The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
‘Skin’ exposes Hollywood’s naked ambition
Director Danny Wolf says the most shocking thing about his new documentary on the history of nudity in cinema might be that no one had already thought to make that film.
“We’re talking,” Wolf says of himself and producers Paul Fishbein and Jim McBride. “And we said, ‘Do you believe no one’s done a documentary? A definitive documentary on the history of nudity in the movies?’
“Not something exploitive, and not a ‘breastfest’ or anything,” Wolf says. “But a real good, you know, in-depth look at the whole history.”
“Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies,” which premiered on streaming services Aug. 18, delivers exactly what it says in the title. A largely chronological story, “Skin” traces the fascination of filmmakers and fans with nudity on screen from the earliest days of Hollywood to the present, mixing film clips from the Silent Era to the present and interviews with actors, directors, producers, and critics.
Some of it is quite highbrow. Directors including Peter Bogdanovich (“The Last Picture Show”), Amy Heckerling (“Fast Times At Ridgemont High”) and Martha Coolidge (“Valley Girl”) talk about the importance of the nudity in those films.
Actors such as Malcolm McDowell (“A Clockwork Orange”), Mariel Hemingway (“Star 80”) and Sean Young (“No Way Out”) are interviewed about their decisions to bare all on screen. Film critics and historians offer insights into the cultural landscape in which the movies were made.
And yes, there is a whole lot of flesh onscreen — you probably got that from the title, no?
But whether it’s mainstream or art fare such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Last Tango In Paris,” or trashier drive-in fodder like “Vixen!” and “I Spit On Your Grave,” over the course of the documentary’s two-hour runtime the scale tilts more toward educational than erotic.
“Documentaries today, everything’s being done or has been done already,” says Wolf, whose credits include the “Time Warp” trilogy of documentaries about cult movies. “We jumped at it as quickly as we could and said, ‘Let’s put this thing together.’
“And we just found if we do it chronologically we’d have something pretty cool we could be proud of,” he says. “Something that maybe could be shown in cinema classes at universities or whatever. That could be fun, entertaining, have a lot of nudity, but also be really informative.
“I think that’s what we came up with.”
Virgin’ territory
Actress Diane Franklin is featured prominently in “Skin.” As a 19-year-old, she shot her feature film debut as the star of the 1982 teen sex comedy “The Last American Virgin,” a role that required nudity.
Watching her own movie was the first time Franklin saw any kind of nudity in a film, she says early in “Skin,” and she laughs describing how she almost didn’t get to see even that when the tickettaker at the cinema didn’t believe she was old enough to watch an R-rated movie.
“I was raised with a more open mind about nudity, that it was beautiful,” Franklin says by phone from her Los Angeles home. Her parents were both European and older and though her initial concern about the nudity required in the script was for how it might affect them, they left the decision to her.
“They were very supportive, and sort of said, ‘This is your life and your decision,’” she says.
Initially, she didn’t want to do it, but she eventually changed her mind.
“This is a big thing with actresses,” Franklin says. “We get to a place where we’re like, ‘Do we need to nudity in order to get an acting job?’ I think it happens still today. But then there was a part of me that said, no, I can make this great, and it is an integral part of the story.”
That’s a key point she and many others make throughout “Skin,” a distinction between nudity that advances the story or expands a character and that is simply there to titillate. And ultimately, Franklin says, the actor should feel good about the decision she or he makes to disrobe or not.
“It was one of the reasons why I decided to do (the documentary),” she says. “I wanted the public to know and I wanted other actors to know that there comes a time in your life where it’s up to you, and you walk through that door.”
Fleshing out the story
Wolf says it quickly became apparent that the film worked best in chronological order.
“It really did because when film was invented in the late 1880s, that’s when ‘bodies in motion’ was filmed by Eadweard Muybridge,” he says. “Nudity was captured on film when film was invented, so it’s easy to move along from decade to decade”
For those early eras of silent movies and the first talkies, film historians and critics flesh out the cultural landscape in “Skin.”
“We wanted to emphasize the political and artistic social changes that predicated a more liberal attitude to nudity as well,” Wolf says.
When big stars such as Claudette Colbert started to appear even briefly nude in big movies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Sign of the Cross,” detractors, which included the Catholic Church, pressured Hollywood to create the production code which eliminated nudity on film until the dawn of the ’60s. (To be fair, it was probably not Colbert’s scene in a milk bath that upset people, but one involving a nude actress being menaced by a gorilla.)
“Then you have these outlaw filmmakers like Russ Meyer making these ‘nudie cuties’ and ‘monster nudies,’ these underground-type movies,” Wolf says.
By the end of the ’60s, the Motion Picture Association of America had instituted its rating system, which led to “Midnight Cowboy” becoming the first and only X-rated movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture.
“Now you started to get major studios making major movies with stars and nudity was now male and female,” Wolf says. ‘So we kind of hit on what are the seminal movies you can’t leave out, like ‘Last Tango In Paris.”
The naked truth
Wolf says that when he interviewed actors for the film, he also asked them how doing nude scenes on screen impacted their lives, a question he says provided some of the most unexpected answers of the interviews.
Erica Gavin, who starred in the title role of the 1968 Russ Meyer flick “Vixen!” tells him in “Skin” how seeing herself naked caused her to become so critical of her body that she nearly died of anorexia.
Mariel Hemingway talked about getting breast enhancement surgery between her nude appearances as a track star in “Personal Best” and as the murdered Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratton in “Star 80.”
“The #MeToo movement has absolutely impacted movies,” Wolf says. “Like immediately, we’re not going to have the exploitive take-off-your-topjust-for-the-sake-of-takingoff-your-top like we saw in horror films. Exploitation and gratuitous nudity is done.”