This week's Female Filmmaker is a TV and documentary director who has only directed one feature film with nudity...but it is VERY hot. Let's talk about the career of Donna Deitch!
Donna started her career in the 1970s and she has primarily worked in documentaries and in TV shows. The TV career started to really take off in the 1990s and continues to this day. She has directed episodes of several favorite shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Heroes, Crossing Jordan, Judging Amy, Army Wives, and more.
Donna Deitch began her career as an award-winning documentary filmmaker who edited and directed the documentary Angel on My Shoulder about her actress friend Gwen Welles dying of cancer. The movie won the Gold Hugo award for Best Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1998. You might remember Gwen as the lady who sang nude in Nashville!
Her best work was in her only narrative feature, Desert Hearts in 1985. It was a GREAT one! This romantic drama is based on the 1964 lesbian novel Desert of the Heart by author Jane Rule. Deitch is also an out lesbian who has been with her partner, writer Terri Jentz, for several years. So she could relate to the material! That also means that she added a realistic touch to this film's sex scenes.
The film is set in Reno, Nevada, in the 1950s in which a woman is trying to divorce her husband when she falls in love with another woman. If you didn't know already, Reno used to be the divorce capital of the country where divorces were speedy and legal.
Our divorcee becomes the person that she was always meant to be through this relationship with another woman that transforms her into a more confident woman. One way these two transform one another is, of course, through very long sex scenes.
Vivian Bell is our leading lady played by Helen Shaver and her love interest is Cay who is played by Patricia Charbonneau. Ms. Shaver doesn't show us whether or not she is shaved down below, but we definitely see her breasts as the two women make love.
In the DVD special features, you can see way more nudity than is in the final cut of the film - including a sex scene! There is still a VERY steamy sex scene in the film that involves close-ups of their mouths and their nipples pressing against one another.
While this is Deitch's only film like this, it really made its mark. It became a classic lesbian romance film at a time when there really weren't very many like it. If anything, Desert Hearts walked so Blue Is the Warmest Color could run! She doesn't have anything on the docket coming up, but we hope she isn't done working yet.
Watch this long, HOT sex scene here:
