Two recent releases on DocPlay turn the spotlight on some of the ways in which the Hollywood movie business has been transformed. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s Body Parts (2022) and Ursula Macfarlane’s Untouchable (2019) examine the changing of the guard from different vantage points. One looks at how films are being made nowadays; the other scrutinises the shocking behind-the-scenes practices of a modern-day mogul.
At one time, courtesy of the Hollywood Production Code and the people it was trying to placate, what happened on screen was very different. Kissing couples were required to keep both feet firmly planted on the floor; married couples were sentenced to separate beds. Rather than happening between the sheets, sex was something that could only be hinted at.
There might have been a bit of nudity here and there up until the early 1930s. But, after that – and until the phasing out of the Code a generation later – it was up to screenwriters and savvy directors to find a way of indicating there was a lot more than flirtatious conversation and three-second kissing going on between the romantic leads (and miscellaneous others). Discreet fades to black or shots of closed bedroom doors were signposts for sex.
Another Hollywood code at work, albeit unofficially. Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman : her body-double Shelley Michelle describes the process. Seen through a particular filter, one could, for example, see the classic Hollywood musicals as being all about sex.
The songs might only be talking about making love – call it melodic foreplay – but dancing is doing it. Viewed in that light, elegant Fred and vivacious Ginger aren’t just making beautiful music. As their glorious dancing tells us, they’re ideal lovers too.
All of which lends a special frisson to the title of their 1937 film, Shall We Dance . Then there are wonderful screwball comedies, like Bringing Up Baby (1939, Apple+ rental) with its riotous displacements of sexual meanings. A totally deranged tale about a naive palaeontologist (Cary Grant) looking for a missing intercostal clavicle – a bone – and the heiress (Katharine Hepburn) who helps him find it, it’s loaded with delicious double entendres and was rightly described by famous American film critic Andrew Sarris as “a sex comedy without sex”.
Ah, those were the days. Offscreen, however, as film history has widely attested, Hollywood sex was either an open secret or a badly kept one. Production offices were known for their casting couches, producers and directors were “bedding” wannabe starlets, stars were bedding each other, and the morality that ruled Tinseltown was very much of the nudge-nudge-wink-wink variety.
DocPlay’s films make it clear that much has changed, or is at least in the process of changing. Body Parts reflects on how the Swinging Sixties effectively ushered in an increasing explicitness on-screen, and on the consequences of that for the actors involved. And, dealing with the exploits of self-proclaimed Tinseltown “sheriff” Harvey Weinstein, Untouchable counts the human cost of the casting couch and looks at how the #MeToo movement has worked to consign that infamous piece of furniture to the scrapheap.
“Originally, we were interested in the performance of body-doubles for nude and sex scenes,” Guevera-Flanagan, a professor at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television, told Filmmaker magazine. “That these idealised bodies are brought in and stitched together to present a perfect image of feminine sexuality – while simultaneously being uncredited and paid less than stunt performers – was telling.” Several interviews in Body Parts deal with this contrivance.
Shelley Michelle, who was Julia Roberts’ body double in Pretty Woman , describes it as “like, bring out the chicken dinner, legs, breasts ...
” But then, enlisting (literally) about 1000 film clips, the film also looks beyond it, widening the lens to try to build a broader context for its account of how women and their bodies have been exploited by the business. It also draws attention to other ways in which the illusion of perfection is created and its impact on audiences’ expectations of themselves. VFX artist Sevan Najarian explains how perceived blemishes on actors’ bodies can be removed digitally, confiding that it goes against the grain for him.
“I don’t respond to ultra-beauty in my life,” he says. “I like the flaws ..
. I feel like I’m part of the problem instead of the solution.” It’s a problem whose sources Body Parts is trying to pin down.
I think I wanted to show that we could bite the head off power rather than just biting at its ankles. We’re introduced to “merkins” (pubic hair wigs) and “modesty garments” and shown how sex scenes are choreographed. We’re told about how Hollywood has long been better at depicting violence than sex, about the ways in which women have been exploited by directors and fellow actors – Rosanna Arquette’s account of what happened to her on the set of Blake Edwards’ SOB (1981) is dismaying – and about the role of entertainment lawyers and intimacy coordinators in halting what might once have been simply seen as insensitivity but is now recognised as harassment.
Actor Rose McGowan explains why she went public about how she’d been assaulted by notorious producer Weinstein. “I think I wanted to show that we could bite the head off power rather than just biting at its ankles,” she eloquently explains. And writer-director Angela Robinson points out how “the repurposing” of images in the modern age has changed the rules of the game.
However, while Body Parts raises a wide range of issues, its whole is disappointingly less than the sum of its parts. Instead of providing a sharp focus on how the depiction of sex on screen tells us about the workings of a patriarchal order, it delivers a barrage of illuminating observations, bouncing them around without connecting them in any substantial way. And its “repurposing” of clips to make its points about the workings of the wretched male gaze frequently ignores the fact that the films they’ve been extracted from might actually share Guevara-Flanagan’s views.
No such confusion arises, though, with Untouchable , whose clinical approach is in sharp contrast to Body Parts’ mishmash. An account of the crimes of a man seen variously as a genius and a monster, it begins with the 66-year-old Weinstein surrendering himself to New York police after three decades of accusations against him. What follows is a chronology of his rise and fall, featuring testimony from his victims and co-workers as well as from journalists who’ve dealt with him over the years.
However, director Macfarlane’s attention is essentially elsewhere, on the suffering Weinstein caused, “the culture of silence” that enabled it, and the rise of the #MeToo movement that called it to account. While one of Weinstein’s senior male executives at Miramax naively describes him as “a caricature of a Hollywood mogul that hasn’t been around for years”, former Weinstein assistant Zelda Perkins offers a much more insightful view of how he got away with his crimes for so long. “The most sinister aspect of all of this,” she says, “is that the system enabled it.
” Punctuated by unsettling forward tracking shots along hotel corridors and accompanied by a score full of foreboding, Untouchable features interviews with numerous women who found the courage to speak out about Weinstein’s sexual assaults and the cash payments and non-disclosure agreements used to silence complaints against him. They’re all deeply disturbing and utterly compelling, shot in extended close-ups. Canadian actor Erika Rosenbaum recalls how Weinstein’s reputation as “the star maker” led her into the Miramax lion’s den.
Company employee Hope D’Amore and actor Nannette Klatt speak in unsettling detail about the helplessness they felt during their encounters with the producer. Supported by colleague Andrew Goldman, New York magazine reporter Rebecca Traister recounts an alarming physical confrontation with him during a reception. What The New Yorker commentator Ken Auletta describes as “the complicity of the Hollywood community” – of the agents, staffers, actors, journalists and others in the know, most of them in the business of getting films made and sold – is Untouchable ’s implicit target.
And it hits the bull’s-eye. Body Parts & Untouchable can be viewed on DocPlay Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday .
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