Sharon Stone, who shot to stardom with the 1992 film Basic Instinct, said she was tricked into shooting the infamous scene where she flashed her private parts in the film in an exclusive excerpt from her upcoming memoir The Beauty of Living Twice.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, a scene from Basic Instinct briefly bares Stone’s privates.
“There are several versions to the story but since I’m the one with the vagina in question, let me say: The other points of view are bullshit,” Stone writes in her book.
She said she was made to attend the film’s screening with Verhoeven, and lawyers and agents, most of whom had nothing to do with the film.
She wrote, “That was how I saw my vagina-shot for the first time, long after I’d been told ‘We can’t see anything—I just need you to remove your panties, as the white is reflecting the light, so we know you have panties on’. Now, here is the issue. It didn’t matter anymore. It was me and my parts up there. I had decisions to make.”
The 63-year-old actor recalls slapping Verhoeven after the screening and contacting her lawyer Marty Singer.
She wrote, “I went to the projection booth, slapped Paul across the face, left, went to my car, and called my lawyer, Marty Singer. Marty told me that they could not release this film as it was… And, Marty said, per the Screen Actors Guild, my union, it wasn’t legal to shoot up my dress in this fashion. ‘Whew,’ I thought. Well, that was my first thought.”
She added, “Then I thought some more. What if I were the director? What if I had gotten that shot? What if I had gotten it on purpose? Or by accident? What if it just existed? That was a lot to think about. I knew what film I was doing. For heaven’s sake, I fought for that part, and all that time, only this director had stood up for me.”
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The Golden Globe Award winning actor, who is one of the first female actors to be paid higher than the usual pay, reflected on being called a “difficult” woman in Hollywood. She said that she was pressured to maintain sexual relations with her male co-stars by white male executive producers to achieve a better on-screen chemistry.
Despite having actor approval in her contract, her opinion was never taken while casting the male lead, she wrote. “No one cared. They cast who they wanted. To my dismay, sometimes. To the detriment of the picture, sometimes.”
The Beauty of Living Twice will release on March 30 and is expected to be an extensive account of how Stone made her way up after getting her break with Basic Instinct, her 18th film by then.