Don’t Look Now sex scene was for real, says author

Did Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland do it for real in the notoriously sizzling bed scene of the 1973 classic Don't Look Now? It's been one of the hottest questions in Hollywood tittle-tattle for nearly 40 years.

And now there is an answer: Yes, it was real.

There they were on set in Venice, side by side in bed before the rolling cameras, doing this and doing that to the command of director Nicolas Roeg, when they got carried away. Really carried away.

Well, maybe.

This is the headline-grabbing claim from a man who just might know: Peter Bart, former studio executive, lately editor of Variety, the Hollywood 'insider's magazine', and now the author of a soon-to-be-published memoir, Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, The Mob, (and Sex).

He says he was invited to Roeg's set as a young Paramount Pictures executive, visiting on "an auspicious day". He observed that both stars were stark naked.

"It was clear to me they were no longer simply acting: they were fucking on camera," he writes, according to the Hollywood Reporter, which has got hold of an advance copy of Bart’s book.

Bart then whispered to Roeg: "Nic, don't they expect you to say 'Cut'?" Roeg replied: "I just want to be sure I have the coverage." That prompted Bart to say: "That's beyond coverage."

This is Hollywood gold, and publishing profit.

Responding to the Hollywood Reporter item, Donald Sutherland has issued a statement saying: "Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it." Sutherland insists there were only four people on the locked set: him, Christie, Roeg and cinematographer Tony Richmond.

The film's producer, Peter Katz, has backed him up. "While there was a sex scene captured on film," Katz told the Hollywood Reporter, "it was not a scene that would lead to the creation of a human being."

Julie Christie has yet to respond, but did once say that "making love on screen is such hard work that there is no time for the libido to take over."

But Bart insists he saw it all. He also claims that out-takes from the scene made exclusive viewing in Hollywood screening rooms. Yet surely they would be on YouTube by now?

When she made the film, Christie (above) was the lover of Warren Beatty, who was at the very peak of his lothario career as the most desirable man on the planet. Bart recalls that he made a fuss over the sex scene, demanding cuts. "I want to cut the movie with you, pussy hair by pussy hair," he apparently told Bart.

Beatty's involvement raises a question: why would Christie go beyond the call of duty with the scrawny Sutherland if she had the dishy Beatty waiting at home?

There is a story of Christie getting carried away with Beatty, too. In their smash-hit movie Shampoo there is an equally notorious scene in which Christie sinks below a restaurant table in order to administer a blow-job to a squirming Beatty, her on-screen object of desire.

That, the story goes, actually happened at a real life party in the back room of Chez Jay's bistro in Santa Monica, one of the last of  Old Hollywood's bohemian hang-outs. Jay always swore that this was true. So, when Christie is in the mood, great moments may indeed occur.

The evidence falls short of being beyond reasonable doubt. But Hollywood knows when we wish things were true. ·