, soft, continuous strokes over different areas of the body -

that reads romantic.

They're about to go into passion.

And here we go.

It's kind of animalistic and they kind of just, like, allow themselves

to get lost in the experience and it's a bit out of control.

So the last one's dominance.

The energy tends to be cool, calm, collected.

It can be sadistic.

Can be punishing.

Just is occurring to me how fraught this is for men.

A lot of them are afraid of, like,

"What if I, like, cross another person's boundaries?"

Or, "What if I, like, harm her or do something?" You know...

And yet to do a good job, it needs to look a certain way.

I mean, it's a lot of... It's like an exaggeration

of everything in the culture happening... Yeah.

OK. Here we go. Let's lock it up, please.

Take one.

All right. Quiet now, on a bell.

BELL RINGS

And...roll, please.

Speed!

If there's going to be nudity or a sex scene in a movie,

SAG has certain requirements.

They have to send you in writing

what the sex or the nudity is going to entail.

The Nudity Rider is a very thorough list of what can or cannot be shown

and what you will or will not do.

You have these fairly dry conversations

about boob, side boob,

nipple, flank.

That's a big one, flank.

Let me see your tits.

For the purposes of this nudity consent rider, player agrees

that player services will require nudity and/or simulated sex scenes

in accordance with the terms and conditions provided herein.

Very nice.

I'll show the side of my breast, but not my nipple.

I'll show my rear end.

But I only want part of the butt crack to show.

It's sometimes a little odd to go through how specific it is.

You know, whether you're going to see the nipple or not

or the areola or not.

It even gets as specific

as, like, if you have a position, if you're doing, like, doggy style,

for example, it includes the anal cavity.

And even with the nudity rider, it's not entirely perfect.

Thought that's what you wanted.

It has definitely happened where people thought a scene

was going to get portrayed one way and they arrive

and all of a sudden the director has this other really creative idea.

The sex scene wasn't, "Oh, we're making love."

It's very harsh.

Things that they would not have agreed to if they had understood

how the director was going to film that nude scene.

If it's not SAG, you don't have protections.

There's that whole arena of movies where you're not covered by a union.

You have no protections.

I went on set and I discovered that I had two nude scenes, not one.

I was told that it was going to be empowering.

In this industry, things happen so fast.

They don't really, you know, sit down with you

like, "Oh, we're thinking about doing it this way,

"or this other way."

When I saw the final product, I didn't think it was tasteful at all.

Talent to set.

And that's why it's really so important on a set to have a person

who can help you enforce your rights.

Action.

The hair I'm using is human hair, it's permed and straightened.

And I've got two or three different colours here

and I'm blending the colours together.

Actors that are doing mainstream entertainment

are not signing up to do a real sex scene.

They're not really having sex,

but they have to really look like they are.

So a merkin is essentially a pubic hair wig.

A lot of ladies say they like wearing the modesty garment

with a merkin over it cos they look totally naked

but they don't feel like they are.

They feel like they're wearing an item of clothing still,

so they feel safe.

And then when it's done, it's very natural looking.

I like to present them in nice little boxes.

Kind of makes everybody kind of comfortable

about the whole situation, which can be very awkward.

Hi. Good morning. Hi.

Do you have any skin allergies? No. Perfect.

The experience of shooting a sex scene is, like,

the least sexy thing in the world.

They will have a modesty garment on,

which is a very small pair of panties

that has no sides and no back.

Some people are very nervous.

It's not something they do every day.

And, action for rehearsal.

It's also strange because you usually just meet,

and there you are touching each other

and laying all over each other.

Let's have her on top now. Roll over.

That's great.

Hold there.

With rehearsal, we just kind of walk through the steps.

OK, now start over.

"Here's the position." Or, "Now they're on the couch."

Or, "Now you're sitting here.

"Go right, left, up, down. Spin in a circle and land.

"And then the guy's going to yank your head back."

You don't go to school and learn how to, you know,

choreograph sex scenes.

Cameras rolling.

I was on set, and was working on a film

that required quite a bit of nudity.

The DP tried to sneakily and very slowly move the camera,

so that it could shoot the lower part of me nude

as well as the upper part.

Every day that I went to work after that,

I thought about how much had they shot that we hadn't caught.

