The Lack Of Intimacy In Our Intimacy

What's it's like to work on sex scenes.

I’ve worked on a lot of sex scenes over the years, and the experience is, in a word, unsexy. This is true regardless of how the scene turns out on screen, both because so much time and effort is spent focusing on everything you don’t want the camera to see, and because even with a closed set (which means the minimum number of crew allowed in, to keep things as private as possible), the situation still usually comes down to a bunch of guys, with whom they are casual acquaintances at best, watching two actors wearing patches over their private parts do things most people would prefer not to do in front of other people. I’ve nearly always found myself in the awkward position of being not just the only woman in the room during simulated sex, but someone who is basically required, by my job, to watch. That’s to be expected I guess; there are upsides and downsides (especially during covid) of being the crew person who is physically closest to the action. But what I didn’t realize I’d signed up for was having to say something when bad shit goes down in these situations, as it inevitably does.

I was booming sex scenes from literally the beginning of my film career, since two of the first professional films I worked on were a lesbian teen romance called The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls In Love and a gay sex comedy called Lie Down With Dogs. That’s right, my first sex scenes were gay sex scenes, which at the time made those films genuinely edgy by virtue of their very existence. This is as opposed to most of the sex scenes in self-described “edgy” films I worked on in the 90s, where that translated to “titillating for cis straight white guys,” aka lots of gratuitous female nudity, mostly combined with the type of straight-to-penetration sex that male writers and directors seem to think is hot. I’m not saying that these sex scenes aren’t at all titillating for women to watch, because what turns us on is complicated. Women my age learned what’s supposed to be sexy from these types of sex scenes (porn wasn’t ubiquitous like it is now), so of course that’s what we respond to. But even when I feel turned on watching a scene, I recognize that if I were the woman in that scene, I would not be having an orgasm, because most movie and tv sex scenes have no “foreplay” — which, for women, is a complete misnomer, cuz it’s kind of the whole enchilada. For most of us, straight-to-banging instasex is just bad sex. And yet, in most films and shows, women 1) are so turned on just by locking eyes across a crowded room, or maybe sometimes intense flirting, that they are immediately 100% ready to pound, and 2) will orgasm at the same time that men do after just 30 seconds of of D. For those lucky women for whom that is true, congrats, I’m happy for you. But this concept of how sex works for women — even after Sally taught Harry the ugly truth about fake orgasms in 1989 — is basically why I pretty much gave up on casual sex by the aughts: the guys I had it with didn’t know they were supposed to do something other than stick it in, or if they did, they were at a loss for how to figure out what that something was. I mean, sure, some of them just didn’t give a shit, but most of them did seem to want to get me there, they just didn’t know how to do it right — because that would have meant actually being intimate, by which I mean getting to know their partner’s body and paying attention to their responses. Which, admittedly, is tough with someone you hardly know, but especially hard when you don’t see it modeled anywhere.

If the production is doing it right, the parts of a sex scene without dialogue are filmed without sound, because whatever sex sounds you might get from having the boom op in there are much less important than making the actors comfortable. You do kind of have to have someone in there when there is dialogue, mind you, because you can’t wire people who are naked, and if they’re partly clothed, rubbing those clothes up against each other is going to make that soundtrack 100% SCRATCHRUSTLESCRATCHSCRATCH. So, even though it was just my luck that I happened to fill in on the day that they filmed the sex scenes in both Two Girls and Grind, with Adrienne Shelly and Billy Crudup, I was only there for some making out and undressing at the beginning of each. Which is definitely a weird thing to happen right after you introduce yourself to someone, but could’ve been worse. I was actually surprised to find out, when I looked it up, that Grind ended up being unrated, because I didn’t remember seeing anything that could have made it that way. That was unfortunately very much not true of the also-unrated Fall, on which I had to watch a sex scene between Eric Shaeffer’s character and Amanda De Cadenet’s that really made me want to take several showers afterwards. Part of what made it icky was that the whole movie was so clearly a male fantasy — specifically, according to set gossip, Eric Shaeffer’s fantasy about what he wished had happened between him and Elle MacPherson during and after making If Lucy Fell (for instance, his character in Fall tries to get the married model love interest to come back to him after a brief affair by filling her hotel room with red roses, which Shaeffer apparently actually did to Elle MacPherson, only in real life, the woman in question told him to fuck right off). But add on to that that it required De Cadenet, a model who hadn’t done much acting, to act out Shaeffer’s sexual fantasies in graphic detail, and you start to get a sense of the true ugh factor of this shoot for everyone but him. On top of that, the production never really closed the set during the sex scenes. There were more crew than necessary in the room to begin with, and also crew people walking in and out in between shots, when the actress was still naked. I finally went and yelled at the first AD, who was also a woman, about how fucked up this was, although I later felt bad about it because she was just overwhelmed, thanks to that same writer/director/producer/“actor”/raging narcissist who had decided to make this fiasco without raising enough money to do it (guess the script was too skeevy even for the finance bros).

