The Intimacy Coordinator
This map finishes telling the story of how studios worked in 1948. Where the studio system collapsed, the account of the machinery stopped. The continuation arrived seventy years later.\n\nIn 2018, on the set of the HBO series The Deuce, the actor Emily Meade asked for something: that when intimate scenes were filmed, there be someone present to work through the staging with her. HBO brought in Alicia Rodis, and in time adopted a policy of placing someone in that role on all of its productions containing intimate scenes. That was the moment the craft of the intimacy coordinator became part of the industry's own machinery.\n\nHere too, whatever is called the first has something before it. Rodis had co-founded a non-profit with others who held the same view in 2016. The framework existed first; in 2018 a large company adopted it.\n\nThis section sits in this line of the map because it is not a story about technology. The role is part choreographer and part advocate for the performers: reading the script, consulting with director and actors, working out the staging of physical movement. These are the people who first made visible, from outside, what had been happening beneath the flag of the auteur. And this map wanted to record that the beginning was neither a policy nor a movement, but the words of one actor who was there on set.