mandy lee

I’ve touched (oo-er) on this before in a previous post, but I’m back to redrafting the feature written over the summer which is ostensibly a comedy with a romantic element and a lot (hopefully) of black humour… and it’s also the project that features some rather rude and somewhat earthy elements. This makes me a little nervous, especially as the few who have given me feedback so far have commented that it’s “sex-mad”, a “bit French”, and more recently regarding a certain scene, “a bit shocking”. Regardless of the actual quality of the script… what is it about writing about s.e.x. that makes people uncomfortable? And I do mean writing about it…. because I know lots of very openminded and frankly rather filthy people who have no boundaries regarding what can be discussed in conversation, but balk at writing about such things. In fact, I know that at least one classmate from the past year took out a sex scene from her script because she didn’t want her tutor to read it, and she’s not alone in my experience – embarrassment about the subject matter or worry that it’ll reveal something hitherto hidden?

It is strange, because I’ve read scripts about incest, all kinds of human and animal abuse, torture, violence, horror, sadism, war crime, psychological terror, all kinds of difficult subject matter… and there are TONS more of those than anything that deals with the very thing that is said to genetically drive us. Though I have read a lot of scripts that contain strippers, sex of a sort, but a very particular sort… and may I just say in script-form they’re nearly always gorgeous with a heart of gold, or being abused, which considering the few I’ve met in real life isn’t always the case.

If I read a script about a child being harmed, I don’t automatically assume the writer has had similar experiences, so why worry about something from the opposite and rather saucy end of the spectrum? Perhaps anything writerly… in black and white… that touches on s.e.x. is just always going to be a little sticky…