The story behind the worst sex scene ever filmed is, itself, like something out of the movies.
It was 1972, in an apartment on Rue de l’Alboni, where Bernardo Bertolucci was making a film called Last Tango in Paris. Marlon Brando was playing Paul, a middle-aged man grieving his wife’s suicide; Maria Schneider was playing Jeanne, Paul’s much younger lover. The couple’s intense and brutal relationship is already beginning to unravel, and this scene represented the beginning of the end: a brutal act of sexual violence in which Paul anally rapes Jeanne using a stick of butter as a lubricant.
But Schneider, who was just 19 at the time, didn’t know what was coming. Not just because the butter wasn’t in the script, but because the 31-year-old Bertolucci and 48-year-old Brando conspired to keep her from knowing this detail.
Bertolucci later explained that he wanted her humiliation to be authentic. “I decided not to tell Maria because I was interested in her reaction,” he said in a 2013 interview.
“And, in fact, she was very humiliated, and she was right—not because we used the most common thing in the kitchen, but because I didn’t tell her.”
Granted, this is an extreme example, but the ’70s were different: Even when actors weren’t intentionally kept in the dark about the content of their sex scenes, they definitely weren’t consulted. Jane Fonda, in a recent interview with Women’s Wear Daily, reflected on how irrelevant her input was when she filmed sex scenes then. In her day, it was unheard-of to complain. “You want me to say—to a guy you’re supposed to look like you’re in love with—and you say, ‘But please don’t uncover my breast on the left side’? You know, you don’t do that.” But times have changed. In the interview, Fonda praised the then-unheard-of, now-ubiquitous professionals known as intimacy coordinators.