Donald Sutherland Unequivocally Denies 'Don't Look Now' Sex (Again)

On Tuesday, I wrote a post that quotes from Peter Bart's forthcoming book about how the author and former Paramount exec claims that he watched Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie having actual sex during the filming of Don't Look Now in 1973.

Sutherland, through his longtime publicist Catherine Olim at PMK*BNC, denies this (again) in strong terms. Here's what Sutherland has to say today:

"Peter Bart mendaciously writes that he witnessed the shooting of the love scene in Don't Look Now and saw sex. Not true. None of it. Not the sex. Not him witnessing it. From beginning to end, there were four people in that room. [Director] Nic Roeg, [DP] Tony Richmond, Julie Christie and me. No one else. Wires under the locked door led outside, and this was 20 years before video monitors."

Not long after, I got a call from Peter Katz, who produced the film and says he's a good friend of Bart's. "While there was a sex scene captured on film," Katz notes drily, "it was not a scene that would lead to the creation of a human being."

Katz, who co-owned the negative, says that the U.S. and Canadian versions of the film did include several small cuts to that scene that made them different from the U.K. and European releases. Otherwise, Katz claims, the MPAA was planning to give the film an X rating. But no, he says, the coitus was totally fake-us.

The CAA-repped Sutherland most recently appeared in The Mechanic and The Eagle. He will next appear in the Warner Bros. comedy Horrible Bosses, which will be released in July.