As intimacy coordinators become the norm on movie sets, Rob Lowe is reflecting on a once unwritten rule in Hollywood.
The 6x Golden Globe nominee recounted the “page 73 rule” for screenplays as he mourned the lack of sex scenes in today’s movies, compared to his heyday with films like 1988’s Masquerade, which he noted the studio dumped because it was “too sexy.”
“They’re like, ‘It’s so brave. She’s so brave,’” he said of the approach to intimate scenes in contemporary films on his Literally! podcast. “She’s brave because she has a sex scene? Like, that’s brave now. In our day, it was required.”
Lowe continued, “There was the page 73 rule. Back in the day the sex scene was always on page 73. You got a script and were like, ‘Am I going to be naked in this?’ And you didn’t have to read the whole script. You just went to page 73 because that middle second act… what do you do? It’s the toughest sledding in storytelling so they Blue Lagoon it. But now, it’s so brave.”
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The 9-1-1: Lone Star alum lamented that “nobody has sex scenes in movies anymore,” with the exception of A24’s Babygirl, which he said was “great.”
Babygirl writer-director Halina Reijn previously explained that the presence of intimacy coordinator Lizzy Talbot allowed them to achieve “way more risky” sex scenes in the film, which stars Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson.
“You can get more extreme sex scenes that look way more risky than when you’re thinking ‘no, let the actresses find out themselves,’” she told IndieWire. “That’s such a dated idea of what sexuality is and how to approach it. I really am against it.”
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