The Sex Scenes Master Class was made up of 40 students; 20 actors who auditioned in pairs as couples, 10 writers and 10 directors. I was one of the directors selected to be part of this exclusive class. In early September , James Franco took to social media announcing that he would be teaching a new class at his school and encouraged actors, writers, and directors to apply for the week course which would result in a short film.
I applied as a writer and a director. I found out I was accepted into the class as a director the first week in October. The secret location of the class was emailed to us the night before our first class. Classes met once a week, for three hours, in west Hollywood for 12 weeks from October through December. I only had two expectations when I walked into this course: 1 Learn something new, 2 make a movie. So needless to say, I was not disappointed in the experience. On the first day of class I sat with some people I knew from the writing course I took.
The groups of couples were varied as these scenes were intended to depict a variety of relationships. The actor pairings were in sets of male-male, female-female, male-female, and younger-older. The writers and directors were evenly split, five women, five men. The first part of class consisted of introductions. Everyone got up and introduced themselves. After that we were given time to mingle and meet our classmates. After about 20 minutes of mingling we handed in our pieces of papers with names.
James Franco , Jay Davis and their assistants went into a backroom and emerged a few minutes later, having picked our team based on the pieces of paper everyone turned in and trying their best to match everyone up with their first choices. Each team consisted of one writer, one director and two actors. I was teamed up with a writer named Michelle and my actors were the younger-older couple, Jeff Vernon and Jacqueline Bustamante.
Immediately I knew this was going to be an interesting creative challenge for me and I was excited to take it head on. The following week we improvised some ideas in class and the writers were assigned to write their first drafts. When I was handed the first draft of our script, the first four pages were a phone conversation between a mother and daughter.