Playing an intimate scene with another partner, you know,

it's awkward, not intimate at all, and very disconnected.

When I watched it, the nakedness of my body

being turned into an image for anyone to see,

suddenly, I realised my body wasn't mine.

You're simulating sex,

but there's only so much simulating you can do.

You can't simulate a kiss - you have to really kiss someone.

And you have to really touch their naked body.

Like, I almost - when I have had to do sex scenes, and I've done many -

it's almost like I go into a blackout.

Like, I just have to get it over with.

I wake up that morning with so much dread.

Oftentimes, I did what I normally do when I get freaked out,

I just kind of leave my body and float up to the ceiling.

My first tendency is, almost, go numb to it,

because it's too intense.

And yet, if I do that, then I'm not present

and I'm not doing the best work as an actor that I can do.

With American puritanism,

it's hard to talk about sex.

Sex is taboo.

It is the realm of real people in real bodies

having relations with one another.

That's not so comfortable to the film-makers.

Say mercy! No. Come on. No.

Say mercy. No.

The first sex scene I ever did was on my first feature, DEBS,

and I was so nervous.

Nobody feels comfortable talking about sex, period.

Nobody feels comfortable saying they're uncomfortable.

It's a moment of intimacy.

Trying to have, like, a ten-minute conversation with a director

or a producer to be like, "So, you're OK with these things?

"Check, check, check," is not a very thorough way

to define your boundaries.

There is so much shame around the body, around desire.

There are a lot of directors who don't know how to talk about sex,

because it remains this forbidden area of our lives.

Oh, God. Oh...

Jesus Christ.

The 1960s and the early '70s were the era of sexual revolution.

Everything was changing.

And with the rise of hardcore pornography on big screens,

the avant-garde - like Andy Warhol's art films -

and the Europeans leading the way,

I think it just became absurd for movies to pretend

that the era of the code was still operating.

Mom.

This is John.

The world of European sexual liberty...

..and American prudery sort of come together

in the career of Jane Fonda.

Man, you sure do look different.

Oh, boy. You not only don't talk much, you don't say much.

JANE FONDA: In the first part of my career, when I was playing

ingenue roles here in the United States,

I was never asked to take my clothes off.

I mean, this was the late '50s, early '60s.

It wasn't until I went to France,

under the guidance of Roger Vadim.

I fell in love with him, and I eventually married him.

I knew what I was getting into.

He never made a movie where women weren't undressed,

so I knew that was coming along - and it did, and I did it.

Roger promised me that he would use the letters of the titles

to cover...the important things.

Which was only partly realised.

I was utterly terrified.

I was 30, I should have known better.

But I was at a place in my life when if you were asked to do something,

especially by a man, you did it.

I didn't know anything about nudity clauses and contracts,

and all those other things.

I just did what I was told.

And so I...

I just got drunk, basically.

Now it was possible to play with different rules,

but the different rules were not a whole lot different

from the old rules.

I think these early films showed how, for men,

sex is a very homosocial relation,

whether it's Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy...

Here.

..or Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge.

What do you say?

What the man is often doing

is proving his virility to his friends via a woman.

Breasts were now completely available for looking at,

but male frontal nudity was really frowned on.

Real portrayal of romance and intimacy,

as it's practised in life,

weren't part of the American cinematic lexicon

for decades and decades and decades.

And suddenly, when censorship lifted in the 1960s,

we went from having romance without sex

to having sex without romance.

Oh, yeah.

Wait.

Why don't you turn out the lights?

In the '70s so-called blaxploitation films,

you see a lot of sex, drugs,

lots of female nudity,

and these different characters who were not Sidney Poitier

being accepted into a white world.

We have bad-ass heroes, right?

Black heroes.

They spoke to the black power movement

and the black feminist movement.

You want me to crawl, white motherfucker?

What are you doing? Put that down.

You want to spit on me and make me crawl?

The people loved it.

We were breaking all kinds of records.

Black women were, quote, sex goddesses for the very first time.

For our hue, it was new.

How many love scenes did you see of us in any movie

during that period of the '60s and '70s?

None.

But, of course, there was controversy from the very beginning.

There's harems of women who were at the disposal of these men,

which really highlighted their sexual bodies.

Sort of an extreme voyeuristic eroticism.

Turn around slowly.

Of course, you had Gloria Hendry,

who was the first black woman being a Bond girl.

