Hooray for Hollywood Wood
It is said that there are no small parts, only small actors. More and more, Hollywood’s leading men are dropping trou and letting us see if that’s true.
March 15, 2013
(The Blue Lagoon)
When Seth MacFarlane sang “We Saw Your Boobs” at last month’s Academy Awards—his effort to keep us all abreast of which of Oscar’s leading ladies had gone “full upper frontal”—his song had many people thinking that, in the spirit of fairness, equal air time should be given to naming those Hollywood leading men who have dared to bare their naughty bits on the silver screen.
Female nudity has been featured in film for almost as long as moving pictures have been around (roughly the late 1800s). Even during Hollywood’s repressed and highly censored “Hays Code” period (1930–1968), when restrictions on showing breasts and cleavage were stringently enforced, independent studios went out of their way to make low-budget exploitative movies, “ethnographic” features, and even quasi-documentaries about the nudism lifestyle in order to justify showing naked women. For most of the 20th century, however, movies seldom included naked men and rarely if ever showed penises. Even Last Tango in Paris (1972), Bernardo Bertolucci’s groundbreaking and extremely controversial X-rated film that shocked the world with its nudity and sexual content, had no full frontal male nudity. (A scene showing Marlon Brando’s genitals was ultimately edited out because Bertolucci felt that to include it would be too much.)
Not until the 1980s did movie-star dicks start inching their way into mainstream American cinema. The notorious cult biopic Caligula, which had its U.S. debut in February 1980 and shocked and sickened audiences with its graphic depictions of perverse sex, contained more wieners than an Oscar Mayer company picnic. But Caligula was hardly typical of how Hollywood handled its stars’ meat at the time. Movies of that era typically shot naked men from a distance or in a way that offered only a quick, “passing glans”—like the glimpse fans got of a fully naked, 30-year-old Richard Gere in American Gigolo (which premiered six days after Caligula). Gere is often cited as the first mainstream hunk to show his junk, but there’s really only a shadowy suggestion of Richard’s gear. Similarly, in July 1980, the promise of catching fleeting glimpses of 18-year-old Christopher Atkins’ bronzed nakedness had audiences flocking to see The Blue Lagoon.
A handful of the male full frontal movies of the 1980s that followed have titles that may still be recognizable: Porky’s II (1983), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). It wasn’t until the Clinton years that Hollywood really let it all hang out. A quick survey of 1990s flicks that show cocks reveals at least three dozen well-known titles, including ones where the male organ is critical to the plot—like The Crying Game (1992), where [spoiler alert!] Jaye Davidson’s penis-reveal left audiences with their mouths agape, and Boogie Nights (1997), whose final moments feature Mark Wahlberg unzipping to whip out Dirk Diggler’s greatest (albeit prosthetic) asset.
By the 2000s, dicks seemed to be coming into their own, cinematically speaking, in releases like The Brown Bunny (2003) in which Chloë Sevigny performs non-simulated oral sex to completion on Vincent Gallo, and Shortbus (2006), John Cameron Mitchell’s answer to porn. While penis portrayals in movies like Transamerica (2005), Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005), and 2 Days in Paris (2007) were non-gratuitous or at least non-sensationalized, a remarkable number of pictures from the 2000s used dick-flashing as a sight gag—the 21st-century version of mooning. Sideways (2004), Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008), Borat (2006), Brüno (2009), and all of the Jackass movies are just the tip of the, um, iceberg.
So what does the future hold for full frontal male nudity in Hollywood movies? In this age of TMI and TMZ, celebrity sex tapes, tweeted dick pics and reality TV, it’s not hard to imagine that pretty soon you’ll be able to see your favorite leading man “Coming soon on a screen near you!”
See if you can identify the movies in which the following actors revealed their most important parts:
1. Robin Williams
2. Harvey Keitel
3. Bruce Willis
4. Ewan McGregor
5. Kevin Bacon
6. Jude Law
7. Geoffrey Rush
8. Mark Ruffalo
9. Michael Pitt
10. Peter Sarsgaard
11. Viggo Mortensen
12. Jason Segel
13. Billy Crudup
14. Ken Jeong
15. Michael Fassbender
16. Jason Biggs
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