A Challenge to Film Makers
By Eolake Stobblehouse

Beautiful women is a seriously underused resource for movies. Especially nude ones.

I believe this is caused by two things: 1) the attacks coming from various segments of society on anything involving nudity. 2) the idea that nudity in a film has to be strongly justified, otherwise it is "gratuitous" or cheap.

I think the second one is the more important one, because it is less obvious, but just as powerful. If you put nudity in a film, people tend to tell you that you are selling out, and that you are trying to "sell with sex".

This is nonsense. We can see that if we consider other images of beauty. Look at David Lynch's wonderful film The Straight Story. This film has many wonderful images of the American Midwestern landscape during harvest time. Just beautiful. And yet I have not heard anybody telling Mr. Lynch that these scenes were "gratuitous" or that he sold out.

How come when you show beautiful landscapes or architecture in films, it is Art, but if you show beautiful people without hiding them in clothes, it is at best doubtful or commercial, and at worst evil and pornographic?

I believe there is a huge opportunity for film makers who face up to this and just decide: "to heck with that, I am going to put nude and pretty people in my movies, because they are beautiful, and beauty is an important part of art."

I believe that there is a real need for non-sexual nudity, to counter all the genuinely gratuitous sexual innuendo we see every day in ads and other places.

We need to spread the word that nude people and beautiful people are much more than just an invitation to sex. Nudity is our natural state, and attractive members of our own species is of course the strongest communication you can achieve.

In this day and age, anybody with talent, determination, a digital video camera and a DVD burner can make a movie. To those of you who does that, and of course to any career film makers who read this, I say: put the pretty people in your films. We need the beauty.