The S- scene that promised to be hot was Filmed and Ended on Paper
"The Specialist" tried to be one of the most rat-trapping movies in the cinema in the middle of the 90s. But the actress felt that she had already undressed too much and the actor tried to cheer her up with a few shots of vodka. The scenes of filming with anger, shots, and embarrassing attitudes.
In early '90s Hollywood, there was no woman more beautiful than Sharon Stone and no more trusted action hero than Sylvester Stallone. When The Specialist (1994) began to be considered, the combination of the two on set should guarantee immediate success, and a scene of high S- voltage would be the icing on the cake.
The plot didn't matter too much, although if it could include blackmail, weapons, or gangsters, much better. But something went wrong and the film, although it was a box office success almost tripling its budget, was destroyed by critics and was closer to the bizarre than to the erotic police.
For Sharon Stone, it marked the end of her reign as an icon that she had begun just a few years earlier. With a few minor roles in her career and already rounding the 30s curve, she entered the '90s determined to be a star. To do this, she combined the role of a beautiful woman on the cover of Playboy with her role in The Avengers of the Future -alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, the other great action hero-, which placed her as a known face for the public.
When she arrived at Low Instincts, she entered the erotic imagination forever. She was able to exploit her acting skills with her bombshell, and her cross-legged scene during interrogation needs no further description. She wanted to endorse her parchments with Sliver, but the experience was not the best. She got along badly with her partner William Baldwin and she felt that her voice was not heard despite being the star of the film.
In The Stunt it all went to hell when Stone got tired of the role that the industry had designed for her. But the industry had not understood it in the same way, the public was unaware of what was going through the body and head of the actress. And if she knew, it didn't matter, at least not these days.
Directed by Peruvian Luis Llosa -cousin of the famous writer Mario Vargas Llosa- the plot of The Specialist, let's say that it doesn't deserve to be studied in universities like the great script of the decade, but rather the opposite. Sylvester Stallone is the explosives expert of the title, a former member of the CIA who is hired by the beautiful and mysterious Sharon Stone. His goal is to avenge the death of her parents when she was a child. You don't have to be very intuitive to conclude that they fall in love and obviously have a great S- encounter.
However, the much-talked-about erotic scene ended up being a fiasco.
It all happens in less than four minutes. A luxurious room, she in a black dress, he in a suit. The movements are clumsy, the kisses on his neck seem forced, the music greasy and stunned. They do not transmit skin, nor do they enjoy it. From the bed, they go to the shower, where neither Sly's marked back nor Sharon's protruding breasts manage to move. Some gasps and the running of the water are barely heard until they apply the soap trick. There is no case. Still N- and in the shower, they discuss the revenge plan. A couple of compliments, and that's it. That was it? Yes, and for such coldness there is a reason.
Sharon Stone didn't want to get N- to do an S- scene in The Specialist. She had already been betrayed in Base Instincts, when director Paul Verhoeven asked her to take off her panties, arguing that the light was reflecting off her white underwear while she assured him that her private parts would be safe during the shooting. famous crossing of legs. This was shown on the monitor, and the actress remained calm, until she saw the same scene but on the big screen. Sharon went from pleading to be removed to threatening to sue and ending up taking out her anguish with a slap on the director's cheek.
Low Instincts was a worldwide success and its continuity was almost natural. But of course, it did not give a sequel and so on until the Infinite saga, Sliver appeared, where the erotic content was reinforced and a voyeuristic plot was added to it. When the actress found out that William Baldwin had signed a contractual clause that kept him safe, he went to knock on the door with the same claim. The response from producer Robert Evans went down in history as a maxim of the time: "No actor has become a star by undressing and no actress has become a star without doing so."
Sharon bit down on her anger…and then some. Before filming began, Baldwin had referred in the worst way to Stone's emblematic reflection, "in Hollywood, the combination of a vagina and an opinion is lethal", ensuring that "we have already seen too much of both from Sharon ". Not only that: after filming the first S- scene, he commented to the audience that she had “very thin lips, but her breath is not bad”. The bad thing for the actor was that the actress found out. When they had to replay the scene, Sharon bit his tongue so hard they had to put a hold on filming for two days because Baldwin couldn't speak.
