Tuesday 31 January 2012

Spartacus: Vengeance S03E01

As the men of Spartacus waged war all around her, Katrina Law’s character – slave girl Mira – was largely mute. That’s going to change as the series begins its third, well second, season with Spartacus: Vengeance. This season picks up where we left off in Spartacus: Blood and Sand, following the bloody escape from the House of Batiatus, gladiators and slaves alike continuing the battle for freedom, events which have opened up all kinds of avenues for Mira. "She was a house slave without hopes, dreams or opportunities," says Law. "So along comes Spartacus, who presents her with an opportunity for, potentially, love and freedom. And this year, you’re going to see her on the run with the rest of the rebels."

That meant some pretty intense physical preparation for Law, an exotic beauty who grew up in South Jersey with a love of action. “Watching all the boys have fun and get to play, while I stood there until I got to pour them water or wine, I was jealous,” Law confides about season one. “So this year, to be able to run around and hit the ground and get bloody along with everyone else, it was a lot more fun.” Not to mention a lot of work. Law trained for two-and-half months with noted trainer and fitness model Anca Marcus before reporting for gladiator training – a two-week marathon that involved, among other things, rolling 300-pound tractor tires, something called the Circle of Death, heavy duty circuit work, weapons training and fight choreography. "I was in relatively good shape and I then get down there and we did two weeks of Gladiator Boot Camp and let me tell you, it took about six days before I could walk normally again after that," says Law.


The intense regime also gave Law the body confidence needed for the copious amount of nudity that is such an integral part of the show. Spartacus, as she explains, is not a show for the faint of heart. "It’s so sexually charged and violent— you have to know where to look," said Law. "We were shooting one scene where these eight fired-up gladiators all dropped their drawers. You had to look at the floor, the ceiling — or the eight penises." Beyond the penises, she’s had an honour few actors have: she’s shot a full-frontal bath scene with Lucy Lawless. When quizzed about it, she laughs for ten seconds straight. "Does that reaction tell you how I felt about the scene?" she chuckles. "That time, I was more scared of the camera. But Lucy made sure I was taken care of, and she was topless, too. [Any time I felt weird], I just remembered, ‘Hey, I’m looking at Xena’s boobs!’" Not one of the most discomforting thoughts.

Warming to the subject of doing naked scenes, Law shared that the people behind the show take the scenes very thoroughly. "They light you well, they pose you well, they do all this stuff with makeup and lighting and editing," she explained. "They really protect the actors on this show. If there is a bad angle, I know I really did something to piss someone off." Protected or not, the actress says she still finds it weird to watch playback. "I have this weird, oblong alien face! I have to get over myself to even look at my work." Fortunately, that isn’t a problem for us. And, thanks to her exotic beauty—something she attributes to her mixed Taiwanese, Italian and German heritage — we suspect it isn’t a problem for most men, either.

Surprisingly, that’s not the case. "Actually, men never approach me!" she protests, before recalling how she had to take the lead with her new co-star and onscreen lover in their intimate scenes. "I felt like the old pro, 'Just take your clothes off, hon, it's going to be fine,'" she told Liam McIntyre. "It's all in a day's work," laughed Law.


Television Series: Spartacus: Vengeance (S03E01)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Katrina Law, Viva Bianca, Lucy Lawless
Video Clip Credit: Jabby


















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Shameless US S02E04

"Fucking hell, this is amazing..."
"Flattery will get you everywhere!"
Lip Gallagher doesn't want to give up having sex with Karen (we can't blame him, we wouldn't be able to let go of Laura Wiggins either), so he's trying to make her leave her fiance. Step one of his master plan: have crazy ass-against-the-wall sex with Mandy (as portrayed by Emma Greenwell). Step two: ask Mandy to seduce Karen's fiance. We think that's a bad idea, but that's not our main concern. We're primarily focused on step 1.5 which involves Lip and Mandy placing their hands over each other's mouth to muffle their orgasms. It's anticlimactic in a very pro-climactic way!

Inevitably, Jody refuses Mandy's advances and then tells Karen. Karen goes to the Gallagher house and kicks the crap out of Lip. She reveals in a moment of rage the real reason she wants to marry Jody. She’s pregnant. "Stay the fuck away from me," she shouts, "and stay the fuck away from this baby!" Uh oh. Karen has only been sleeping with Lip, not Jody. Jody is older and can provide. Lip cannot. So that’s why she’s doing it and not because of Jody’s dong. Speaking of which, did you SEE that thing? collectively gulps the blogosphere.


Television Series: Shameless US (S02E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Emma Greenwell
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey










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Monday 30 January 2012

House Of Lies S01E04

"Dance for me, Roxy..."
Dawn Olivieri is a star whose rise to TV fame more or less exploded when she landed a recurring role on The CW’s hit series The Vampire Diaries. But it’s a lead spot on Showtime’s House Of Lies where she finally bares all- in more ways than one. She plays Monica Talbot, a woman the actress describes as "narcissistic, manipulative" and willing to do anything to get what she wants. In other words, Olivieri told TV Fanatic, it's her "dream character." Viewers got an immediate impression of Monica in the first few seconds of the pilot episode, as it opened with her lying naked in bed alongside her ex-husband and top business rival, Don Cheadle's Marty Kaan. Look for these two to often be in such compromising positions together. "You don't wanna be taking your clothes off for any old show," Olivieri laughed. "But House of Lies covets that quick wit, that truth, those in-your-face situations... if you're gonna be naked, it might as well be for a show like this."

Olivieri says that since she started acting "pretty much everybody wants me to be naked!" She was so happy getting The Vampire Diaries on The CW knowing that all they could do to me was put her in that bra and underwear, which of course they did! "It’s just my luck in life here," she smiles. "I work out too much, and therefore everybody that hires you wants you to take off your clothes! It's just the way it is. One day I’m going to be very old and I’m not going to have the body that I have."


There is still a little embarrassment though. "It pushes the limit for me, at times, of vulnerability," Olivieri admits. "I think, never are you as vulnerable as when you are completely naked having a scene with someone. I mean, you pretty much can’t get more naked than that, emotionally and physically. So there’s definitely moments in this series that I’ve really had to strong arm my disposition and say, listen, I got to figure out ways to do this and make it real and forget the fact that there are 17 people standing around me, two of which have huge cameras, and really just go for it. I’m naked sometimes, but whatever. I don’t care."

So the nudity is set to continue then? "Oh yeah, come on, it’s Showtime!," she answers cheerfully. "But I’m naked less than Don Cheadle is naked, so at least that makes me feel better." It also helps to share these scenes with such a veteran actor. Olivieri can't say enough positive things about her co-star, referring to him at various times as "accommodating, compassionate, open and a genius in subtlety and nuance." For someone who has only been acting for six years, Olivieri said the experience has been "terrifying" and, well, "orgasmic." "He's the lifeline she can use to manipulate Marty," Olivieri says. "She'll use any kind of business strategy to close a deal. I'll just say this," Olivieri teases. "She's a business woman at all times. If someone or something is encroaching on her territory, she's gonna do something about that."

She certainly doesn't seem to be the most well put-together girl then. "Yeah, she has this psychotic diagnosis," continues the actress. "But where is that coming from? It’s coming from Marty, it’s coming from her ex-husband. And what I liked, what I connected with in creating this character for me was the fact that if you were to interview my ex-boyfriend, he would tell you that I’m a psycho! (Laughs) It doesn’t necessarily mean too much to me. I translate it into the fact that she’s opinionated, she’s passionate, she works very hard, she’s ambitious, but she also parties really hard. She’s the master of the art of dodging the truth, in a way that she wants. That manipulation is kind of what makes her sparkle."

