At the Telegraph, Celia Walden skates around the issue Hollywood has kissed goodbye to the steamy sex scene:
According to Vincent Bruzzese of Ipsos, a market research company, sex has been all but eradicated from Hollywood scripts over the past 18 months. “Sex scenes used to be written, no matter the plot, to spice up a film trailer,” he said in an interview at the weekend. “But all that does today is get the film an adult-only rating and lose a younger audience.”
The author of this piece blames a number of things: The expense of getting actresses naked, the fact that women over 25 are making more of the movie-watching decisions (which flies counter to the argument that they’re choosing films with explosions, giant robots, and CGI aimed at teenagers, who spend most of the money on films).
The subhead kinda hints at the real impetus: “Today’s directors would rather appeal to a wider audience”.
Who do you think that wider audience is?
Is it the teenagers sexting each other who would be put off by a sex scene in a movie? Is it the American over 25-year-old demographic that’s dragging its overt sexuality into its forties and fifties or who dress or allow their children to dress too saucily because that’s all you can buy off the rack?
You know who that over 25-year-old woman who’s making decisions like that for her family that says no to a film with boobies in it? A Christian and/or a Republican, and that’s not Hollywood’s target as it is.
No, the wider audience Hollywood is going for and that balks at sex on the screen is the rest of the world.
What passes for steamy and risque here is prohibited elsewhere, and I bet Hollywood, the business side of Hollywood, knows that its bottom line depends upon those foreign receipts and that the artistic necessity of baring Halle Berry’s breasts is trumped by the business necessity of getting the film into the Chinese market instead.
It’s not the changing face of Americans’ or Westerners’ sensibilities that Hollywood is concerned with because American and Western values, on the whole, have not been somehow trending to the more prudish in pop culture. The rest of the world, though, has steadily remained more traditional in its moral outlook.
(Link seen on Instapundit courtesy temp blogger Sarah Hoyt.)
An interesting hypothesis!
It’s not the changing face of Americans’ or Westerners’ sensibilities that Hollywood is concerned with because American and Western values, on the whole, have not been somehow trending to the more prudish in pop culture. The rest of the world, though, has steadily remained more traditional in its moral outlook.
This must make the oikophobes in Hollywood feel uncomfortable.