With the complicated adult drama Men, Women and Children, director Jason Reitman explores the different ways that technology affects members of multiple families in several generations. And as you might have guessed, a good number of the subplots featured in Reitman’s movie involve online pornography. What you might not have figured is how much time (and money) Reitman put into making the porn in his movie so realistic.
There are two characters who spend far too much time in Men, Women and Children staring at Internet porn. A father (played by Adam Sandler) pleases himself to porn whenever his house is empty. When dad’s not looking, his teenage son (played by Travis Tope) is perched in front of the computer, looking at some deranged stuff too. And Reitman recently told HuffPo that instead of just relying on the usual porn sites, the production crew went the extra mile by doing this:
We had a guy whose job, full-time, was to look at porn ... and find thumbnails so we could create Pornhub pages so that it looked as though someone was searching things and things were coming up. So that guy, for weeks, he just watched porn and came up with thumbnails and titles to clips."
I know what you are thinking. You want that dude’s job. Imagine how he answers his family’s inquiries when they find out he worked on Jason Reitman’s new movie. "That’s awesome, honey! What did you do? You were an assistant? Did you help Jennifer Garner or Judy Greer? What’s that? Oh, you surfed porn all day. We paid for you to go to college to do that?!"
Put it on the resume.
I’m left to wonder why Jason Reitman went to such lengths, when there is SO MUCH free pornography on the Internet. Couldn’t he just have found a site with an established design that was to his liking? In Reitman’s own words, the Men, Women and Children team "had to think of the internet as a location," and that they "spent more time, more money, more man hours building the actual internet that the actors were exploring." I’m sure there is an aesthetic reason for it. But having seen the film, I kind of think that the normal Internet would be a great stand in, and Reitman just wanted to let that guy surf porn.
Jason Reitman’s Men, Women and Children is in limited release, and will expand in coming weeks.
