So sex doesn’t sell?
By: Phil Safari on Sep 02 2010Category: Life
Well, at least for movies, at any rate. Here are excerpts from a 2005 CNN article, and there have been more articles since then. Wish I could find the original source to link, but stuff disappears so fast off the Internet these days…or it is buried under other junk.
So stupid humor sex is cool, but sex involving any brain cells or real emotions is not? Actually it’s not that simple. I love this hypocrisy part. People do still watch serious sex media; they just don’t want to be seen in public watching them.
I’m not a social critic or anything, but it is rather amusing that we seem to be going back in time. Back in the 1800-1950s, society was sexually repressed, although reality was sometimes a different story (roaring 20s, anyone?). Then people went buck-wild in the 1960s and 70s, and now we are going back to being (ostensibly) conservative. History repeats itself!
LAS VEGAS, Nevada (Hollywood Reporter)
“People get itchy about straightforward sexuality,” Universal Pictures publicity executive Michael Moses says.
The old adage “sex sells” no longer applies to the movies. “Sex will not make something that is otherwise not entertaining sell,” producer Tom Pollock says. “Movies work because they make you laugh, cry or (be) scared. Audiences won’t go to a movie because of sex…”
Last year, five of the top-10-grossing movies were PG. Of the top 25, only four were rated R. “Increasingly, if a movie is rated R,” says producer John Goldwyn, “audiences won’t go.”
[P]roducer Peter Guber says, “If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. Laughter covers up insecurity…
Which is why vulgar, dumb, funny sex plays in such movies as “There’s Something About Mary,” “American Pie” and “Road Trip.” “When they’re flinging around in a wet T-shirt contest in ‘Old School,’ it’s fine,” DreamWorks marketing chief Terry Press says, “because no emotion is attached to it…”
These days, sex is in the home. In the privacy of your own room, you can see all the racy material you want in “Sex and the City,” “The L Word,” “Queer as Folk,” “Deadwood” and “Desperate Housewives.”
“Today’s audiences aren’t comfortable being seen in a mass-audience public place like a cinema complex seeing something that is inevitably notorious because of its sex,” producer Bill Horberg writes in an e-mail. “If you go to a complex, you might run into your kids, much less neighbors, co-workers…”
“We are a Puritan society,” Press says. “We’d rather watch it at home.”
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