In part, the series is about how we navigate Monica and Marty’s relationship.
"[You’ll see] those threads interweaving, and I think what you find it’s evident that they can’t be together, but they almost can’t be apart," she agrees. "So it creates a really interesting story which possibly many people deal with or have dealt with in the past with there’s just that one person, that one guy or that one girl that you just have this very passionate rollercoaster of a relationship with that you love but you also know it’s bad for you. And it’s how much you indulge in that vice. I think it’s just how much you give into that drug."

There was a time when a wonderful role and story were enough to draw Olivieri to a project. Those elements continue to be essential, but working with such a stellar cast is a prerequisite as well. "There is only so much you can do if you're pulling weight and there's nobody there to play off of," she noted to Backstage. "You can't have those beautiful moments with new actors who are so worried about everything else but the moment. With the stellar actors I'm working with now, there's so much more that can blossom."

The actors she's referring to include Cheadle, Kristen Bell, Glynn Turman, Ben Schwartz, and Josh Lawson. The raunchy, dark comedy recounts the nasty shenanigans of a hot management consulting firm, headed by a delightful sleaze played by Cheadle. Olivieri is his pill-popping ex-wife and business competitor, who's at the top of her game in the boardroom and totally messed up in every other aspect of her life. "The show pushes the envelope and people's comfort level, but for me, Dawn, the script is more truthful than most of those I've read and worked on," she continues. "But the acting challenges are the same" whether nudity is required or not. "You try to do what you have in front of you and then dive into that black hole that you're usually covering up."

In that regard, it also doesn't hurt that Shameless comes on right before her show, and Emmy Rossum is topless a lot. "That kind of helps some," thinks Olivieri. "I think TV is going in a way, especially with these networks like Showtime and HBO, where there’s moments that it makes sense. And the nudity is tasteful, and it’s okay. In that scene, in the very opening scene it makes sense that that’s the situation that I’m in. So as long as it’s not gratuitous, then let’s do it. Let’s tell a story."

Television Series: House Of Lies (S01E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Kristen Bell & Dawn Olivieri
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey











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Californication S05E04

"Jesus fucking christ. I think you just added seven years to my life..."
Justified star Natalie Zea returned to Californication with a very spirited performance in “Waiting for a Miracle.” Earlier this season, Hank woke up with Kali giving him a blowjob. However, it was only a dream. In this week's episode, he woke up with a real message from his ex-girlfriend Carrie; the girl with the bottomless libido who just wants to get "drunk on cock". After setting fire to his apartment in New York, she was bringing her foul mouth and nutty persona over to the west coast. Specifically, Carrie said that she had a “surprise” for Hank. Shortly after the doorbell rang. Hank went to get it and found an envelope with panties in it. Then, Carrie jumped out from the bushes to surprise him. After her explosive breakup with Hank in the Season 5 premiere, she was in much higher spirits and elated to see her ex.

Carrie's in town for a potential job opportunity (a blond, hapless romantic with a career in print journalism—is that you, Carrie Bradshaw?), but she's really there because she's a sucker for love and thinks maybe, just maybe, Hank has matured enough to give her psycho ass a fair shot this time. But as we all know, Hank only has room in his heart for one woman, and it's not Carrie. "Are we really going to stand here wasting our time with chitchat when we could be fucking each other's brains out?" she asked before the two got down to business. While Carrie was on top, finishing up an orgasm, Hank was lying in bed apathetically. She was basically having sex with herself and Hank’s unthinking erection. Still, she loved it. “It just fits so nicely inside there,” Carrie said before rolling off of Hank and suggested that she would make a plaster cast of his penis, since it was a perfect fit, and then create a dildo from that cast. Hank wasn’t shocked by the comment at all and followed it up with the suggestion that she should make a second one so that he could give it to Charlie. Nice.


All of which only serves to set up Karen’s closing monologue in which she expresses genuine concern for Hank’s pattern of impulsive flings and warns him against holding a torch for their love, as a metaphorical gauntlet for Californication itself. If we, the audience, are waiting for Mr. Moody to lick his wounds, grow up, and move on, or, alternately, woo his ex-wife back into a passionate but destructive tango, we may as well hold vigil for the Virgin Mary.

Television Series: Californication (S05E04)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Natalie Zea
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea










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Sunday 29 January 2012

Shameless Acting

Actor John Moraitis is often brought in to add both dialogue and sounds to film and television programmes. His latest job, he writes in the Guardian, was to add 'sex noises' to Steve McQueen's explicit film, Shame...

I'm an actor, and when I'm between roles, my bread-and-butter is something called ADR – additional dialogue recording – where I go to a studio and record background conversations for scenes from films in post-production. It's often a restaurant scene. You stand at the microphone with another actor, watch a video of the sequence, pick two characters at a table in the background and improvise.

Last summer, I was invited to do ADR for Shame. At the time, we knew nothing about the film. My agent said: "It involves sexual sounds. Do you mind?" I said: "No, it's just a job. It's fine." The sound engineer kept the sexual stuff till the end. There's a scene where Michael Fassbender's character goes to a gay club. At the back of some shots, couples were at it. So I stood at the microphone with another guy and we improvised. For example: "Yeah. YEAH. Go deeper, GO DEEPER." The sound engineer would say: "OK, a bit more intense, please." You came up with anything you could think of. "Who's your daddy?" Stuff like that.


One of the more entertaining moments came when we had to evoke the sound of a penis entering an open mouth. The engineer was almost embarrassed but we found it amusing. None of us had done anything like that before, but it was a hoot. There was a kind of one-upmanship. The art of ADR is to make the noises blend in, so when I saw the finished film, I couldn't make out my own voice. I thought the film was terrific. I'm not sure how much I cared about the main character, but it was beautifully acted. And the ADR was great.
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Friday 27 January 2012

Mad Dogs S02E02

Whether reclining naked on a bed expectantly awaiting the attentions of her young lover in Bellas Durmientes, or joyfully straddling her partner in nothing more than a pair of metallic silver knickers in a film that roughly translates as Semen: A Love Story, seductive Spanish actress Leticia Dolera insists "it seems a bit reductive to reduce her work" to the salacious capping of her occasional 'bed scenes'. In an interview with Barcelona daily Elmundo, Dolera states she does not like it when such scenes are taken out of context. "We have much to tell and we have very beautiful and interesting stories that are not based only on sex," she said. "By the way, are you not sick of seeing so much sex in advertising? We use sex to sell cars, cosmetics, food, clothing, etc. .. You are being given a market value and it's a bit tiresome and superficial, in my opinion." Well, given her particularly 'interesting' and 'beautiful' appearance in last night's episode of Mad Dogs, can I just say lo lamento Señorita Dolera for what follows...


Television Series: Mad Dogs (S02E02)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Leticia Dolera
Video Clip Credit: Trailblazer











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Thursday 26 January 2012

Damsels In Undress

The nudity clause, once required only in movies, is suddenly becoming a standard part of TV work, reports Sean Daly in today's New York Post. The pressure on young actresses to sign can be tremendous, he writes, and it’s not just on cable anymore...

Behind every boob shot and flash of bare buttocks is a hard working entertainment lawyer because they are usually the one to negotiate Hollywood’s most awkward legal agreement: the nudity clause. "The nudity rider spells out exactly what an actor agrees to do in a role: partial nudity, full frontal nudity — even simulated sex," LA attorney Brian J. Murphy says. The document — usually about one page — can be extremely detailed. It typically includes which body parts can be shown, from which angle and for how long. The nudity clause — once a rarity on TV — is becoming, if not standard, an everyday part of contract negotiations. What is more, it’s starting to show.


Kristen Bell, for example, who came to fame 10 years ago as a crime-solving high school student on Veronica Mars, agreed to work in a bra and panties — but not the 'Full Monty' — in the new sex-filled Showtime drama House of Lies. She’s now 31. Shows like NBC’s Playboy Club negotiated detailed nudity riders with key actors to cover scenes filmed for DVD or overseas use. "You have to be careful not to put yourself in a position where you might be taken advantage of," says 19 year-old Vanessa Marano of ABC Family’s Switched at Birth. "Especially if you are not a series regular and you are just a woman going in for a guest spot on cable, they will expect you to take it off. I did Dexter, and there were people naked everywhere on that. I was safe because I was underage, but if I were older, my clothes would have probably had to come off."

