Script To Screen: “Sex, Lies, and Videotape”

Anybody who cares about the indie film world should hold the 1989 movie Sex, Lies, and Videotape in high esteem. During the 80s when the Diller-Esiner-Katzenberg regime at Paramount instituted severe top down control of the filmmaking process, emulated at other studios resulting in… well… 80s movies, along came writer-director Steven Soderbergh with a little $2M film about interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting ways. The movie was a hit, grossing $24M, winning the Palme D’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival, and ushered in a great run of independent filmmaking.

Setup: Ann, a sexually repressed wife, goes to visit Graham, a long-time friend of Ann’s husband who has drifted into their lives, carrying his own sexual baggage.

Here is the scene in the movie:

There’s so much emotional subtext at work in this scene, even the little bit of business where Ann spills some tea (not in the script), suggesting visually how off balanced the discovery of the subject of Graham’s “personal project.”

I’ve always looked at the band Nirvana as the music version of Sex, Lies, and Videotape. They emerged from the bland, prepackaged mess that was 80s music, recording their first album in 1989, the same year SLV was released.

It’s an item of faith for me: Whenever movies, TV, and music become too routinized, too formulaic, too pablum because of dictates coming from corporate overlords, artists will rise up from the masses and rattle our culture’s cage.

If you haven’t seen Sex, Lies and Videotape, you should.

And just because I can:

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