Filming love scenes amid pandemic is a challenge

Even a kiss can risk spreading the virus, forcing movie and television producers to adapt.

One heated question Hollywood is grappling with amid the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic: What is the fate of steamy love scenes, a staple of TV and movies, whenever production fully resumes?

Even director Spike Lee says pulling off these scenes is a major question mark.

“Love scenes, intimate love scenes, that’s number one for me,” Lee tells USA TODAY. “Maybe we just do what they used to do back in the day, where the couple kisses, then you fade to black.”

Actually, even the kissing part is a challenge. So are intimate close-ups of any kind while the highly contagious COVID-19 remains a health threat — and with the surging pandemic still threatening to derail tentative plans to broadly resume movie and TV production.

“It’s common sense,” says Dr. Daniel Uslan, co-chief infection prevention officer at UCLA Health and a medical consultant on the COVID-19 production plan produced by Hollywood studios and entertainment unions in June. That industry blueprint urged “amending

scripts” to avoid love and action scenes for safety reasons.

“Any scene that would require close prolonged contact is challenging, and intimate scenes are the most obvious example,” Uslan says.

Whenever production rolls out across the country for an industry that has been shut down since March, TV and movie producers will have to take significant steps to keep these intimate scenes, if they implement them at all.

“We’re not saying goodbye to them. The big message is not that entertainment production is now going to be sanitized of all emotion and romantic scenes, and it’s going to be boring,” says Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, chief operating officer for SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union. “We’re just saying that producers need to be judicious and do these scenes as safely as possible.”

Crabtree-Ireland was part of the task force that completed a separate, detailed 36-page “Safe Way Forward” plan on resuming production in June.

COURTESY OF UNIVERSAL PICTURES Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, scenes like this moment between Christian (Jamie Dornan) and Anastasia (Dakota Johnson) in “Fifty Shades of Gray” will be difficult to shoot.

XJ JOHNSON/JPISTUDIOS.COM Eli (Lamon Archey) and Lani (Sal Stowers) get steamy in an episode of “Days of our Lives.”