Bare breasts and simulated sex have been essential ingredients on pay cable shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City and Californication for years. Now the four broadcast networks may soon be able to show a lot more skin in prime time, depending on whether the US Supreme Court decides the FCC can no longer regulate against “indecency” — a vague term that can cover anything from a fleeting F-bomb to a deliberate flash of a backside.”

The networks — which have been consistently losing ground to cable, which is unregulated, in the ratings ­— have been complaining for years about the two-standard system. No matter. The ruling has pushed the issue of pressure on actors to strip down to get the part to the front burner. Shonda Rhimes — creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice — insists nobody is forced to disrobe on her steamy ABC shows. “We will write in a love scene, and if somebody says ‘I want to do this love scene while wearing a turtleneck and snow pants,’ we will say ‘fine,’ ” she tells The Post. “If somebody wants to do it completely naked, that is great, too.”

John Wells, producer of the sexually charged Showtime series Shameless, is less flexible. “We are very clear [upfront] that nudity will be required,” he says. “We don’t hire actors who tell us they are not comfortable doing it.” Yet Wells may not be able to fire any of his stars for refusing to strip down. “The performer has the right to refuse to do [nudity] once they have agreed to do it,” says Screen Actors Guild rep Elizabeth Moseley. “Basically, it is not binding. If the performer changes their mind, the producer (only) has the right to use a body double.”
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Wednesday 25 January 2012

Thank You, My Lady

Playing the future Queen of England really does pay off. British actress Camilla Luddington, (in)famous for portraying Kate Middleton in the tepid Lifetime telefilm William & Kate, has just debuted in a meaty role on Showtime’s racy series Californication. The 28-year-old English rose takes on the role of a fired nanny who is then hired by Charlie (Evan Handler) and Marcy (Pamela Adlon) in an eight-episode arc. She seems innocent at first but turns out to be a manipulative little schemer.

Unfortunately for Luddington, the nature of the show means marrying into the actual royal family is most certainly going to be off the agenda now. "I wouldn't be able to handle that — or get naked on Californication," she told Esquire, "that would probably not be allowed." We're talking pretty rude then? "I have to get topless and you definitely see my butt in a lot of stuff," admits Luddington. "I mean, it's a sexy show — there's obviously sex scenes and there's nudity. I don't think Kate Middleton would get away with that. They have this thing: a privacy patch. It's slightly horrifying. It's basically like a panty liner that's skin-colored and it sticks to you — which is definitely, by the way, not fun to take off. But it protects the areas that need to be protected; they frame the cameras so you can't see it. But you're walking around and that's the only thing you have on. You're almost like, should I even bother wearing this?"


It would certainly seem to take you out of the moment. "You have to feel sexy — even if you feel vulnerable in front of the camera," she continues. "Because the reality is when you're in an intimate moment with someone and you're having sex or you're kissing or making out, for me personally, I'm not thinking, Oh my gosh, am I skinny enough? You have to get lost in the moment. I definitely have curves. I don't intend on losing them. It's not like I have the most perfect body in the world. I'm a normal girl. I have my hang-ups, but I sort of had to throw caution to the wind and be like, OK, I'm just going to show you what I've got."

Luddington admits she's had "a couple of naughty beach moments when it's dark and you're definitely not supposed to be there, which makes it a little more fun; you feel the breeze..." but it was the first time she had been naked on screen. "It was the first time I'd ever done nudity," says the Ascot, Berkshire-born actress. "It's written into the contract that I signed that I'm okay to do it. I thought, 'Maybe I'll be the one character, like a nun, who doesn't sleep with anyone all season.' Of course, that doesn't happen. I was so naive. But it turned out I was surprisingly comfortable with it. At the end of the day, you just kind of have to let go of all your inhibitions and all your hang-ups and be free with it and have fun with it," she says. Besides, "Everyone on the set has seen it a thousand times."

Speaking to the National Ledger, Luddington also credits Duchovny, who told her, "Anything you're uncomfortable with, call me or the director and we'll work around it.' A camera angle, a shot, anything whatever." The actress is equally adept at British and American accents but says she chose to go into Californication meetings carrying on in the English way, "to stand out a little bit. The lines sounded almost more ridiculous that way, talking about sexually explicit things with a proper British accent." Of course, the Californication team was well-aware of her Kate Middleton performance, too. She's often been called "Your Highness" around the set. "There's even a part at one point where I do a little curtsey and say, 'Thank you, my lord.' I think they wrote it in as a playful little wink."

Californication stars Duchovny as has-been novelist Hank Moody, who is struggling to revitalize his professional career while maintaining a good relationship with his ex-wife and teenage daughter. Showtime renewed the veteran dark comedy for a fifth season in January. As well as Luddington, Meagan Good will be stopping by for eight episodes this time around, and hip-hop musician RZA will also be returning.
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Monday 23 January 2012

Shameless S02E03

When Showtime premiered "Shameless" in January 2011, its graphic depictions of sex and sexuality immediately drew a lot of attention. And as the series progressed, it never shied away from that side of it storytelling and Emmy Rossum is happy about it. On "The Rosie Show" she talked about why she thinks the sex scenes aren't gratuitous...

"If we're gonna show poverty and depression and anger and joy that you get from being around your family ... and how would people try to be together?" she explained, emphasizing the tiny house shared by these eight family members. "So I think it's kind of interesting." If it didn't serve the realism of this darkly comic story they're trying to tell, she might not support it. That doesn't mean sex scenes aren't inherently awkward though. Rosie O'Donnell talked about the sex scene she had with Julian McMahon on "Nip/Tuck" and the infamous "sock" male actors have to wear in such scenes. Rossum then opened up about her "Shameless" co-star Justin Chatwin's first time experiencing one on their set. "Rumor has it he actually filled it with sand so it would -- in case he got excited at all during it-- hold it down," she laughed.


Now it’s summertime on the Southside for Shameless' second season and it sees the Gallagher family more than surviving a sweltering summer. "The Gallaghers thrive in the summer," Emmy Rossum tells TVGuide.com. "They make a lot of money that they put and stash to keep them going through the winter." In fact, the entire family is pretty busy. "Lip and Kev run the ice cream truck, which sells a lot more than ice cream," Rossum says. "Fiona's gotten a job with Veronica at this cool nightclub where she makes a lot of money in tips as a waitress and there's bottle service and stuff like that. She works at night and sleeps during the day. The [rest of the] kids run this successful daycare service out of the house, which Fiona at least appears to be running for the parents because she's there for pickup and dropoff, but she's really sleeping most of the day."

Relationship-wise, following her failed relationship with Steve (Chatwin), Fiona is 'playing the field'. "She's been doing a little bit of nursing her wounds about Steve, and she's getting back out there," Rossum says. "She's clearly been through the grieving period, and is now a little boy crazy. We're going to see her push it a little too far, make some mistakes and hook up with some people she really shouldn't have, and then have to pay the price for that." In case you're wondering- and you really shouldn't be- "playing the field" means lots of sex. And nudity -- this is Showtime, after all. Rossum says she never thought twice about the risque nature of the show. She stressed to TV fanatic that “my number one priority is focusing on the material, to make sure the scenes really land and the character dynamic works. Fiona isn’t the kind of girl who sits around on the elliptical or stairmaster.”

