As Hollywood continues to clean house in the wake of sexual harassment and assault allegations against numerous players in the industry, it’s worth remembering that this behavior was enabled in many small, seemingly innocuous ways. Case in point, Aaron Sorkin‘s story about his experience writing the 1993 thriller “Malice” starring Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin.
Speaking with USA Today, Sorkin recounts his team working on the movie, which was very early in his career, and how he was asked to write an explicit sex scene for the movie. Even with his rookie status at the time, Sorkin refused to give in to the demands of director Harold Becker, whose only purpose for the sequence seemed to be to show some skin.
“The director, very close to the start of photography, decided that we were missing a sex scene between Alec and Nicole. I went back to the hotel and I wrote like four pages of banter that ended with them falling into bed and we cut to the next day. Harold Becker said, ‘No, no, no, you have to write the scene,’” he explained.
“I hadn’t written that much at the time, I’d only written ‘A Few Good Men.’ And I said, ‘Boy, exactly what do you mean?’ And he said, ‘Look, it’s easy, just go back to your hotel and write what you’d like to see Nicole Kidman do,’” Sorkin continued. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ First of all, I just did a movie with her husband [Tom Cruise]! And second of all, no, I’m not going to write down what I’d like to see Nicole do and then hand the pages out to the crew and Nicole.”
As Sorkin describes it, the “terrible scene” was eventually conceived by the director in conjunction with Kidman and Baldwin, but the anecdote is likely not an unfamiliar one. It’s exactly that kind of attitude toward women that leads toward larger actions like harassment and assault.
Sorkin’s directorial debut, “Molly’s Game,” opens next month.