Writing the Sex Scene

Two figures facing each other at a dark hotel bar, drinks between them

Write the decision, not the choreography.

Two people jump into bed and the story stops. That's the problem, and it's almost always the same one. Nothing gets decided in the scene, so the scene is just spectacle.

The good ones are negotiations. Somebody wants something besides sex. Out of Sight is the one working writers point to. Scott Frank wrote it, Soderbergh directed, and the hotel bar between Clooney and Jennifer Lopez is cut against the room upstairs. She's a federal marshal. He's a bank robber she has to arrest. The scene isn't about whether they'll sleep together. It's about two people agreeing that for a few hours their jobs don't exist, both knowing what it will cost. Take the sex out and you still have a story beat.

Here's what you're not thinking about while you write it. Your pages go to an actor's agent, and that agent reads them for what the role asks of a client. Vague pages read as risk. A scene that says plainly what's shown and what isn't gets a yes more often than a scene that trails off and leaves it to the director. You also just added an intimacy coordinator, a closed set, and a slower day to the schedule, and your line producer noticed before your director did.

So write the decision, not the choreography. Name what the audience sees, keep it as short as the beat needs, and make sure something between those two people is different afterwards.

If the story survives cutting the scene, cut it. If it doesn't, you wrote it right.

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