In our weekly series Anatomy of a Nude Scene, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sex scenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around it, and their legacy. This Black History Month, we're honoring four of our favorite nude scenes featuring some of the hottest black actresses of all time! This week, Shari Solanis gets real by having real sex in 2009's Now and Later!
Real sex in a non-pornographic film took its first big step toward mainstream acceptance in the first decade of this new millennium. After the indie movie wave of the 90s loosened certain taboos around showing male nudity on screen, it exploded in the 2000s with a glut of films aimed at breaking explicit sex into the mainstream. From Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs to John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, and even Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, it began looking like the porn industry might lose their grip on the real sex on film market.
This mainstreaming of films with explicit sex became even more prominent as lower budget films with real sex in them made their way into heavy rotation on various premium channels and, along with documentaries, seemed to dominate the early offerings on Netflix's streaming service. Two films that got a lot of traction both on HBO and Netflix were 2005's Lie with Me and 2009's Now and Later. The former was a bit more well known thanks to it featuring two fairly well established actors in Lauren Lee Smith and Eric Balfour, both of who had dozens of prior credits.
With Now and Later, however, the leads were relative unknowns. Female lead Shari Solanis gets an "Introducing" credit in the film, while her male co-lead Keller Wortham only had a handful of one-off TV roles to his name. Of course, casting unknowns lends to the verisimilitude of any project featuring real sex. It makes the audience feel as if they're seeing "real people" have sex, rather than two well-known actors. Of course, the allure of seeing two well known actors actually having sex is a whole other can of worms, but let's focus on that more realistic and far more common casting of unknowns for such films.
The stigma that most actors have to deal with in deciding whether or not to accept a role that would require real sex is that it can irrevocably alter people's view of that actor or actress—though, it's mostly actresses that have to deal with this particular stigma. This has played itself out, time and again, with actresses like Chloë Sevigny, Eiko Matsuda, and Margo Stilley all finding themselves borderline pariahs after filming unsimulated sex scenes, and Chloë might be the only one whose career ever fully rebounded. The reason that Shari Solanis never worked on screen again after Now and Later is a total mystery, though it's hard not to speculate that her explicit sex scenes had at least some complicity.
In the film, Solanis plays Angela, an illegal immigrant living in Los Angeles who meets Bill (Wortham), a banker recently indicted on fraud charges who has skipped bail and is in hiding awaiting an opportunity to cross the border and get out of America for good. Of course, the chemistry between this fiercely independent woman and this staunchly selfish man is off the charts and it isn't long before they're going at it like a couple of rabbits. In eight explicit sex scenes, all averaging well over two minutes, Solanis and Wortham keep nothing hidden as they passionately go places you might otherwise see only in porn.
When Woody Allen was asked the difference between pornography and erotic films, he famously quipped, "the lighting," and like all great jokes, there's more than a kernel of truth in there. Now and Later, though shot digitally rather than on film, looks like a motion picture, with none of the harshly lit trappings of pornography on display. There are obviously a mountain of actual differences between porn and erotica, but if the lighting is the quickest tell, Now and Later passes the test.
In the film's longest sex scene, Solanis and Wortham go at it for a solid four minutes with a whole lot of acts packed into those four minutes. Enjoy...
Vulnerability is one of the most desired qualities in any actor because it makes them more relatable. What then, I wonder, is more vulnerable than having sex on film? That would seem to be the height of vulnerable positions in which an actor could find themselves, though perhaps the actual exposure of sex overtakes the emotional exposure of the performance. Either way, it's nothing short of a shame that Shari seems to have fallen victim to this continued stigmatization of actresses having real sex in a mainstream film.
In fairness, perhaps she decided to leave film acting behind, but the fact that her male co-star has gone on to substantially bigger and better things—including recurring roles on Jane the Virgin and Westworld—since Now and Later is an indication that Hollywood's double standard is alive and well. And yes, we should say good on him for having a burgeoning career post filming a movie with real sex, but until we recognize how wildly the pendulum swings between the genders in this regard, the harder it is to celebrate his post-Now and Later career.
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Further Reading for Black History Month
—Busty Beauty Pam Grier Becomes a Blaxploitation Icon in 1973's Coffy
—How Halle Berry's Nude Debut Led Her to Monster's Ball
—Rosario Dawson Laid Bare for Danny Boyle's Trance
—List Bonet's Bloody Nude Debut in Angel Heart
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Catch up with our most recent editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene
—Christina Ricci Goes Nude for the First Time in the Opening Minutes of Prozac Nation
—A Salute to Tanya Roberts' PG Nudity in Sheena and The Beastmaster
—Sarah Silverman is Seriously Sexy (and Topless) in I Smile Back
—Jessica Chastain's Nude Debut in Salomé Takes Director Al Pacino Over a Decade to Finish
—Salma Hayek Knocks Our Pants Off with Her Performance in Frida
—Kirsten Dunst Goes Topless for the First Time in All Good Things
—Kristen Stewart Pops Her Top Off in On the Road
—Uma Thurman Steals Dangerous Liaisons Out From Under Her More Famous Co-Stars
—Did They Really Kill a Chicken During That Infamous Pink Flamingos Sex Scene?
—A Naked Julie Michaels Kicks Keanu's Ass in Point Break
—Alexis Dziena Gives Aging Lothario Bill Murray an Eyeful in Broken Flowers
—P.J. Soles Establishes a Key Horror Movie Trope in John Carpenter's Halloween
—Can We Talk About Linnea Quigley's Barbie Doll Crotch in Return of the Living Dead
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Click Here to Read All Past Editions of Anatomy of a Nude Scene/Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy
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