Daniele Priori January 06, 2023
The naked truth, over half a century later. And such a shock that actors Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, then underage but now in their seventies, are filing a lawsuit against the film Paramount Pictures, producer of the masterpiece that was (is and will remain, barring possible further controversy): Romeo and Juliet directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The year was 1968. To end up in the eye of the storm and at the center of a lawsuit for damages that appeared to be worth as much as $500 million, on top of the unique 54-year postponement (the lawsuit was filed before December 31). ), is the famous nude scene where you can see Romeo Leonard’s buttocks and Juliet Olivia’s breasts.
A pose requested by Stark Zeffirelli, meanwhile disappeared in 2019, and according to numerous testimonies by the actor himself over the years, not stolen at all, but today suddenly even defined as “unauthorised”. Worse still, at the root of a frustration that would accompany Olivia and Leonard practically their entire lives and even embarrass the two once very young acts over the years, jeopardizing further job opportunities in the cinema world.
FIRST PERSON
For the moment Outstanding did not comment on the news. As on the part of the two ex-stars, the very numerous awards that Romeo and Juliet brought them personally were not even mentioned: two Golden Globes for best new actor and one for Zeffirelli for best director. Repeated successes in photocopies in Italy with three David di Donatello attributed for the same reasons, up to the two Oscars in Hollywood. The best cinematography and (even if it makes you chuckle a little today given the circumstances we’re writing about again for) the best costumes.
While the now totally outdated breasts and buttocks, especially for the older bearers of the time, will have a process that will inevitably be absent precisely because of the youth (like irony) of the protagonists. The magazine remembers diversity which conveniently underscored how Olivia Hussey defended the offending scene in an interview in 2018, just five years ago, simply defining it as “necessary for the film.” In addition, ten years after this film, Hussey was Maria in the television drama Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Zeffirelli.
Or like back then in Great Britain, when Olivia herself, not yet of legal age, was banned from entering the theatre. A ban that made Zeffirelli’s Giulietta wonder, with nice sarcasm, how it was possible that she couldn’t see something she used to see in the mirror every day. That mirror, which, however, makes no appeals to the passage of time. And against which often only the appeal to a posthumous #MeToo remains. Or to offer sensational reinterpretations of cinematic plays that have shaped history. Sometimes precisely because they are scandalous.
LAST TANGO As with another epoch-making film that ended in storm after decades: The Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci Accused in 2007 by Maria Schneider, leading actress of the brutal violence scene with Marlon Brando. An anal sex scene spiced with the proverbial butter that the actress, who died young in 2011, knew nothing about. “They almost raped me. This scene was not in the script. I refused, I got angry. But then I couldn’t say no. I should have called my agent or my lawyer because you can’t force an actor to do something that’s not in the script. But I was too young at the time, I didn’t know it,” the actress denounced, admitting that “the tears you see in the film are real. They are tears of humiliation.” A story that, however, hardly compares, if at all, to the awakening of the late Romeo and Juliet, who, in the early hours of the morning and in the absence of other proposals, the Braghettoni would like to put on a masterpiece. Something that, by the way has already happened in art history, not without a dose of laughter, which came and survived as a dam against the overflowing mockery.