Chapter 35

Sex Scenes

Having written screenplays for many years, for me, the three least interesting scenes to write are:

• 1) Sporting Events. (Cut to SCOREBOARD. 49 to 7)
• 2) Fight scenes. (My version: Sam throws the first punch. All hell breaks loose. The whole barroom gets into it. When the dust clears, Harry is dead with a knife in his chest. Sam is lying on the sidewalk in a pool of broken glass. And everyone else has taken off.) For the blow by blow, they have fight choreographers and stunt men. Your job is the story content: Harry, dead. Sam, not. Let them take care of the rest. Unless you have a great, original idea to offer (James Bond does parcours, or Jason Bourne can shoot bad guys while falling four flights down a stairwell, using a dead body to break his fall) don’t write the punches. Leave it to the experts. The same goes for:
• 3) Sex scenes. Not all love stories have sex scenes. Often sex is something that we imagine may happen later. Classic love stories like Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail fall into this category. Others like Gone With the Wind, Notting Hill, Four Weddings, and Brokeback Mountain do include sex scenes, on or off screen.

Sometimes people fall in love before they have sex (Dirty Dancing, Romeo and Juliet). Sometimes afterwards (Knocked Up). Sometimes the act of sex itself drives a wedge between them. When Harry Met Sally comes to mind. It is entirely up to you, the writer, who sleeps with whom, where, on screen or off, whether it’s good or not, and how it changes the story.

A few things to keep in mind:

They choreograph sex scenes, almost like they do fight scenes. Many directors enjoy working out the details, planning them, lighting them, rehearsing them, and shooting them.

I have never heard of an actor wanting to do a film because they loved the sex scene and couldn’t wait to do it. Actors, whether male or female, almost to a one, don’t love to shoot sex scenes. They have to be partially or fully naked in bed (or wherever you choose) with someone they are not actually in a relationship with, doing things that their actual partner is going to have to watch them doing onscreen. Not to mention their children. And their parents. And grandparents. And to top it all off, there will be between ten and fifty people standing around watching them do it. The crew, grips, gaffer, script supervisor, cameramen, etc. Not to mention the millions of strangers who will see it later. Not the most fun thing in the world for those being scrutinized.

The odds of a real-life couple shooting a sex scene in a major motion picture are low. A Brad/Angelina combo with one of them directing (Angie of course) only comes along once in a generation or so. Or maybe only once period. And when a couple like that gets divorced, well let’s just say, nobody gets custody of the sex scene.

What is important to you as the screenwriter, which is to say, the storyteller, is to answer the question: how does sex advance the story and the relationships? Does it make things easier? More difficult? More dangerous? Does it complicate things? Unless it’s in the last ten pages, you want every scene to make things more difficult. Nothing should get easier until the end. So keep this in mind. There are no picnics (I teach my students) in Act Two or Three. And that includes in bed. Just because it’s a sex scene doesn’t mean it can lower the stakes of your story. We never lower the stakes. We only raise them.

Screenwriting at its best is lean and clean. The fewest possible words to describe any and all action, including sex. Know that even if you describe it in a few words, they will still shoot it as a real scene.

You can actually write it as lean as this:

Int. Jodie’s Apartment.night.

It’s fine. If you want dialogue, then you have to write it out fully, but the choreography can be left primarily to the choreographers.

In Buffalo Girls (1995, miniseries written by me, from Larry McMurtry’s novel), I needed Calamity Jane (Anjelica Huston) and Wild Bill Hickok (Sam Elliott) to have sex in order for her to later give birth to his daughter. Calamity is dressed up like a lady for the only time in her adult life. She loves Bill, but he doesn’t feel the same. Probably partly due to the fact that she dresses like a man and acts like one too. In the previous scene in the saloon, none of the other men in Deadwood recognize, her but Hickok does. And he’s the one she has dressed up for. But he embarrasses her and hurts her feelings and she runs off in tears. When he stumbles out later, drunk, to take a piss, and finds her huddled in the alley, still in the borrowed dress, still in tears, he apologizes and tries to comfort her, and ends up physically doing so up against the wall. In the script. When they shot it, the director (Rod Hardy) had them make love in a barn, in the hay with beautiful moonlight filtering in. Kind of the way they always shoot the baby Jesus. Without the sex, obviously.

I didn’t mind the change. I make it a policy never to mind when I get actors as good as Anjelica Huston and Sam Elliott to speak my words and to do other things. And sex in the sweet, cinematic new-mown hay also served the story. And raised the stakes.

To sum it up, regarding sex scenes:

Write lean. Few words. No body parts. No blow by blow.

Be clear on how a sex scene does at least one of three things: develops the relationship, develops a character, or advances the story.

If a sex scene does none of these, cut it. Gratuitous sex is no different than gratuitous violence. It’s gratuitous.