On the union projects I started working on after I joined in 1998, things weren’t that much better on the simulated sex front. While I mostly enjoyed working on The Sopranos, my least favorite part was working at the Bada Bing. Far from there being a closed set when we were filming with the strippers (most of whom were actually strippers), guys on the crew — and it was nearly all guys — brought their friends to watch. They did close the set for the one sex scene I worked on, a post-coital scene with Alicia Witt and Michael Imperioli for which they honored her request to have me boom instead of the male boom op (I was sound utility on that job). But the crew guys grumbled about it, like they didn’t understand why she might want to have a woman in the room — or maybe what a woman was even doing on their set if she wasn’t script supervising.

The intimacy coordinator position started to become a thing in 2017, thanks to #MeToo surfacing stories about sexual harassment and coercion in the film industry. It’s kind of like a stunt coordinator, but for sex. Intimacy coordinators take charge of making sure that everything is done properly, with consideration for and consent by the actors involved, which can include choreography and coming up with fun ideas, but also having discussions around what everyone expects, and keeping an eye on whether everyone is comfortable. Of course, as with covid supervisors, creating a new job doesn’t mean that there are enough properly-trained people to do it, which can go horribly wrong. But in general, my experience tells me that they are a much-needed innovation.

Unfortunately, I’ve still never actually worked on a set that had one — and I don’t mean I haven’t done any sex scenes since then, because of course I have. In 2017, I did some really weird sexual flashback scenes for one TV show I worked on, with a bunch of naked actors, male and female, simulating sex. Once the main actress had done her one shot, the director basically just moved the actors around like furniture — which they kind of were to him, since he basically just wanted a sea of blurred, undulating body parts, but that’s not the greatest way to treat people, especially when they are naked and vulnerable. In 2018, I worked on another show — one which I actually liked and enjoyed working on, largely because there were so many women in top positions — on a very small unit, called in to pick up what would become scenes in a porno video. We started filming the porn star having sex bent over a pool table, and I realized after one take of her partner slamming her against the table that this was not going the way it was supposed to. I mean, it was uncharted territory for me too — I’d never worked on a scene of real or pretend porn — but it wasn’t my job to think this through and realize we would need an intimacy coordinator, or a fight choreographer, or a stunt person, somebody to explain how to simulate porn sex, which we all know is not famous for being gentle, without hurting anyone. After I said something, they at least brought in padding and started checking in with the actress to see if she was okay. Of course, in both of these cases, part of the problem was definitely that these were bit parts being played by background actors, who our business tends to, in general, treat more like furniture than people. Actors at that level especially don’t say “no,” because their main goal is to come back, keep working, and get in the good graces of someone who can cast them in a bigger part. But having an intimacy coordinator around to actually force the conversation of, What is happening between these two people, and how do we use movie magic to show that, physically, without anyone feeling mortified or getting hurt?, would definitely have made a difference.

Without having worked with one, I can only speculate about whether having an intimacy coordinator on set will actually make sex scenes feel intimate, based on TV shows I’ve seen that reportedly had one. The Deuce was very public about bringing on an intimacy coordinator from season two on, and while it’s a show about the sex industry — a word combination that implies the opposite of intimacy — there are some good scenes of sex that isn’t sex work that show female pleasure. Sex Education and I May Destroy You, which employed intimacy coordinators, do show realistic sexual intimacy, as well as, in the latter, sexual assault, from many different points of view. But these are all basically shows about sex, so it makes sense that they would try to get it right. Apparently Watchmen and Succession had intimacy coordinators as well, and while I do remember some genuinely intimate scenes with Regina King in Watchmen, Succession is kind of about people who can’t really have intimacy, so it’s not surprising I can’t think of any there. I didn’t see Bridgerton, but I have seen some of Queen Charlotte, both of which had intimacy coordinators, and there’s certainly a lot of attention paid to sex from the woman’s point of view, which makes a lot of sense because Shonda Rhimes.

So maybe it does work. But of course there are still way more sex scenes shot without intimacy coordinators, who producers don’t want to spend money on and directors worry will cramp their style, than with them. Until they become ubiquitous, I think I’ll be stuck having to be the bad cop on set about bad sex, and having to watch more of it, both on screen and in person, than any woman should reasonably have to.