It’s Not About the Copious Fake Sex. Really.
Sunday, July 29th, 2007
CULVER CITY, Calif.
THE scene, being filmed on a stuffy and intermittently noisy soundstage, involved lots of talking and lots of groping, as many of them do on the new, soon-to-be-controversial Showtime series “Californication.”
David Duchovny, as the occasionally unpleasant antihero of the show, a creatively blocked novelist named Hank Moody, was fully committed to the moment in spite of a real-life cold and a lozenge-coated throat. He and Amy Price-Francis, playing one of the many wrong-for-him sexual diversions who populate the story lines, were going at it in a full-on lip-locking kitchen-sink clinch.
“I love women,” Mr. Duchovny’s congenitally flippant character said after being accused of just using female partners to distract himself from his continuing writer’s block. “I have all their albums.”
“Cut,” said the director, Bart Freundlich, one of Mr. Duchovny’s closest friends, instructing the couple to disengage and start over. “There was a shadow on her head.”
Two entertainment Web sites set off fireworks on the Fourth of July with reports that Time Warner-owned New Line Cinema was finally moving ahead with Time Warner-owned HBO on the long-time-a-comin’ “Sex and the City” flick, about two years after the idea was hatched.