Besides, she argues, "if we're showing alcoholism and poverty and domestic violence in the way that we are -- in an honest way -- then why wouldn't we show nudity and sexuality in an open and honest way? I hate when you see a scene and a girl wakes up and she looks gorgeous and her eyeliner is still perfect and she's wearing a $300 La Perla bra. Nobody wakes up like that. Fiona certainly can't." In fact, Rossum says, "In the first season we had a theory that Fiona didn't even own a bra. So every time Fiona was wearing a sweater or a T-shirt it was kind of baggy like she couldn't afford a bra. Now we're shooting summer, so we didn't have a choice this year. We had to go with bras. Fiona bought a bra."

In the season premiere, we met the first of three new guys hoping to coax Fiona out of said underwear, played by "Lonestar" leading man James Wolk, whom Rossum dubs "Steve 2.0. "He's dark and a little bit of a fast, about-town kind of guy," Rossum says. "He's an investment banker. He and Fiona are definitely just having fun -- I don't know how much they connect on an emotional level. I think it's just kind of a physical, fun relationship. He even looks like Steve, but he doesn't have the danger factor so she's not as actually interested in him. We see that she's not really willing to open up."

"Vampire Diaries" star Taylor Kinney will pop up in later episodes as past high school infatuation Craig, Rossum says. "He is the guy that she was always crushing on in high school, but he's married now. With kids. Very complicated." Plus, she says, "There's another guy who's going to come on in addition to those two who's older and a different type and they don't mesh together at all, so it's interesting to see how much she really did love Steve and she does feel that a part of herself is missing."

Talking of which, Steve will be back and we'll be seeing plenty of him. "As the season progresses we'll definitely find out where Steve went and what he's doing now, but I think it'll take a lot for Steve and Fiona to be back together," Rossum confesses. "I don't know if we'll see that very soon." Not only does he return in the nude, but later in the season he'll be wearing a thong on a yacht full of women. Steve, of course, isn't the only one in the buff, but that's the nature of a show with the title Shameless, Rossum says. "This is a house with very thin walls. The kids are growing up and they have bodies. Little Liam is 2 years old and is getting stiffies in the mornings, so everyone's in everyone's business. There is a certain amount of over-share and of comfortability that they have with each other and themselves that lends itself to a certain amount of nudity."

At the end of Season 1, newcomer Jasmine (Amy Smart) implanted herself into Fiona's life, much to the chagrin of Veronica (Shanola Hampton). Their continued friendship over the summer, and the influence Jasmine has over Fiona, will drive a wedge between the longtime friends. "Veronica really hates Jasmine and really doesn't understand what Jasmine wants from Fiona," Rossum says. "We'll get to see more of the intention of Jasmine and how Fiona deals with that."

Frank (William H. Macy) will also be back to his old tricks — the least of which include getting Liam kidnapped and trying to marry a woman on her death bed. Fiona will also discover she "has Frank's DNA in her body and if she's not careful, she can make the wrong decision and end up being chased by somebody with a baseball bat and hiding under tables just like him," Rossum says. "Of course that's Frank's proudest moment, but this is all too horrifying for Fiona."

Instead, Fiona will focus on herself -- a strange experience for someone who's never really thought about her role in life other than caretaker to her siblings. "She wants to know what else she could have in life," Rossum says. "The kids are growing up a little bit, so she is able to take more control of her life. But there's a stress in that too, because she hasn't had to focus on herself. Sometimes it's easier not to focus on yourself and what your own goals are and to put that off onto other people." Rossum continues: "She has to start evaluating, as the kids get older, who she is aside from this mother figure. We'll see her think about going back to school and trying to get her GED. She's definitely a hard worker, but she doesn't feel as if she's book smart at all. It's interesting to see her struggle through that and to see her navigate the waters of being single and playing that field."

Television Series: Shameless US (S02E03)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Emmy Rossum, Laura Wiggins & Molly Price
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey



















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Saturday 21 January 2012

Have I Got Nudes For You

Viewers watching a current affairs programme got a shock when a nude woman performing a sex scene appeared on a studio screen behind an interviewee, reports today's Telegraph. The naked blonde woman flashed up on a television in the background during a debate about Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party on Scotland Tonight. STV, the channel which broadcasts the show, has apologised, insisting that the explicit clip – thought to have been from an episode of the Channel 4 drama Shameless - was an accident.

The image appeared for a few seconds behind political blogger Dan Hodges in ITN's London studio as he answered questions from the show's host John MacKay. Shadow Scotland Office Minister Willie Bain was also involved in the debate, which took place after the watershed. An insider told the Daily Record that no one in the newsroom realised the blunder had happened until they watched the footage.


He said: "It’s unfortunate but in a busy newsroom we have monitors showing the various TV channels. You can only see the scene for a few seconds and the vast majority of viewers probably won’t even have spotted it. However, it was probably a bit of a distraction and not exactly what they expected to see on Scotland Tonight. The show was on after the watershed but we will try not to let it happen again."

A spokesman for STV added: "We hope viewers weren't too distracted by the unexpected and incidental content on the show."
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Thursday 19 January 2012

Putting On A Bold Front

"She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her breasts. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste. Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his shirt.

Come on, please, please, she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a whore might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention.

She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her passion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, 'Yes'..."


Birdsong, about one man’s intense experiences of the extremes of both love and war, has become a bona fide modern literary classic. A bestseller since its 1993 publication, it was also voted Britain’s 13th favourite book in the BBC’s Big Read poll. Now, nearly 20 years since it was first published, at last Sebastian Faulks’s First World War novel has reached the screen. Thankfully the final result, BBC One’s two-part version, the first episode of which will premiere on this Sunday, does the book proud, writes The Telegraph's Serena Davies.

A cast blessed with devastating good looks, including Burberry model Eddie Redmayne and In Bruges’s Clémence Poésy, sensitively plays out Faulks’s tale of a love affair that straddles the cataclysm of the Great War. Scriptwriter Abi Morgan, who also has two major films opening this month with The Iron Lady and Shame, has spliced the love story that takes place largely before the war, in 1910, with episodes from the conflict itself. These sharp shifts from the lyrical and languid scenes of hero Stephen Wraysford (Redmayne) and his French love Isabelle Assaire’s (Poésy) romance, to the mud and blood of the trenches where Stephen later finds himself, movingly juxtapose the optimism of passion with the despair of war. “This book is about the most extreme things you can experience in life,” comments director Philip Martin. “Either in love or war, everything is 10 out of 10.”


29-year-old French actress Poésy hadn’t read the book before she met director Martin, but when she did she fell in love with the story. “Birdsong isn’t as big in France as it is in England, but when I spoke to my English friends about the book I found that they were completely obsessed by it," she admitted. "I had no idea it was such a modern classic, so when I read it myself I thought, oh my god! It’s a brilliant story about love, passion, life at its peak and then death. I think it explores such extremes and describes them beautifully and so truthfully. The characters are very modern and you don’t really realise that you’re in a period drama. That’s what we tried to get across when filming.”

She says she loved playing Isabelle. "She is someone who has been very unhappy for a very long time and is trying to find happiness wherever she can — a happiness that’s not in her marriage," she told TV Choice. "She hasn't got many friends. She is a lonely woman. And she has these two children to look after who she loves a lot. And she’s trying to make this house nice. She’s artistic and very close to nature. And open to seeing beauty in small things and is trying to fill her life with that. Then Stephen arrives and all of a sudden she doesn’t need all that — she just needs him. When such a connection happens, it’s like going back to nature, like to the nature of what you are. There’s a description in the book where she says when she is making love to him, she feels like that is what she was made for. And it’s blinding her from her reality because that’s all there is."

Although Isabelle eventually leaves Stephen, when they meet there is an incredible connection between the two characters. “I think the reason Isabelle is drawn to Stephen is because he listens to her, he treats her like his equal. There is a prominent sexual chemistry between them, which is hard to explain and although not all love stories are about passion, Stephen and Isabelle’s is. It’s about a strong sexual connection between two people. There is a great sense of freedom that this passion brings to her life. Like Stephen, it’s probably the first time Isabelle has had any connection with anyone, as her life with her husband is quite miserable. I think women have that thing at some point in their life that makes them feel like a woman and this is Isabelle’s moment for that."