Ah, beautiful, brave, and now resourceful.

It was really a watershed moment.

But the film only goes so far.

I think that the white people were scared of the repercussions

of their base, having a black activist wind up with Bond.

Oh, James.

She's killed, of course.

A black activist couldn't possibly wind up with Bond.

Out of 5,000 pairs of legs, I was chosen.

And I thought, wow,

no-one's ever going to know that it's me on the screen.

It was just like a cattle call,

and they were like, "Your legs, yes. Your legs, no. Your legs, maybe."

OK, let's bring in the body double.

Hi. Hi.

I'm Mindy. Pleased to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Our body is on the film that you're seeing.

You're there to make the actress look perfect.

Perfect legs, perfect breasts.

Perfect body.

I think the public would be shocked to find out

how many hands aren't really the hand of the talent,

or the butt of the talent.

Kim Basinger.

Madonna, Barbra Streisand.

In Pretty Woman, the whole opening scene,

where she's getting dressed to meet Richard Gere,

that's my body.

Body doubling is really hush-hush.

I was Janet Leigh's acting double in the shower scene of Psycho.

You don't see her face - that's me.

That's the back of my head,

my hands, my arms, my belly button.

Janet Leigh wrote her biography,

and she let on that she did the whole thing.

Pissed me off.

That I wasn't recognised.

In Rising Sun, I was the live body sushi plate.

A SWAT team is breaking through the window, and I'm there nude

with this sushi on me.

And I remember looking away, saying,

"I'm not going to get cut by the glass."

But if you're a body double, they pull you out like a chicken dinner.

You're like, bring out the breasts, bring out the thighs,

bring out the leg. They just think, oh, you're just there.

You're just kind of not real.

Somebody in the producing department wants there to be less smile lines.

So I've aged her down slightly.

My work consists of visual effects generally, but a lot of requests

I get from clients is

to do beauty work.

She's got a little mole here.

Sample it.

And...all right...

Removing blemishes, freckles, pubic hair,

slimming people up,

making them look younger.

It was a heavily guarded secret when it first came out.

Now, most people on television and film get it done.

As far as making somebody look younger, it's mostly a request

for women, cleaning up, like, bags under the eyes or neck wrinkles.

I get asked to do face replacements a lot, and usually

that has to do with stunts.

So if there's a stunt double and their face is visible,

then we put the actual actor's face on the stunt.

But they're starting to do this more often for beauty purposes,

so you get a stunt body or a body double.

In Game Of Thrones,

it was somebody else's body, and her head was literally stitched

right on top of that body.

There was a request that came in from a client

for me to remove a postnatal belly.

Because this actress had just given birth.

So that was just a matter of taking her body,

Rotoing it out, cutting it out,

squeezing it and then basically

putting it right back on and cleaning up the background

wherever her belly would have been.

That was before.

And that's after.

Actors and actresses buy into it and THEY persist it

and THEY ask for it because they believe that this is important

and this is needed and that we need to portray our best selves.

We should all be looking like china dolls, you know,

we should all have flawless faces.

Whatever we do, we always want to look our very best.

I don't respond to ultra-beauty in my life.

I like flaws and I like to see natural people.

I feel like I'm part of the problem

instead of the solution for that.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

Damn it! I can't see a thing!

In American movies...

Mind if I join you?

..there has always been limits to who's allowed to be sexual.

Ah...

I worked for a television producer

earlier in my career who, when we were casting day player roles,

said, "There are no fat women in my shows."

And I remember at the time going,

"Wow, like he's created a whole universe,

"and it's true, in his brand, there are no fat women."

I'm fat. That's not a bad word.

And I am fat, naked and in front of a lover too.

I only see that as a joke.

I get it. You're self-conscious about your body.

Don't worry. I was going to shut the lights off anyway.

But then, for us, it's like, "Turn off the lights. Don't see me."

What we see on the screen affects what you take into the bedroom.

You're cool with going out the back again, right? Um...

It is very few, very few,

extremely rare

and far between

to see people with disabilities in sexual situations.

So people don't genuinely think that it exists.

I don't want you

to miss all the things that someone else could give you.

Louisa...

I once told my manager, "I'm not going to play anybody in a hospital,

"I'm not going to play any more lawyers

"or desexualised trans people,

"and I'm not going to play anyone who visits anybody in a hospital."

