With California set to reopen June 12, Hollywood is preparing to call action for the first time in months. But before film and TV producers can get back to filling screens big and small with post-pandemic content, the industry needs to figure out how to keep cast and crew safe from spreading coronavirus.
“Just because some businesses are opening doesn’t mean your risk for COVID-19 is gone,” Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, said in a statement. “We all need to continue to keep physical distancing, wash our hands, and wear face coverings in public.”
Hollywood reportedly has a few ideas for bringing employees back safely, including temperature checks, cast and crew quarantines, and using CGI to keep cast members to a minimum or eliminate particularly close contact scenes. But the key to safe post-COVID filmmaking may actually be a decades-old testing system used by the porn industry, Reuters reported.
The method, known as Performer Availability Scheduling Services, was established in the 1990s in response to the HIV epidemic. The system keeps porn performers safe from STIs by testing each performer every 14 days and entering the results into a database that tells directors and producers which performers are available to work safely at any given time.
According to Mike Stabile, spokesman for the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for the US adult entertainment industry, the porn industry’s testing system could be a productive tool to help the mainstream film industry ensure post-pandemic production safety.
“When we first starting talking about COVID, we felt very well prepared because we have a whole history of testing within the industry as well as contact tracing and production shut-downs,” Stabile told Reuters. “This is obviously a different type of virus, this is a different type of threat, but we understood in general how it would work and what we’d need to do in order to protect ourselves.”
The porn industry has been keeping its performers safe from disease for years, and Stabile says the mainstream film industry could learn a thing or two from its racier counterpart. “The challenges for sports, for Hollywood and the porn industry, are all different,” he acknowledged. “But in reality, we each have things we can learn from each other.”
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