In those gentle days before internet pornography there was a book you could buy which listed the precise moment in each Hollywood film when the sex scene began, or when the leading lady – very often Greta Scacchi – got her kit off, thus enabling one to buy the video, or rent it from Blockbuster, and fast-forward to the, uh, important bit.
Apparently the most requested fast-forward was of Sharon Stone in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct: a film as dumb as pretty much everything else the Dutchman has committed to celluloid, even if his reputation has lately been rehabilitated (for reasons I do not understand). Stone played a bisexual novelist suspected of murder and the scene in question comes during her interrogation by the police, when she uncrosses her legs, thus revealing to the detective – played by Michael Douglas – the briefest glimpse of her vulva, the shot lasting one-sixth of a second. In other words, the merest snatch.
Verhoeven, a man with form in this area, had apparently told the relatively unknown Stone – about the 25th choice for the part, although she is probably the only good thing about the film – that she should not wear knickers for this particular shot as they were giving the most terrible glare off the camera. Don’t worry, he added, you won’t be able to see anything. He wasn’t wholly wrong. I saw the film first in the cinema and, either because of my already declining eyesight or the grainy texture of the film, saw nothing at all. Nor did I when I watched it on video on an admittedly small TV much later, nor later still when I got a bigger set. Luckily Basic Instinct has recently been remastered, imbuing this one-sixth of a second with much greater visual clarity, to Stone’s chagrin.
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