A lot of First World War literature focuses on the huge change that society goes through as a result of the war. In Birdsong Stephen and Isabelle are not only changed by the war, but they are also transformed by meeting each other. “The people we meet in life and the loves of our life are very, very important in terms of what or who we become. Change when it is right is probably for the best, but I think when Isabelle leaves Stephen she probably goes on to become more depressed than she was before she met him. I think Stephen is changed in a different way to Isabelle. He is a beautiful character because he is moved by love and by life and he is changed deeply by his experience in the trenches."

Poésy says there was one scene where she and Eddie "freaked out about for a long time", when Isabelle and Stephen see each other again after years apart and then they have one big goodbye scene together. "I was very scared about trying to get it right," she said. "It was extremely weird for me when Eddie showed up on set as he brought the war with him. It was very impressive, because all the time I was looking at this person that I had been acting with for a few weeks and it wasn’t him anymore, it was someone else. He had become that soldier and it was as if he was bringing a third character into the room with him, and that character was the war. Anyone who has gone through that trauma lives with it, so although I think Stephen is changed by Isabelle, he is also made a completely different man by what he has seen. He has witnessed people dying and he has watched what men can do to each other. It is seeing how love can help and hatred can destroy.”

With such a hard-hitting book, surely the whole experience was emotionally draining? "As an actor it’s part of the job to play with your emotions, but I was actually surprised by some of the scenes," confides Poésy. "There were certain points that became really intense when we were shooting them. Like one scene where Stephen and Isabelle touch ankles for the first time on a rowing boat; while we were shooting it I just couldn’t stop crying. It was really weird. I had no idea it was going to go there."

It is the moment, of course, where Faulks' hero and heroine make their first fleeting, physical contact. In the formal, stuffy, stuffed-shirt atmosphere of the Azaire household, Stephen and Isabelle's growing feelings for each other have hitherto been played out in stolen glances and tremulous gulps. But as they boat along the river in that "interminable heat", their ankles graze together. It's an electrifying and ominous moment, and not just because of the sign we see on the edge of the river: we are in the département de la Somme. "These scenes between Clémence and Eddie are all about the danger their characters are walking into," offers cinematographer Julian Court. "And by putting them under the trees and using the shadows and having them almost silhouetted, we're trying to visually suggest that jeopardy."

"I want to recalibrate what is sexual," Martin adds. "We want to take the audience back to a time when a touch was an extremely dangerous and provocative and erotic thing." For Isabelle and Stephen, that touch of skin on skin lets the genie out of the bottle. Their affair is incendiary, entirely based around explosive passion. In one memorable passage in the book, Faulks writes in graphic detail of the "sex act" (to use the normal newspaper euphemism) the Englishman performs on the Frenchwoman. "As a young man reading the book, for me that was an incredibly erotic scene," a chuckling Redmayne told The Independent. The actor, now 30, was an adolescent at the time he read the 1993 novel, "and a lot of my friends were blown away by it. We have a responsibility to this book, but in some ways doing that scene [properly] is also a massive responsibility."

Poésy had no time to duck that responsibility – she and Redmayne filmed the scene on her first day on set. Was that a deliberate choice on her part? "No, no, no, no," the Parisian actress, 29, says emphatically. "I looked at the schedule and I was, like, 'Really, are we going there already?' But then there was that thought of, OK, well at least it's out of the way. And of course it wasn't – we had to go back to it every single week because we never finished it that day! But it needed to be done properly. And it's weird because I try to avoid those scenes. I had a policy against things like that as I had a bad experience." (Aged 18, Poésy appeared in a French film in which, against her better judgement, she shot a topless scene.) "But I think every actress says that, then you grow old, then you really don't give a shit."



The novel is famous for its sexual content, so was it hard filming some of those more racy scenes? "We had three days of rehearsals in London and talked those scenes over and over. I could really confide in Eddie and we were both very lucky because we were totally at ease with Philip Martin the director, which is a huge deal because if you’re not, those scenes can become a nightmare," Poésy told Stylist magazine. "If viewers knew what actors go through when shooting scenes like that, they’d never find them sexy; it’s all very technical. But we were very conscious that we had to make them work. So even though I normally try to escape nudity, for the first time in my life, we added more sex scenes. We really wanted to get it right."

"Those couple of days of rehearsal in London were crucial," agrees Redmayne, not least because they weren't filming chronologically. "We'd talked through the script with Philip - we talked about the sex scenes and the love, so I at least had it in my mind as I was playing the war stuff and looking back. Clémence and I both just jumped into it - it was a really quick shoot. We went out one night early on and got pretty pissed together - we went through our disastrous moments in various love lives, and it was quite a good way of getting to trust each other! When you're that exposed, basically spending quite a lot of time half-naked on top of each other, you need to have some trust!"

Morgan is keen to explain her juxtaposition of these love scenes with the harsher realities of the war. "I think [the story] is about the violence of a love affair," she insisted to Cult Box. "The drama shows the violence hidden in love - and the sex scenes of 1910 have a rawness that I couldn't have shown if I was adapting Faulks' story twenty years ago - by the same token the war scenes are surprisingly tender."

Stephen and Isabelle clearly have an amazing chemistry and Eddie and Clémence certainly bring this chemistry to life on screen. "What was great about Eddie is that he didn’t avoid the subject of the love scenes – we always felt we could talk to each other about them," said Poésy. Being completely scared before a scene is good though. It means that it isn’t just a regular sex scene that you have in other films; I felt that we were more ourselves. Philip insisted on spending a proper amount of time on the scenes and he stopped directing us at points, which was terrifying, hopefully they are okay though. I suppose filming the scenes with Eddie made the job a bit easier, but it still wasn’t easy. Eddie makes everyone feel really special though. He’s lovely, gentle and genuinely interested in everyone. He’s great -he’s got everything that guy, it’s a bit annoying really."
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Monday 16 January 2012

Shameless US S02E02

"Stop talking about my boyfriend and fuck me..."
When you're being considered for your first major role and it's to play a sex-addicted teen, you might have to do embarrassing things while auditioning. Laura Slade Wiggins, who plays Karen Jackson on Showtime's "Shameless," learned that first hand. "I had to do two blowjob scenes and I'm Southern Baptist," Wiggins told the Chicago Tribune while on the location shoot for the series, which debuted its second season Jan. 8. "Instead of like pantomiming the blowjob I just kind of put my head in my hands and was shameful. [Laughs.] I was so embarrassed."

Wiggins chatted for a few minutes between takes at 1937 S. Spaulding Ave., a South Side house that serves as the home of Karen and her agoraphobic mom, Sheila (Joan Cusack), in the series. She talked more about how she got the job, whether Lip will forgive Karen for having sex with his dad, and how Karen deals with her sex addiction in Season 2...


Karen did a bad thing. Are things going to get better between her and Lip?

I feel like when her father called her a whore she started that whole downfall and she lost a lot of her childhood. Lip sees her go down this bad path and I feel like he's gone through it himself living with Frank. And he understands that Frank sometimes just brings out the worst in people.

What's coming in Season 2?

Karen is in Sex Addicts Anonymous. [Laughs.] We learn that in the first couple of scenes. Thank God. She's still friends with Lip. He does forgive her and he really does genuinely have some kind of love for her, even if it's not romantic love. She's not even capable of romantic love. She's so consumed with sex all the time; that's like all she thinks about. She really is a sex addict.

[There's] tons of cool stuff [coming]. Karen has a new boyfriend and he's a lot older than she is. I guess she really did like the Frank train.

How did you get the role?

