Romancing the Steamy Scene
I love a little romance in the stories I read and in the movies I see. As explicit scenes have become formulaic, they have also lost some of the romantic sweetness I appreciate. When transferred to the big screen, the steamy scene feels uncomfortably absurd.
When I lived in Santa Monica, California my kids played with the kids of celebrities. We all wanted our kids to grow up happy and feel loved. The business of Hollywood knows that it is creating fiction, fantasy, and illusion. There, the violence and sex in entertainment was part of “show business” and shrugged off as an influence on teens. The insiders put the responsibility of the content of the story on the people who watch it: “If a story sells with steamy scenes, that’s what people want to see.”
As I read the Twilight series, I was inspired to write the Starlet Series, taking on the realities of first experiences and challenging Hollywood’s idea of love and beauty. The teen characters in Starlet’s Man and Starlet’s Web are part of the Hollywood culture that creates stories. But they are just as confused about their identities as teens in the suburbs, especially when celebrity parents take them to church or enroll them in religious schools.
What if friends talked about their feelings and then fumbled through their failed first romantic scene? What if the pressure that our entertainment puts on our teens to have their own unrealistic steamy scene makes them not know what to do when it is real for them?

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