Rape scenes have become 'a plague on the industry', says Hollywood producer

Sansa Stark gets raped in Game of Thrones. Photo / Supplied

A television producer has opened up conversation about the proliferation of rape scenes on screen, after revealing as many as 20 per cent of submitted scripts feature sexual assault.

Jeremy Slater, whose previous work includes writing the script for blockbuster Fantastic Four as well as producing the US small-screen version of the iconic 1973 horror film, told Variety Magazine that screenwriters' dependence on rape scenes "has become a plague on the industry".

He said that he repeatedly came up against rape or sexual assault scenes while reading speculative scripts to find writers for The Exorcist:

"One of my hard-and-fast rules when reading spec scripts was, the second that there was a rape that was used for shock value and that didn't have any sort of narrative purpose, I threw the script aside. And I was shocked by the number that had that. I would say out of those 200 scripts, there were probably 30 or 40 of them that opened with a rape or had a pretty savage rape at some point."

Slater's comments were backed up by other experienced screenwriters in a report put together by Maureen Ryan.

One anonymous female writer said that rape had "become shorthand for backstory and drama", while another said "for male showrunners, sexual assault is always the go-to when looking for 'traumatic backstory' for a female character. You can be sure it will be brought up immediately, like it's the obvious place to go when fleshing out a female character."

In 2015, HBO's most successful drama Game of Thrones caused outrage after creating a rape scene that hadn't happened in the books by George RR Martin that the series was based on.

While the episode's director, Jeremy Podeswa, said he "knew it was going to be challenging for the audience", he defended the scene, saying: "it was very important to us in the execution that it would not be exploited in any way. To be fair, the criticism was the notion of it, not the execution. It was handled as sensitively as it could possibly be; you hardly see anything."

Regardless, the rape of Sansa Stark caused many fans to say that they would no longer watch the programme, including Democrat senator Claire McCaskill, who said the "gratuitous" and "disgusting" scene had made her abandon the show.

Rape scenes on screen have been part of a wider conversation in Hollywood this week after footage re-emerged of Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci admitting that 19-year-old actress Maria Schneider was not fully aware of the details of the rape scene in Last Tango in Paris before it was filmed.

On Tuesday Bertolucci released a new statement about the filming of the scene, saying that it was only the addition of the stick of butter with which Schneider's character was assaulted that she didn't know about, rather that the full violence of the simulated scene.

He called the furore "ridiculous", saying: "I would like, for the last time, to clear up a ridiculous misunderstanding that continues to generate press reports about Last Tango in Paris around the world."