I'd never really done a series regular role before. I was at City College in Pasadena. I went in for the initial audition and I had a really bad flu, which kind of helped get over my nerves I used to have. I mean I had the swine flu or something, it was terribly bad so I just chugged some Day-Quil. It was so ridiculous because I had to do two blowjob scenes and I'm Southern Baptist. But my agent called me and told me if I didn't go they were going to drop me. So I was like, "I guess I'll go in," and I eventually got the part.

Maybe they thought if she can do this, she'll be able to do anything else we ask her to do.

Right. [Laughs.] I wish I could have peeked in on the other girls' auditions just to see if they were pantomiming or how they did it. ... I didn't know what to think, because I really didn't do the blow job [pantomime]. I was just really weirded out.

You said this was your first big gig and regular role?

Yeah. I didn't even think it was possible to get a series regular job until you were much older. I was 20 when I auditioned and from Athens. Wow, I can't even believe it's been two years since the beginning of this process.

This is the best show to learn on because we have Bill [Macy], who's a former acting teacher and he's a dad right now, so he's always giving us all this amazing information about the industry and acting.

Jeremy [Allen White] is obviously a really talented guy. And Joan, there was one scene where I thought the agoraphobia thing was going to be really funny and [she showed me] that it was really serious. I think that was the first time as an actor that I realized that not everything was a joke on camera.


Television Series: Shameless US (S02E02)
Release Date: January 2012
Actress: Laura Wiggins
Video Clips Credit: Deep at Sea, Zorg, Wimsey












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Friday 13 January 2012

Concern Over Indecency Is Misguided

While the Supreme Court debates nudity on old episodes of NYPD Blue, research shows we have a much bigger problem with kids and TV, argues Time's Erika and Nicholas Christakis...

There’s something ironic and misguided about the Supreme Court’s delicate concern for our television-watching sensibilities. The Justices are currently debating whether the FCC can continue to enforce its policies on nudity and profanity on broadcast TV, with an ancient episode of the now-defunct show NYPD Blue which showed a woman’s naked backside as central evidence.

A number of justices long for a fairytale world where “government can insist on a certain modicum of decency,” as Justice Antonin Scalia archly observed. Chief Justice John Roberts, a father of young kids, plaintively noted that “all we are asking for is a few channels” where kids won’t be exposed to profanity and sexual acts. Justice Elena Kagan opined that “it seems to be a good thing to have a safe haven” during prime time.


A safe haven on television? How quaint. Leaving aside the availability of profanity and sex to anyone with cable or a laptop, the Supreme Court justices — and most Americans — are kidding themselves if they think keeping F-bombs off TV will keep children safe. It’s like taking your car to be detailed when the brake pads are worn out: it deflects attention from what really matters. The painful reality is that the great majority of screen time — prime-time television included — can have detrimental effects on children, and it’s unlikely we can legislate ourselves out of this problem. We need an attitude change more generally about TV and kids.

Decades of research have produced a mountain of evidence that violent imagery on television can cause aggression in children, as summarized in a report by the Institute of Medicine. Moreover, the rapid-fire pace of even the most apparently benign cartoons has well-documented damaging effects on early brain development that can set up children for a lifetime of academic, social, and behavioral problems.

We know this in the same way that we know it’s a good idea to eat fruits and vegetables and lay off the fatty donuts — which is to say that we can go ahead and quibble with the methods or sample size of an individual study, but the overall truth is unchanged. We also can’t ignore what ordinary people have understood since before the advent of radio: Monkey see, monkey do. So much research has been done on this subject that we even have piles of “meta analyses” which aggregate individual research studies to produce even more robust conclusions.

So why can’t we do more to tackle this problem? First, there are many occasions — and television habits are just one of them — where adult and child interests simply do not intersect. Any parent knows that it’s not merely difficult but also meltdown-inducing to put a child’s interests first and turn off the TV. It’s impossible to keep up with all the pernicious influences on our children and, frankly, depressing to realize that many aspects of our child-rearing are sub-par. We salve our guilt by pretending to make prime time clean.

A second reason is our tawdry national love affair with violence and our prudish suspicion of unclothed human bodies. Can’t we just get over this, already? How is it possible that active-viewer video game depictions of decapitations, mutilation and gang rape can be “protected speech” and thus not subject to oversight for children, according to a 2011 Supreme Court ruling, but a nationally televised wardrobe “malfunction” is not?

Third, many adults also feel that, where TV is concerned, what didn’t hurt them won’t hurt their kids. Unfortunately, our media environment has significantly worsened for children. Just watch an episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood to see what an impossible processing burden we now place on children’s developing brains compared to 20 years ago. Additionally, the content of broadcast TV (not to mention cable, movies and video games) has changed, too. One 2009 study found a dramatic recent increase in stories and jokes about violence toward women on shows ranging from CSI to Family Guy, Desperate Housewives, and American Dad.

We always get sidetracked by free-speech debates. It’s certainly discouraging to read a Supreme Court opinion that likens digital sexual assault and dismemberment to a Grimm’s fairy tale; and that sort of callous attitude seems almost deliberately ignorant of the current science of child development. But this is not about free speech. It’s about whether we can be consistent. If a swear word on prime time is harmful, how can it be okay to subject kids to violent and cognitively impairing imagery? All of these can be true, but let’s at least get our priorities straight.

Since none of us wants to live in an Orwellian dystopia, the solution to our problem is not censoring so called obscenity. It may not even be restricting media violence, at least through legislative channels. (Supply and demand is another matter, of course.) The solution, rather, is to get our heads out of the sand. We can’t fix a problem until we appreciate its gravity. We need to face what we already know and, even better, offer constructive alternatives to the brain-scrambling and soul-crushing reality that many children experience for hours on end every day.
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Thursday 12 January 2012

BBC Defend Cheeky Entertainment

BBC executives "thought very carefully" before including the pre-watershed nude scenes in Sherlock that drew so many complaints, but decided to go ahead because the drama is "cheeky entertainment", according to controller of drama commissioning Ben Stephenson. Speaking about the Sherlock footage of actress Lara Pulver, who plays dominatrix Irene Adler, Stephenson said he "sort of expected" complaints would be made. "We thought about it very carefully, we had lots of conversations about it," he confirmed. "Just because it's pre-watershed doesn't mean it has to be dull. You actually saw more of Benedict Cumberbatch than Lara. Sherlock is cheeky entertainment that takes risks like having text on screen."

In the New Year's Day episode, A Scandal in Belgravia, Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes meets his match in the form of Adler, who is naked when they first meet. However, thanks to the camera angles and Pulver's carefully placed arms and hands, viewers do not see her completely naked (although those with a sharp eye and a pause button can find a little something if so inclined). Pulver told the Radio Times this week that she found the role "really empowering".


Stephenson said that the complaints would be taken seriously but pointed out that about 10 million people watched the show and that it had high audience appreciation scores. He also warned those same fans they will have to wait at least until next year for more episodes of the hit show. When asked when the Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss-penned drama would be returning, Stephenson declined to answer and went on to say that viewers would have to wait for Sunday night's final cliffhanger episode of the current run to see why. Sherlock fans had to wait 18 months between series one and two, and have already been asking for more episodes. But the schedules of the cast and writers, the demands of the complex scripts and quality look of the show mean a fast turnaround is not possible.
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Wednesday 11 January 2012

Empowerment In Nudity

Lara Pulver, whose recent role as an (occasionally naked) whip-wielding dominatrix in BBC1's Sherlock prompted more than 100 complaints from viewers, has proudly admitted that she filmed the controversial scenes entirely in the buff. The actress said there was something "really empowering" about her role in the New Year's Day episode of the hit drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, before revealing the intricacies of filming a nude scene for television in an interview for the new issue of the Radio Times.


"A Scandal in Belgravia" involves Irene Adler, a high-class dominatrix whose career providing "recreational scolding" has left her in the possession of compromising photographs of a young royal. Sherlock is given the job of getting the photographs back but finds himself competing for this MacGuffin with mysterious American bad guys and the confusing effects of an unprecedented attraction to Irene herself, a woman who wields a riding crop like a master but is herself more turned on by cerebration. "Brainy's the new sexy," she whispers huskily to Sherlock, exemplifying the old sexy by entering the room stark naked.


