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Thursday 11 December 2008

Right There, Right Now

In her craft blog Write Here, Write Now, Lucy Hay posts on the reluctance of British and American writers to tackle sex scenes in their screenplays.

Which reminded me...

I once wrote a draft of a script with a sex scene where I constructed it as I would any kind of action - laid out the basic moves so it would reflect the characters and be a progression of the drama, not an interlude.

The script came back with a pencil stroke through the scene and the words Director's discretion in the margin.

So in the next draft I just wrote, "They shag enthusiastically".

4 comments:

laurence timms said...

That's one of the many differences between writing novels and writing screenplays. I wrote two sex scenes in my first novel and both took several re-writes before they even read as remotely genuine.

Being able to write 'they shag enthusiastically on top of the narrowboat' and 'they shag drunkenly by the swimming pool' would have saved me hours.

Lucy V said...

LOL that is brilliant. "Director's discretion" - the bugger.

When it's a spec though they can keep their dirty hands off whilst my characters get their dirty hands ON each other!!

domynoe said...

You don't know how much i needed that little bit of a smile today.

Stephen Gallagher said...

Happy to oblige. Thanks for stopping by.

I just realised that the 'returned script with the pencil stroke' element makes this at least a 10-year-old memory... these days it's all Final Draft and email, and I don't see paper until I print a copy out to send to the binder for my 'bookshelf of vanity'.