…but I did some stage acting in the mid ‘70s, and I somehow picked up the idea that the most persuasive kind of acting involves craft and discipline, of course, but is often sired within an atmosphere of spontaneity. You have to surrender to the behavior and more importantly the emotion. Technique only gets you so far.
In a Westport Country Playhouse production of “Dark of the Moon,” my role as backwoods yokel Marvin Hudgens required performing a bizarre ritualized rape scene. I had to forget about the cast (and the audience) watching this assault and just go with it — within the limits of decency and proper consideration for the actress playing Hudgens’ victim I had to become a hormonal animal, so to speak. I had to “be there.”
Three or four years later I was struck by a semi-aggressive sex scene between Roy Scheider and Janet Margolin in Jonathan Demme’s Last Embrace (‘79). Instead of the usual clutching and heavy breathing, Scheider dropped to his knees and buried his face in Margolin’s exposed lower belly. Definitely something Last Tango-ish about this — untamed, primal, committed. All these years later the scene is still an HE favorite.
The only other spontaneous belly smooching I can recall happened in a 1968 comedy called How Sweet It Is!, shot in Europe and costarring James Garner and Debbie Reynolds. Reynolds was the recipient; the smoocher was a colorful Italian chef or concierge.
What if woke-mandated “intimacy coordinators”, who’ve only been around the last couple of years…what if intimacy coordinators had somehow been monitoring these belly-smooching scenes way back when? Would they have helped or hindered the intended effect?
All to say that poor Sean Bean got roughed up by woke Twitter fascists yesterday for asserting that “intimacy coordinators” kill the mood or interfere with the natural vibe of a heated romantic scene, or words to that effect.
HE to director friendo: “Have you ever felt that actors in a romantic scene that you were directing weren’t ‘feeling it’ and needed to somehow give themselves more freely to the moment?”
Zegler translation: If it hadn’t been for the WSS intimacy coordinator, Ansel Elgort might have taken liberties and perhaps worse. But I was protected, thank God. How did Natalie Wood ever survive the coarse gropings of Richard Beymer during filming of the original West Side Story (‘61)?