The Problematics: Did Today’s Pervasive “Mr. Skin” Culture Lead To The ‘Romeo And Juliet’ Lawsuit?

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that the lawsuit Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting just brought against Paramount Pictures was one that pretty much nobody saw coming. Actors Hussey and Whiting, who are 71 and 72 respectively, filed a lawsuit on December 30 in Santa Monica, alleging sexual exploitation. According to the report in Variety, the actors state that the director of the 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli, hoodwinked the pair into performing nude in a bedroom scene, after having previously assured them that they would wear body stockings for their love scene. According to the suit, they were pressured by Zeffirelli to abandon that plan on the last day of shooting, and their love scene was shot with the two actors together in the altogether. They are seeking more than $500 million, apparently.

The suit is shocking in several respects. One is the fact that this is, or has been up until the suit was filed, an extremely well-respected picture and something of a landmark in cinematic Shakespeare adaptations. At the time of its making, Zeffirelli, then in his mid-forties, was a highly respected opera director who’d scored a worldwide success with his first feature film, a 1967 adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, starring then-Hollywood-It-Couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. For his follow-up, Zeffirelli hit upon a casting concept that no prior film director had ever dared: to cast Shakespeare’s teen-love tragedy with age-appropriate actors. A long search yielded the 15-year-old Hussey and the 16-year-old Whiting. (Romeo’s pals Mercutio and Tybalt were played by Michael York and John McEnery, more seasoned players almost a decade older than the leads.) Compare and contrast George Cukor’s 1936 film of the play, starring 43-year-old Leslie Howard and 34-year-old Norma Shearer. No, really.

In addition to these fresh faces, Zeffirelli applied an exemplary cinematic approach to staging, “opening up” the play from the very start, locating its Renaissance Italy action in authentically old towns and plazas, shooting outdoors almost as a matter of course.

And, because it was the 1960s and the Production Code was no more, and filmmakers were taking advantage of what could be called “the new freedoms,” Zeffirelli showed some daring when depicting the lovemaking of the star-crossed couple.

The result was almost unanimous praise. In the New York Times, Renata Adler, whose tenure as a film critic there mainly tended to underscore the fact that she really didn’t like movies, called it “the sweetest, most contemporary romance on film this year.”

Roger Ebert could have been sounding a half-century early alarm by noting, in his 1968 review: “A lot of fuss has been made about the brief, beautiful nude love scene. I doubt whether anyone could see it and disapprove of it, but apparently someone has. The Chicago Board of Education I am informed, objects to the nudity and will not approve the film for educational use after its commercial run. This is stupidity.”

In the intervening years, though, as the movie’s classic reputation has solidified, the nude scene in the film seemed akin to what they call in judicial circles “settled law.” And, as the Variety report on the suit notes, Olivia Hussey, as recently as 2018, said the scene and its shooting “wasn’t that big of a deal.”

One is reasonably certain that if the suit reaches court, Paramount will use statements such as that one in its defense. And it will certainly cite Hussey’s own fairly extensive filmography as contradicting the suit’s claims that the scene cost her and Whiting job opportunities. (Whiting, who had a much more limited acting career post Romeo and Juliet, may have more credibility in this respect.) And one is also reasonably certain that, if successful, the suit could set a far-reaching precedent. One of the attorneys, Solomon Green, said in a statement that “nude images of minors are unlawful and shouldn’t be exhibited.” The “but this is art” arguments that oppose such blanket statements have not been entirely settled — see the controversies still surrounding the work of respected still photographer Sally Mann — and a judgment in favor of the plaintiffs here may well give rise to all manner of censoriousness.

In mainstream filmmaking nudity is supposed to be well-regulated but it’s mostly self-regulated. The culture has gone from the 1970s joke about the starlet saying on a talk show that sure she’d do nudity if the script called for it, and the host raising an eyebrow at the prospect, to #MeToo tales of actors browbeaten and inveigled into shedding their clothes. And as far as regulation is concerned, it can be very sloppy. Writing another Decider column a few months back, about the rise and fall of softcore icon Bo Derek, I was shocked to discern that Derek’s frequently nude costar in the 1985 Bolero, Olivia d’Abo, was not even fifteen when she made the film. Yikes.

As for the nude scene in the Zeffirelli picture: A would-be drooler with a low tolerance for Shakespeare will have to sit through a lot of Bard talk before getting to it. About an hour and a half of an over two hour picture. What’s seen? Whiting lying face down on a bed, buttocks and legs exposed. He gets up and opens the curtains of the bedroom. (Remember how that worked out for Graham Chapman in Monty Python’s Life of Brian? No such worries here.) Whiting starts to dress. Dreamy music notwithstanding, it’s relatively matter of fact. Called back by Hussey’s Juliet, he leaps on her, and after some canoodling, he gets back up, and she turns over quickly, exposing her breasts for a split second. Throughout the scene, they act Shakespeare’s dialogue well, and with confidence, as they do throughout the film. The performers do not seem distressed, in other words.

Honestly, there’s more eroticism in the looks exchanged between the two before their first kiss — and in the way Hussey closes her eyes in a lustrous closeup in that scene — than there is in their short post-coital scene.

We live in a time when certain parties find it desirable to foment a kind of hypertrophied moral panic. Noticing attractive traits in individuals under eighteen — or under twenty, or under twenty-five, it varies from case to case! — is to invite being called “pedo.” We also live in a state of — Solomon Green’s blanket condemnation notwithstanding — some legal ambiguity. Nevertheless, some parties will indeed condemn the glimpse of a bare female breast in a two-hour cinematic drama as child pornography.

And we do have to face facts. Particularly as they pertain to depictions of nudity and American attitudes to them. Speaking to a younger friend about the movie today, he said “Watching this movie in 9th grade English class will forever be seared into my brain.” The movie was long considered so viewer-friendly that it was indeed used as an intro to Shakespeare. An adolescent boy’s first exposure to female nudity can arrive in a number of forms, but in the America of years ago, it generally came from under your dad’s bed, where he hid the Playboy mags, or in a movie theater, at your first R-rated movie. (Mine was 1972’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and the female nude was Valerie Perrine. The movie is pretty downbeat, as you may expect if you know the source material, and I appreciated that. But I also appreciated Valerie Perrine. I was twelve.)

In many respects — in part due to the substantial influence it wound up exerting — Zeffirelli’s film does not seem nearly as fresh as it did in 1968. (And his filmmaking powers would considerably diminish as the years went on, culminating in kitsch like Tea With Mussolini.) Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet was/is sufficiently sassy (some might say sacrilegious) to still warrant the Superfresh Shakespeare designation. (That film had stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes play a topless love scene, albeit one choreographed to limit their exposure. Danes was about 17 at the time of shooting, and DiCaprio already in his twenties.) But the film cannot be said to appeal to any but the most perverse and macro of prurient interests.

But of course the Internet itself seems almost by design to appeal to macro perversity, and one may look up stills of the nude scene with ease, at least as of now. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Had we never had a “Mr. Skin” culture to begin with, we might not be experiencing a severe and potentially punitive backlash to it now. I can’t speak to the process that led Hussey and Whiting to want to prove mental and emotional distress to the court. But one’s ability to instantly access nude images of both actors may have something to do with it. And remember Seth MacFarlane’s grotesque “We Saw Your Boobs” number at the 2013 Oscars? That kind of cocky leering can’t not contribute to a state of vulnerability that any performer, of any gender, might feel when contemplating a nude scene.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.