After an 118-day strike, SAG-AFTRA reached a deal with AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) on Nov. 9.
The agreement is a big win for intimacy coordinators.
SAG-AFTRA’s new contract includes a Sexual Harassment Prevention section, which says producers will “use best efforts to engage an intimacy coordinator for scenes involving nudity or sex acts.”
Producers will also “consider in good faith any request by a performer or a performer’s representative to engage an intimacy coordinator for other scenes” and producers “shall not retaliate against a performer for requesting an intimacy coordinator.”
Intimacy coordinators have an important role on set.
They help choreograph and coordinate scenes between actors in which sex and other intimate acts are simulated. It allows for actors to feel safe and for there to be consent between their actions.
With the update to the contract, many actors will be protected from sexual misconduct.
In a new report published by Rolling Stone, SAG-AFTRA members and intimacy coordinators explained why this update to the contract is so important.
“This is the first where intimacy coordinators are mentioned [in the contract]. I just think it’s very common to have either an uncomfortable or possibly traumatic experience when it comes to this,” SAG-AFTRA member Caitlin Dulany told the publication.
“And it’s not healthy for us or our sets [to deal with these situations], so it’s a great victory to have this in our contract,” Caitlyn added.
Alicia Rodis, who is an intimacy coordinator, also told the outlet that by mentioning the use of intimacy coordinators in the contract, it means that the use of them is “not going away.”
She said, “I think at the beginning people were like, ‘Oh, this is just something that’s happening because of #MeToo.’ Embedding intimacy coordinators into the contract is saying, ‘This is not a practice that is going away. This is not a blip, this is part of the cultural change of the industry.'”
Alicia, who started out as an actress, sees how intimacy coordinators create a better environment for actors on set.
“At the end of the day, I’m also an artist and the product and the process ends up going smoother and working better,” she said. “That’s been my experience and the experience of the folks I’ve worked with.”
Negotiating committee member Jack Mulcahy told the publication that highlighting the importance of intimacy coordinators was something that both SAG-AFTRA and studios agreed on from the beginning of negotiations.
“For too long, the industry has been a little lax and a little tone deaf in terms of people’s comfort on set in terms of how they are directed and how they are asked to perform in these certain situations, sometimes with little or no notice whatsoever,” he said.
He added, “So we had to put some guardrails around that. Not just soft guardrails, but really strong and robust protections for actors, both male and female.”
Jack also pointed out that while there aren’t enough intimacy coordinators in the industry to require them on set, the contract utilized the term “best efforts” to make sure that they’re used as much as possible.
“From what I understand legally, ‘best efforts’ means that you must make your best efforts [to use intimacy coordinators] or you can be subject to and open yourself up to litigation,” he said.
Another big thing that changed is making sure that the contract specifies how the request for nudity in the audition process is handled.
There will no longer be requests for actors to act out scenes in the nude during their audition process.
Intimacy coordinator Chantal Cousineau told Rolling Stone, “During the pandemic, we had a lot of casting directors asking for simulated sex scenes in their auditions so essentially, they were asking performers to provide what amounted to pornographic materials because it just seemed like people were having simulated sex on camera during auditions. So we put the ‘no nudity’ in concrete terms in this contract.”
After Rolling Stone published its piece on the future of intimacy coordinators in Hollywood following the new SAG-AFTRA contract, the conversation expanded on Reddit.
Many voiced their support towards normalizing the use of intimacy coordinators.
“A long-overdue reform.”
A Reddit user pointed out how useful having an intimacy coordinator can be on set. They wrote, “Sounds like like a long-overdue reform. I would imagine most directors, actors, and crew would be happy to have the services of an intimacy coordinator on hand to make the business of simulating sexual or intimate acts on screen more comfortable for all concerned.These are professionals creating art and entertainment together. It seems very sensible to have an expert in this aspect of the production as part of the team, just as you have a sound engineer or a script editor.”
“No-brainer.”
Another Redditor noted that just like movies have choreographers for fight scenes, it would be a “no-brainer” to have a choreographer for intimate scenes, too. They added, “Imagine if, for action movies, they just put the actors in front of the camera and said ‘Ok these stunt guys are going to attack you, just do whatever comes naturally.’ That’d be crazy, right?”
“A pretty useful thing.”
Someone else commented, “It’s actually a pretty useful thing. An actor who is going to participate in a nude or sexual scene gets a person to basically act as their advocate. They tell the IC what they are and are not comfortable with, IC then deals with director/producer to arrange things. IC ensures that the shoot is as described, with discrete garments preventing any sexual contact or full nudity, goes through the choreography with the performers to ensure everyone’s on the same page, etc.”
“Nothing prudish about it.”
A Reddit user also shared what she learned from watching an intimacy coordinator’s YouTube videos. The person wrote that the coordinator’s videos “explained the various situations that came up and how to handle them…nothing prudish about it. It was all about consent and protection and to make sure everyone, from the director on down was on the same page. Some of them were funny….like if two actors were good friends in real life and had to do a sex scene….she had to be on hand to help them not randomly burst into laughter when things were supposed to be getting steamy.”
Others, however, didn’t understand the need for an intimacy coordinator.
Someone alleged that sometimes intimacy coordinators make people “overthink” physical actions.
“There was an interesting take by Blake Anderson the Workaholics guys podcast. He said that it was interesting because sometimes (not all the time) an intimacy coordinator has people overthink things they’d normally be comfortable with, and go ‘wait am I supposed to not be okay with this?’,” read the comment.
Not everyone enjoys intimacy coordinators.
A person claimed in the comments, “Every working actor I know hates intimacy coordinators and feels it makes the scene more awkward and uncomfortable than it already is.”
Someone was concerned over movies losing the spontaneity of performances with intimacy coordinators.
“Cool, another barrier to protect us from interesting performances and natural chemistry. Hollywood is gonna bland itself to irrelevancy,” they wrote.
Regardless of how some may feel about intimacy coordinators, it appears their inclusion will be helpful on set for many.