And I didn't work for two years.

So, if I keep taking the hormones... You'd be feeding the cancer.

Are you saying if I become a woman, I could die?

In Hollywood, exclusion is part of the story.

Here, try this.

VOICEOVER: When I was a teenager, there wasn't

that much queer representation at all.

So what do you think?

You'd like, scour the video store for, like,

obtuse glances between women on video boxes.

In The Color Purple, these women love each other,

they see each other sexually,

but doesn't go full-on into sex scenes.

You two have met, haven't you?

Or it's about some weird

male fantasy spectacle.

And we have to remember, the censors are white,

cisgender, heteronormative men...

..who said, "Look, if you're going to do this,

"if you're going to be naked, we want to see two women together.

"Because that's art."

Right?

Penises are pornography.

Tits are art.

Film has been men showing other men what they see.

What is visual pleasure?

It's not actually about watching two other people.

All it is is about the male fantasy.

I don't know anything that I saw growing up that told me

that I could have the agenda of being the one

who wanted the pleasure.

HE GRUNTS WITH PLEASURE

Nobody actually tells a woman that when she has sex, you know,

there is a space where she gets to have the pleasure.

She's not the one just giving pleasure.

How women are satisfied, what that looks like, how that works

in real life, like, it's still a mystery, I think, to so many people.

Tell me what you think.

Honestly?

Think about all the movies where men would be having

an important conversation...

Here's to old friends.

..and hot women would just be sitting at the table

while it's happening. Just like, kind of just there as decoration.

This round's on me.

The way in which women can just be kind of present but unnecessary.

You be the man and you be the woman.

You had to cast those two girls, and they had to sit there,

fake fucking all day.

And...it's kind of a bummer.

I think it really does damage to girls in particular,

that's what bothers me.

Girls feeling that they have to behave a certain way

and look a certain way.

Without even consciously realising it,

they will just assume that they are less than...

..that they don't quite count as much.

The more that we perpetuate and condone women as being merely

sex objects, the more readily boys grow into men thinking

that that's how women want to be treated.

It's in every movie and TV show they've ever watched.

Actors who are starting out are used in these films that ask for nudity

and sex scenes because

they don't know how to advocate for themselves or they don't have the

power to advocate for themselves. An A-list actor who's asked to do

a nude scene, they can have a body double.

They get to say, "The light has to be dim, and the actor can only

"touch me from here to here."

It's like I have never had that much protection in a film,

but I've done nudity a lot.

Like, I've done sex scenes a lot.

It's like, "Oh, you have to pay your dues

"and you just have to be grateful that you're here at all."

I'm not some great, fabulous beauty.

When I walk into a room, people don't turn around and go like,

"Who's that girl? Put her in the picture."

I started taking classes at James Franco's acting school.

When James took a chance on me, I was so grateful.

The way that I got hired for The Long Home was by getting

a text message from James.

He said, "I want you to be in my movie.

"Nudity will be required.

"You're playing a prostitute. Do you want to do it?" And I said...

.."Absolutely. Like, no questions asked. Yes."

Hey, Candy, they want YOU.

And then things started to sort of get a little tricky

because there were some scenes that were added

that weren't in the script that required nudity.

And one actress didn't want to do it.

The next thing I know, she's on a plane back to LA,

and she's not in the movie.

And I realised if I do something like that, if I say,

"I'm uncomfortable with this,

"I don't want to do this," I'll lose my job.

Sarah Scott is an actress whose most recent work includes an appearance

on the Seth Macfarlane show The Orville,

and she played Courtney Love in the film Soaked In Bleach.

Thank you for having the courage to come in and talk to us.

This is an incident that happened in May of '18, 2018.

Mm-hm, it's an independent TV pilot.

It was the last scene of the day.

I remember being really cold that night and made mention of it.

My scene partner cuddled up to me and said he would keep me warm.

Knowing that we were about to start kissing,

I just kind of went with that. That was fine.

He cuddled up to me and... didn't think much of it.

At that point, he took my hand under the covers

and brought it over to his...

..erection.

DEEP BREATHING

I pulled my hand back and looked... and looked back over my shoulder,

like, "What the fuck?" And he just said sorry.