That was the way things were in Sharon's life when The Stuntman started shooting, and to tell the truth, nobody cared about bombs, blackmail, or revenge. The world was waiting for the scene between Stallone and Stone. The producers began to get upset when they saw that the actress insisted on her position. The Rocky actor appealed to a trick typical of a university party or a boy with a lot of fame but little brain: getting the girl drunk to have S-. Fiction and reality are sometimes separated by a very blurred line.
It was Stallone himself who confessed it at the time with a naturalness typical of the time and endorsed it, in great detail, more than 20 years later. It was during an online chat with followers from all over the world. One of them asked him how many times he had intentionally boycotted the shower scene so he could repeat the take. What seemed like a question as chauvinistic as it was innocent in that context, undressed, worth the redundancy, an unhappy plot.
Stallone laid out the picture of the situation. He made public that the actress did not want to undress for the world, and he said that he was losing enthusiasm, without giving credit to the underlying problem, originating in the actress's boredom. Until the appointed day arrived and on set, she did not want to take off her robe to start the action. The director cleared the set of technicians and onlookers as much as possible, but Stone remained firm with his convictions.
Stallone did not understand the behavior of the actress. How did she refuse to film the scene, if she had already talked and he had promised her that she would not go too far? "I'm sick of undressing," the actress exploded, removing all the burden of her previous experiences from her backpack. Far from understanding and showing any hint of solidarity, the actor went on to counterattack with an argument with a lot of egos and little empathy: "I asked him to get fed up with someone else's movie, but he didn't see reason."
The solution was found in her trailer. There he had a bottle of vodka, courtesy of Michael Douglas, coincidentally, Stone's partner in Bass Instinct. He returned with the bottle and they began to share drinks. "After half a dozen shots we were soaking in a wild plan," concluded the actor, with a rhetoric that hinted at satisfaction for the duty accomplished.
Beyond acting judgments and editing and directing opinions, perhaps these ups and downs explain the scarcity of skin and the low heat of the scene between the two stars. And just as Stone denounced the backstage of Bass Instincts and Sliver, he never publicly referred to this shoot. Not even when #MeToo put Hollywood under constant review.
In early 2018, she was interviewed by Lee Cowan on CBS. When the journalist asked her if she had ever felt used, the actress replied with a laugh that lasted several seconds.
“I've been in this for 40 years, she was a girl from somewhere in Pennsylvania who came without any kind of protection. You can imagine what this business was like. I saw it all," the actress said during the interview.
However, Sharon had already shown, in her due time and space, how the thing worked. She had denounced that, as soon as she arrived in Hollywood, a producer had offered her in exchange for making her a star. She was in an interview in 1989, while she was filming Total Recall in front of a Movieline reporter.
Stone recounted that "a powerful producer (I won't tell you his name, but his initials are S.B.) called me into his office, told me I was going to be a big star, and unzipped his fly. I've never laughed so hard in my life. .. It was a reaction he didn't expect. Couch casting exists, but it doesn't get you anywhere. No one is going to risk a million-dollar budget just because you're good in bed."
And already on the crest of the wave, Playboy covers again, this time won with the sweat and tears of Low Instincts was clear in its position. “The men grab their balls, they rub their S- on you, they yell at you from the car, they are condescending. Women are taught to give in, to behaviors that undermine their self-esteem, integrity, and femininity. I don't plan to try again to make others like me or to avoid confrontation." But her words – avant-garde, honest – of her were lost among her image of her femme fatale.
In the same interview, the actress reflected on the roles that the film industry had in the early '90s: “Most movies are written so that the female characters are how men experience women or how they would like to experience them. But not how women really are. How many times do you go to the movies and see a female character that looks like a woman you know in the real world?
To some extent, Sharon Stone was perhaps talking about herself, and how she would have liked to refuse the vodka, turn around and leave. But still, those kinds of heroines were yet to be written.