"They give you a self-adhesive bra that sticks to you and ... imagine a sanitary towel made of tan Lycra, but with wire through it so it cups the underneath of you. And Louboutin shoes," said Pulver. "Paul McGuigan [the director] very sweetly said to me, 'OK, the choice is we spend hours shooting it to avoid seeing straps or we take all that off and shoot it quickly.' I thought I couldn't put myself through being there all day, practically naked anyway, so I might as well get completely naked and get it done in a few hours."

She admitted: "I have never felt so vulnerable in my whole life and in feeling that vulnerability it unleashed an inner power. I thought, 'OK, I'm naked, I'm exposing everything, you can't hide behind Spanx, you can't hide behind a dress.' It's like, 'I'm completely naked, what of it?' There is something about being a woman and being naked that's great and I thought, 'Let's just celebrate that'".

Asked by her co-star Una Stubbs, who plays Sherlock's landlady Mrs Hudson: "So you took it all off?" Pulver replied: "Yes ... There's nothing to hide behind, no mask, and something really empowering takes over." Pulver added: "Martin was naked in Love Actually. Benedict is always naked – he was naked on stage in Frankenstein – so I was just joining the club. It was like, 'Let's all just get nude and do Hair The Musical!' Martin said a few things but they were harmless. They were both supportive and by the end of it I wouldn't move on to the next line until Benedict had stared at my boobs!"

In contrast, she jokes that co-star Freeman was nothing but trouble during the scene when she confronted the pair naked. She says the Office actor was even nicknamed Martin Freehands for his over-attentiveness to her as they filmed. "Martin is always naughty. 'Martin Freehands' is so true. He was like, 'Oh, there she is. She's naked and there's her arse crack and off we go... '"

The actress said she bore similarities to her TV alter ego, who flirted with Holmes while wearing only diamond earrings, lipstick and heels, and went on to strike him across the face with a riding crop while perched suggestively on a chair- although Cumberbatch has only got himself to blame for moaning that she whacked him too hard! "Benedict said, 'It's all right, Lara, you can hit me harder," Pulver told TV Biz. "I was like, 'Oh can I now, Benedict Cumberbatch?' Imagine how many whips I am going to receive in the post now!" In truth, she suggests, there are 'huge elements of the characters that are us'. "But I don't go around whipping people. And I'm not a lesbian," she told the magazine.

Adler is, it turns out, a follower of the blog and something of a fan, so she and Sherlock are able to flirt over unsolved enigmas. Her nudity is a mind-game, not a desperate bid for attention. The teasing eroticism of Sherlock and Irene's affair is solely one of the mind, yet the BBC still received more than 100 complaints about the pre-watershed scenes. Pulver, whose credits also include True Blood and Spooks, said the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories was a hit because it did not "underestimate people's intelligence". She added of the detective: "I think he has so much going on in his genius brain that he doesn't even think of women as sexual beings. A beautiful woman could walk past him naked – as I did – and it doesn't register."
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Tuesday 10 January 2012

Justices Lean Toward FCC Over TV Indecency

The US Supreme Court appeared ready to give government regulators the continuing authority to regulate profanity and sexual content on broadcast television after a lively hour of arguments Tuesday. The justices and lawyers all stayed polite, not actually using any obscene words, preferring the legally acceptable "f-bomb" or "s-word" to describe the controversial content at issue in the high-stakes free speech dispute.

The court will decide whether the Federal Communications Commission may constitutionally enforce its policies on "fleeting expletives" and scenes of nudity on television programs, both live and scripted. The agency had imposed hefty fines on broadcasters. In many televised instances, "one cannot tell what is indecent and what isn't" said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "It's the appearance of arbitrariness about how the FCC is defining indecency in concrete situations," she added.


But with so many programming choices on broadcast, cable and satellite TV, "All the government is asking for is a few (broadcast) channels where you can say -- they are not going to hear the s-word, the f-word. They are not going to see nudity," Chief Justice John Roberts said. The court's ruling, which will come in a few months, could establish important First Amendment guidelines over explicit content on the airwaves.

The Justice Department had filed an appeal, and helpfully provided the justices with a DVD of a 2003 episode of the now-canceled "NYPD Blue" on ABC in which a naked woman was shown. The content of that program is central to the ongoing legal dispute. Lawyer Seth Waxman representing ABC said the FCC's tough action against the network was "a shot out of the blue." A federal appeals court last year for a second time struck down the government policies, concluding they were vague and inconsistently applied. Pending fines against the broadcasters were dismissed. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are all parties in the case.

Controversial words and images have been aired in scripted and unscripted instances on all the major over-the-air networks in the past eight years, dating back to when the FCC began considering a stronger, no-tolerance policy. The policy became known as the Golden Globes Rule, for singer Bono's 2003 acceptance speech at the live awards show on NBC, where he uttered the phrase "really, really, fucking brilliant."

The commission specifically cited celebrities Cher and Nicole Richie for potty-mouth language in the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards, which aired live on Fox. Richie, in an apparent scripted moment said, "Have you ever tried to get cow shit out of a Prada purse? It's not so fucking simple." Justice Stephen Breyer dryly noted the language from the two women "seems to be naturally part of their vocabulary." That drew laughter in the courtroom. The CBS complaint involved dirty language on "The Early Show," a news and interview program.

The high court two years ago ruled in favor of the FCC on the issue of "fleeting expletives," concluding federal regulators have the authority to clamp down on broadcast TV networks airing isolated cases of profanity. The court, however, refused at the time to decide whether the commission's policy violates the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, ruling only on the agency's enforcement power. The justices ordered the free-speech aspect to be reviewed again by a New York-based federal appeals court, which subsequently ruled in favor of the broadcasters. The Justice Department, in its new appeal, lumped both the expletives and nudity cases together, saying the court should decide the free speech questions as one.

Explicit language is heard with greater, albeit varying, frequency on cable television, the Internet, and satellite radio, which do not use public airwaves. But the federal government is charged with responding to viewer complaints of "indecent" language and images on broadcast television and radio, which is subject to greater regulation. That is especially relevant during daytime and early evening hours, when larger numbers of families and younger viewers may be watching.

The commission formally reversed its policy in March 2004 to declare even a single use of an expletive could be illegal. In addition, a voluntary rating system is used by all television networks to warn viewers when material that might be offensive will be aired.

Much of the oral argument Tuesday centered around the ABC television stations fined $27,500 each for airing the "NYPD Blue" episode featuring a woman with her breasts and buttocks exposed. "The episode is called 'Nude Awakening.' It's about the sexual awakening of a child," Breyer said. "The whole thing was titillating," suggesting the FCC in this case could step in and declare it indecent.

But Justice Elena Kagan echoed the sentiments of the networks. "There is some amount of uncertainty, and ABC finds itself in that area of uncertainty," she said. "Because it turns out that nudity -- sometimes it's allowed as to some body parts and sometimes it's not allowed -- and the commission hadn't really said anything about it for 50 years," until the clampdown a decade ago.

The networks complain the FCC allowed profanity in such movies as "Saving Private Ryan," and full-frontal nudity in "Schindler's List" when they aired on broadcast TV, but fined stations for other allegedly "indecent" material. "Context matters," said Chief Justice Roberts, skeptical about what he was hearing from the networks. "People understand that, including children. When they hear a bad word when someone hits their thumb with a hammer, they understand that's different than having an adult stand in normal conversations and use the words. And it seems to me that your position is saying that the government cannot regulate with an understanding of what takes place in the real world."