SARAH SCOTT SIGHS

I've thought a lot about this. I'm not upset with myself

that I didn't do something in the moment,

I'm very well aware that that's very common.

A lot of the women I've spoken to don't ever say anything.

And I think being in a professional setting, I also just wanted

to be a professional and keep going and finish the day off.

Cut. Terrific.

And so after the day had wrapped up and I was getting ready to leave

for the night, my co-star walks through my dressing room and starts

telling me that he's got a hard on.

He's got to go jerk off in the bathroom.

When I turned around, he had taken out his penis and started

to masturbate in front of me, two feet in front of me,

and that's when I left.

So he did, however, in the LA Times give a statement saying

that he was apologising, he said.

He admitted that he had put your hand on his penis during a sex scene

but he said you were sexually aggressive.

It was really disturbing to see what a convincing case he made

in playing the sort of doe-eyed innocent, embarrassed,

"Oops, I misread the situation." And then even use the words

that, "I just mistook this for a perk of our jobs."

It just became so clear to me that I was dealing with someone

who was a predator.

I've been a proud union member for over 15 years.

That's how I have my health insurance and support my family.

So the way that I see myself is that I'm kind of a

blue-collar working actor.

OK, ladies, I want to see you dance

and I want to see you smile.

And you...

I started to get this feeling like I was the first actress to ever

call the union and say,

"Hey, I've been sexually violated at work."

It's interesting because the SAG-AFTRA basic agreement is

800 pages or something like that, and nudity is, like, a page.

If that. It's like... Wow. It's like I literally have it right

here on... It's half a page. It's this. Wow.

Sexual harassment is not mentioned in 800 pages.

Really? Yeah. Interesting.

The situations, like, that I've been in,

I think that the gentleman, you know, whatever happened,

it wouldn't have happened had I been more famous

or more powerful than he.

I was told by someone in the legal department verbatim that, quote,

"I probably wouldn't be satisfied

"with the results of the hearing."

And I interpreted that as...

..basically nothing is going to happen.

When the LA Times article came out,

a lot of actresses reached out to me...

..just telling me, you know,

how proud they were and how...

..how many actresses had similar experiences but never said anything.

And that made my stomach turn.

Just the realisation that this is such a widespread problem

in this industry.

What does it mean for boys and girls to grow up in a culture

where they see men being aggressive in film to get the girl?

They pull women into these passionate kisses.

Stop it!

Maybe she resists a little bit, like right at first,

but he can kiss her into submission.

Wait a minute! Wait a minute!

Now that's a really common scene.

Hollywood certainly knows how to do violence very, very well.

Much better than it knows how to do sex.

When sex and violence come together, it's rape.

No, no.

There's so many rape scenes in movies because a lot of times,

you know, scripts are written and they imagine

that this is the only way a female character can get strong

is if she's raped - for no apparent reason, other than they think

something bad needs to happen to her so she can rise up

and go murder all the people in revenge.

MUFFLED CRIES

What kind of message does that send out?

My name is Buck, and I'm here to fuck.

Your name is Buck and you came here to fuck, right?

Wait a minute...

HE SCREAMS

There's some hatred for women going on

when you have to brutalise people,

you know, and treat them as subhuman, but then get the glory

that you create strong female characters.

That's not strong women.

Those are brutalised women that have to survive...

..and look good while doing so.

In the age of the internet, actors have to make this decision

of if I'm nude, it's going to get giffed and played on a loop,

and you can't regulate that any more.

The nudity will get repurposed to do all sorts of things.

They'll put other people's faces on.

It's kind of not what they signed up for.

You have to literally go and fight them on every single website

these things appear on, and even if you win, the next day it shows

up on a different website.

The producer basically responded by saying, "This is just what happens.

"This is part of being an actor."

When Jennifer's Body was coming out, we were at a new point

where we were seeing how social media can be used as a tool to shape

perception. In the film,

I wanted to comment on the tropes around how we look at girls'

and women's bodies,

looking back at late '70s, early '80s horror slasher films.

But what that requires is using the tropes.

There was a decision on the part of the studio, I think, to market

the film to young boys as opposed to young women, as if to promise

something with Megan Fox that they were never going to get.

I was shocked by the reaction and the way social media

kind of worked so quickly against the film.

There was so much adolescent angst about some lack of male relevance.

