A little fact of which I had been entirely unaware. The partnership I referred to earlier of James Ivory, the writer (and originally also the director) of "Call Me By Your Name" who became the oldest man ever to receive an Oscar, with Ismail Merchant had produced some wonderful movies. Unknown to me, they were in fact lovers and partners for more than 40 years.
In an interview in today's Guardian, he returns to his earlier comments about being unhappy there was no frontal nudity in "Call Me By Your Name". He had written in into the script and states that the director had definitely agreed to it.
One aspect that does still rankle with him is the absence of full-frontal male nudity. Ivory’s screenplay specified that Elio and Oliver would be shown naked, a detail overruled by clauses in the actors’ contracts. “When Luca says he never thought of putting nudity in, that is totally untrue,” says Ivory. “He sat in this very room where I am sitting now, talking about how he would do it, so when he says that it was a conscious aesthetic decision not to – well, that’s just bullshit.
“When people are wandering around before or after making love, and they’re decorously covered with sheets, it’s always seemed phoney to me. I never liked doing that. And I don’t do it, as you know.” In Maurice, his 1987 film of EM Forster’s posthumously published gay love story, “the two guys have had sex and they get up and you certainly see everything there is to be seen. To me, that’s a more natural way of doing things than to hide them, or to do what Luca did, which is to pan the camera out of the window toward some trees. Well …” He gives a derisive snort.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/m ... ame-nudity
The movie has also made a tidy profit. Filmed on a budget of around $4 million, the box office receipts up to last weekend were $37,941,949.