Another source of contention is whether broadcast radio and the TV networks -- ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and the CW -- should receive treatment differing from their satellite and cable cousins, in a content way. Most broadcast stations are part of the basic cable packages people buy, and just 10% of the population receives its TV only through the airwaves. But the government countered that 69 million television sets are not connected to cable or satellite, and that broadcasting is the medium of choice for children.

"What do you call it, you surf through all the (cable) channels. And it's not apparent to many people which are broadcast and which are not," Justice Anthony Kennedy said to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued for the FCC. "But you're saying that there's still a value, an importance, in having a higher standard or different standard for broadcast media on the television. Why is that, when there are so many other options?"

Justice Antonin Scalia: "Sign me up as supporting Justice Kennedy's notion that this has a symbolic value, just as we require a certain modicum of dress for the people that attend this court. ... If these are public airwaves, the government is entitled to insist upon a certain modicum of decency." But Ginsburg interjected: "The expletives are in common parlance today. I think that the children are not going to be shocked by them the way they might have been a generation ago." Kagan suggested the broadcast regulatory model has been around since the 1920s. "It seems to work and it seems to be a good thing that there is some safe haven, even if the old technological bases for that safe haven don't exist anymore."

Justice Samuel Alito went further, saying the whole broadcast debate may be moot in a few years. "Broadcast TV is living on borrowed time. It is not going to be long before it goes the way of vinyl records and eight-track tapes," he told the network lawyers. "I'm sure your clients will continue to make billions of dollars on their programs which are transmitted by cable and by satellite and by Internet. But to the extent they are making money from people who are using rabbit ears (antennas), that is disappearing." Verrilli warned that without the current regulations, viewers would see only more profanity and nudity. "The risk of the race to the bottom is real, and I think history is showing it."

There were flashes of humor throughout. When Waxman noted viewer complaints after a recent Summer Olympics, showing a female statue -- "very much like some of the statues that are here in this courtroom, that had bare breasts and buttocks" -- several justices began looking about in search of the artwork. "Right over here, Justice Scalia," said Waxman, pointing to a carved frieze atop the courtroom showing legal figures, including a bare-breasted symbol of justice. Everyone enjoyed that moment of levity.

The Supreme Court first ventured into the broadcast speech debate in 1978, when it ruled as indecent a monologue by comedian George Carlin on society's taboo surrounding "seven dirty words." The bit had received some radio airplay. The justices said "context" should be applied when deciding whether words or images are "indecent." The major broadcast television networks say their scripted shows no longer air nudity, racy images or expletives, even after 10 p.m., when some potentially vulgar words are permitted.

Time Warner -- the parent company of CNN -- filed a supporting amicus brief in the high court dispute two years ago. The company is part owner of the CW broadcast network and operates several cable networks.

The case is Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations Inc. (10-1293).
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Monday 9 January 2012

Crying Foul Over FCC Crackdown


Should broadcasters be able to air whatever the fuck they want? asks WSJ's Amy Schatz...

Nine years after Cher used a swear word during a live awards show, the U.S. Supreme Court is finally addressing the constitutional issues behind that question. On Tuesday, the court will consider whether the Federal Communications Commission's efforts to police the U.S. airwaves for dirty words and images violate broadcasters' right to free speech and due process. The court's decision, expected by June, could affect the broadcast-television industry, which has been losing viewers to cable channels, Internet video and other forms of entertainment that by law can't be touched by the FCC's indecency cops.

If the court sides with broadcasters, it might not just free them from the threat of multimillion-dollar indecency fines, but also lead to some networks experimenting with racier content or language that is commonplace on cable-channel rivals such as AMC or FX, industry officials say. The cases before the high court involve Walt Disney Co.'s ABC and News Corp.'s Fox networks. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal. ABC was hit with a $1.4 million fine after showing the bare bottom of actress Charlotte Ross in a 2003 episode of "NYPD Blue." ABC argued that the episode wasn't indecent because Ms. Ross's bottom wasn't a "sexual organ" and there was no frontal nudity.


The FCC warned Fox for the Cher incident in December 2002 after she used an expletive during the Billboard Music Awards and for a similar case involving reality-show personality Nicole Richie. Fox, which wasn't fined, argues that it didn't run afoul of indecency rules because it didn't know the celebrities would swear and hadn't intentionally aired the words. Previously, the FCC had given broadcasters a pass for airing live, unscripted profanities, but that changed in 2003, after U2 singer Bono blurted out the F-word during the Golden Globe awards. Under pressure from watchdog groups, the commission said it would begin fining broadcasters for airing profanities, even those that were aired during live broadcasts.

Supreme Court precedents, in particular a ruling in 1978 involving the "Seven Dirty Words" act by comedian George Carlin, allow the FCC to regulate broadcast indecency during the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when children are likely to be in the audience. Broadcasters can receive a fine of as much as $325,000 for each profanity or indecent image aired. Station owners say the FCC's enforcement is so inconsistent it is almost impossible to figure what is permissible and what isn't. "It's clarity that we're looking for more than anything else. If you tell us what the rules are, we'll follow the rules," says Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.

In 2005, the commission said it was acceptable for ABC to air an unedited version of "Saving Private Ryan," which contained multiple uses of profanities, because the movie provided a historical view of war. A year later, the FCC fined a Public Broadcasting Service station for airing a documentary produced by Martin Scorsese, "The Blues," in which several interviewees used profanities. FCC officials determined the dirty words weren't necessary to "express any particular viewpoint." Lower courts found the FCC's enforcement inconsistent and said it could chill the exercise of free speech, failing a basic First Amendment test.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the commission argues that "the indecency regime serves the compelling governmental interest of protecting children." The FCC says a "rigid" rule banning certain words outright would be worse than the current case-by-case approach because officials wouldn't be able to consider the context of dirty language and would be forced into "permitting broadcast of material that is highly offensive but does not include the prohibited words." The commission mostly stopped issuing indecency fines in 2006 after Fox, ABC and CBS Corp. sued over the issue. Since then, more than 1.2 million indecency complaints have piled up at the FCC awaiting court resolution.

The use of obscenities on TV has gone up dramatically in recent years. There were 1,227 bleeped and unbleeped utterances of "fuck" or "shit" on prime-time network broadcasts last year, compared with three times in 1998, according to the Parents Television Council, a group that advocates for what it calls "family-friendly" TV. The council has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the current case. "Not long ago, it was nearly unimaginable to hear these words edited into prime-time broadcast programming even once," said Tim Winter, the organization's president. "If the broadcast networks get their way, you can bet we'll be hearing them a lot more."

The Supreme Court took a crack at the issue in 2009, ruling 5-4 that the agency had properly followed its procedures. This week's arguments mark the first time the core constitutional questions have come before the justices. If they side with broadcasters, the FCC could be forced to start from scratch in crafting indecency enforcement rules and toss thousands of complaints similar to the Fox "fleeting expletives case." Pending cases involve actress Diane Keaton's use of the F-bomb on ABC's "Good Morning America" in 2007 and several episodes of the Fox cartoon "Family Guy," which has drawn complaints for showing its cartoon characters' naked behinds or other raunchy material.

A victory could also open the door for the networks to air saltier language or images during prime time to better compete with rival shows on cable stations, which aren't regulated. "You may see a little pushing at the edges," says Harry F. Cole, a broadcast attorney at Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth PLC, who was part of the defense team in the 1978 "Seven Dirty Words" case. "If the Supreme Court rejects the FCC's position, broadcasters should and, I think, will—feel more comfortable about trying to capture actual conversation and actual human interaction, complete with various terms and activities that some might view as vulgar."

Still, broadcasters say viewers shouldn't expect a flood of profanity or nudity on TV, because that would alienate advertisers and viewers. Industry executives say that they could already run as many obscenities as they wish after 10 p.m., on shows such as "Saturday Night Live," but choose not to. Even if broadcasters lose, they might get a break from the current FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat, who has shown little interest in focusing on indecency fines. His Republican predecessor, Kevin Martin, made policing the airwaves a priority. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.
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