And I think since then we've seen how much warfare is waged

against women by using their bodies against them.

Now...

..pull your dress up and let me see your legs.

The Hollywood machine is something to be survived.

Turn around a second.

Is something wrong?

As a matter of fact, everything is...

..very, very right.

It's very common to go to hotel rooms and to be asked to audition.

That was kind of a thing back when I started.

He's ready for you. Thank you.

I was raised to believe that you never wanted to make

a man uncomfortable.

You didn't want to make him feel like he had done something wrong.

He grabbed me.

Tried to kiss me.

So if he advances on you, you know, your thing is to

kind of giggle and ease yourself out of there.

After I got blacklisted, I started being harassed behind the scenes

by my monster.

He... He has...

..detectives on staff.

Harvey Weinstein is not the only one.

We have situations now where it's taken a while for a client

to be willing to come out against somebody.

And, you know, the studio makes excuses.

I could file a complaint for you if that's what you want.

But I think you know how it would come off.

You see all the people that protect Harvey, this predator, and the many,

many predators there are in this town that are very big guys

in the business.

There are so many other men. They're not Harvey Weinsteins

but I don't want to wait until these people are all Harvey Weinstein.

I want them to stop doing it now.

Doralee, please. I want you...

Men feel entitled...

..by a lot of stuff that's rolling around in their heads

that has sexualised women and embraced them as sexual commodities

to the extent that they feel comfortable doing that.

If you're wearing something, please get naked.

I believe in only two things. The First Amendment and boobs.

She needs to drop a few.

What do you think about this? Gretchen's beautiful. Beautiful.

I love the women's movement, especially when walking behind it.

Now when you're sold as a sex symbol, it's like the message

that men out there in the world get is that they can all touch you

and that they own you.

It makes her a slut, right?

He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me.

Because you've turned them on.

Nice ass. You've made them do it.

You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the pussy.

It really didn't feel that there was a system in place for this

kind of a complaint.

How sure can this committee be on the accuracy

of your statements?

What you want to do is destroy this guy's life.

Are you interested in writing a book?

Nobody has made amends.

Shame.

Nobody has apologised.

Nobody has taken ownership of having done this to us.

I categorically and unequivocally deny

the allegation against me by Dr Ford. I have not been guilty

of sexual misconduct.

The allegation is completely false.

These allegations are false. It's just not true. Not true.

You can't just be on our shoulders and we can't continue to be gaslit

by these people.

We're made to feel like we're crazy if we're being uncomfortable.

OVERLAPPING VOICES

Are you a scorned woman?

Are you guys ready to move into a little bit of rehearsal?

You're going to be taking off her shirt. OK.

And from what I understand, it's a pretty wide neck,

so you shouldn't have any issue just coming up and pulling

it over Jennifer's head. Yeah?

And then as we discussed, you will take your bra off.

You know, you can position yourself on the edge of the bed here, right?

Maybe you could place Dan's hand somewhere on your upper inner thigh,

on the left leg. Maybe right here would be fine.

And then here? Yeah.

You can move your head a little bit.

And you can cheat it so that your head is not so turned.

Yeah.

And then... I'll be like this. Great.

Love to see, touching his head, tugging on his hair a little. OK.

How does that feel for both of you? I'm fine.

OK. OK.

Great.

On season one, we had a moment where there were some criticisms

of our lead actor, James Franco,

for stuff that had happened not on our set,

but had happened on indie films that he had worked on.

So what are you doing tonight?

But nonetheless, I felt the need to ask

all the principal cast members,

did you have any problems on our set?

Emily Meade rather bravely said things didn't go right on set.

One day I'll tell you about it.

I was playing a prostitute turned porn star.

I was 26...

..and I was starting to realise how much I was having to constantly

dissociate, to, like, show up to my job.

There were circumstances where I wound up having to do

a very intimate sex scene with a completely

random background actor.

I was not willing to be on the show with things the way

they were, wanting to protect the women involved in this show.

Emily basically said, "We can do this better,"

and then it was our job to listen.

The best thing I could come up with was that there should be

a person who was there,

who their sole job is to facilitate,

protect, and just be there for sex scenes, like a stunt coordinator.

GUNSHOTS

HE GRUNTS IN PAIN

We have entire departments of people who are there to make sure

nobody gets hurt when we're simulating violence.

But we hadn't, at this point, hired somebody whose sole area

of expertise was, let's make sure nobody gets emotionally hurt

or physically hurt, or, you know, when we're simulating intimacy.

I'm there to make sure the actors are safe, but also to check

in and make sure what is happening on set is consensual

and what is happening is what was agreed to.

I don't want to disappoint anybody.

That was probably always the hardest part for me,

having to, like, look someone in the eyes, a man specifically,

and disappoint them about what I'm willing to do, sexually.

She could go tell the director, like,

"Emily's feeling "a little strange about this,"

warn the director of that so they can roll their eyes,

or have whatever private reaction they want to,

and I don't have to see it and feel insecure or embarrassed.

Let's go, sweetheart.

And we're good?

It was just the process of having that conversation,

and feeling like I had a choice, and, like, I wasn't in a corner.

All right. First step is Lori and Andy.

The Deuce wound up being the first network television show

to have an intimacy coordinator,

and then HBO wound up being the first network to have

network-wide intimacy coordinators used.

There are certain things that might have been acceptable

five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago

that are not acceptable now.

And I think it took Time's Up,

it took #MeToo, it took...

..this entire shift for people to look at scenes like this

and say, "We can do better."

You're going to listen, Laurie,

whether you like it or not.

There's clearly a deeply entrenched terror

of male privilege and power being taken away.

I'm not going to be stopped by three dumb-witted broads.

I wanted to show that you could cut off the head of power

instead of biting at ankles,

that if everybody is always kind of complaining about the same thing...

..maybe we can do something about it.

I do feel optimistic...

..but Hollywood is definitely sexist,

definitely racist place.

And it's going to take a lot to dismantle...

..those systems.

The #MeToo movement ushered in a greater level

of the magnifying glass.

That long-held patriarchal power in Hollywood was rendered

vulnerable, really, for the very first time in a very real way.

Harvey Weinstein surrendering to police.

Leslie Moonves' career at CBS came to an end in September.

..has been suspended in the wake of sexual harassment accusations.

James Franco snubbed by the Oscars in a week of allegations...

..found actor Kip Pardue guilty of serious misconduct.

I think that many films...

..have women in peril.

Some Prince Charming has to come and save us.

And we come to believe that we

innately don't have the power to save ourselves.

But we do.

Women are finally finding a voice.

Before doing Vida,

I hadn't experienced too much in the roles of getting to play

an American like me, a Latina like me.

It is by design that we are seeing a woman pursue her sexuality

and pleasure in a very unapologetic fashion.

We haven't got a chance to us, like, create complicated

images of ourselves, and these girls I created were shitty, messy.

They made really bad decisions.

Dominant culture gets to tell all that, all the time.

When do we get to say it?

The sex scenes started in the writers' room.

These girls, they knew exactly how to get off, what they wanted.

It progressed the story, it wasn't as gratuitous.

Tanya brought me into the editing room just to make sure

I was completely comfortable with the way that certain things

were being shot.

You know, is this...is this all right?

It's nice to have somebody checking in on you, even after the fact.

The Sex Lives Of College Girls is about

freshmen, college suite mates,

who are navigating their sexuality.

So how does this work?

Do we just take our clothes off and go inside?

Fuck it. I'm going in.

I have a disability.

My character clearly will also have a disability.

But who my character is, is not predicated on the fact

that I'm a disabled woman.

Honey, I pull.

Hey.

It's still about my sexuality.

Do any of you know where a girl named Sarah is?

No. Sorry. I don't.

It's the most refreshing thing to have a character,

especially a wheelchair user,

be sexy, be sex positive, be sexual,

to be seen as desired and loved,

because we deserve it too.

There was a time in my life when I felt...free.

Oh, Jesus.

I always knew that it would be noisy

to make a show about female desire and sexuality,

about a woman who wants sex,

who admits she's had sex,

that she wants to have more of it,

and not punishing her for her desire is in itself a revolutionary act.

When you make that woman a mother, it is just charging straight

into these opinions in society

that martyrdom is the ideal for mothers.

Morning, mummy.

I also felt like we cannot tell this whole story,

and just not even have one shot of a penis.

We put it in the cut,

and the Netflix executives were very nervous about it

and asked us to consider taking it out.

They were concerned that it would be off-putting to women.

Not heterosexual women!

I think everything I've been doing

has been an attempt to investigate the male gaze.

All these ways in which the camera has kind of stood in for an assumed

masculine protagonist, and to kind of reset it, saying, you know,

"I'm the subject, you're the object."

Consent doesn't have to be this kind of, like, mushy thing that's,

like, shrouded in questions about shame and gender.

When I'm filming, I'm always wanting to, like, put the camera

into the place of the character's desire.

So it's like, instead of taking the camera up here or out here,

I'm always, like, literally imagining the camera moving down

into, like, the gut.

Really, really opened up in me.

My sensitivity as a human being translated into what I could

bring to the camera.

The camera's approach is honouring the space for the actors.

Joey would say that I had a mussy,

and say, "Jimmy, shoot from your mussy."

Because I don't think that a man only has a male gaze

or a woman would only have a female gaze.

I wanted to be naked because, first of all, that had never been done.

And the second reason was that I wanted to show this relationship,

and these two human beings are just like, they have conversations

after people take showers and they're naked.

We can't afford any more bills.

I can't believe I have to say this.

Trans people actually have sex.

We have sex with other people!

Isn't that weird? I know, it's strange, but it's true.

Everybody is doing this thing called love.

I'm really interested in pursuing the notion of female desire.

Be it ambition or sex or romance.

The idea that there is a subjectivity,

and often a voraciousness

that comes from a female perspective.

In terms of making films,

the most important thing is women have been doing this forever.

You know, that we're not the first.

Women were putting the camera in a place of empathy.

Yearning, longing, wanting.

There is a rediscovery of lost black films that celebrate

romance and intimacy.

These films have always existed.

It's changing.

You can feel it. You can feel it

in the writers' rooms.

You can feel it talking to producers.

When I'm on the set of Grace And Frankie,

half the people there are women.

Trust me, when I started out in '58, '59, there wasn't a woman,

except maybe the script supervisor, on the set.

We're making vibrators for women with arthritis.

Yes, vibrators!

We're making things for people like us, because we are sick and tired

of being dismissed by people like you. Mic drop.

OK, come on in.

I'm hoping that there will be a more seismic shift

happening more rapidly now.

Hey.

Yeah, sure.

I think we need more...

You'll see more women greenlight a series...

..to greenlight a movie,

and when you see that, you'll see more movies that empower women.

OK. And...cut.

Actresses, for the first time since I would say the '30s,

have power.

Men want to be looking at women in the way

that you look at a protagonist in a movie, which is as yourself.

And for some reason, I think men weren't making

that kind of transference.

Now it's happening.

The beauty of film and television and media

is that we have the ability to reach people's living rooms.

And when you see somebody that maybe doesn't look like you,

but emotionally you see yourself reflected in that way,

all of a sudden that person becomes more familiar to you.

We have consumed for a very long time

ourselves outside of our own lens,

that we are still figuring out

what that means.

I think Hollywood is no longer just a place of entertainment.

I think that the power that Hollywood holds

is so great that it should put its power to good use,

which is representation.

Hey, check this one out.

I think nudity and sex

is a really beautiful way to show things without telling them

and is a vital part of storytelling.

And I actually feel better doing it

with an intimacy coordinator now.

They have done something and been involved in something

that is important and I hope permanent in this industry.

And that's... Yeah, it's pretty surreal.

It's really...

It feels very good.

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# I'm not gonna lie I'm not that thing on the shelf

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# Cos I'm doing it better than anyone else... #

We're just getting started.

All right, fellas.

Getting the cameras into the hands of the people who want them

and deserve them.

Fuck, yeah, Mom.

Women don't stay silent for ever.

Some women will see some of these amazing pieces of work

by women and start to kind of centre themselves in their lives, you know?

But it's not filmmaking's job to do it.

It's the world's job to centre female pleasure.

It's the world's job to understand consent.

You know, it's not female film-makers' job to teach it.

We got enough to do.

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# I'm not gonna lie I'm not that thing on the shelf

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# Cos I'm doing it better than anyone else

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# I'm not gonna lie I'm not that thing on the shelf

# I'm feeling myself I'm feeling myself

# Cos I'm doing it better than anyone else

# Feeling myself

# I'm-I'm feeling myself... #