Jason Reitman Makes a Porno for 'Men, Women & Children'

LOS ANGELES—The reviews for Jason Reitman's drama, Men, Women and Children, which opened earlier this month, are not that great, but one aspect of the movie that is garnering a little extra press is the extent to which Reitman was determined to make the porn sites used in the movie as realistic as possible. He could have just used some real sites in scenes in which his characters are watching online porn, but Reitman told HuffPo Live today that nothing but total authenticity would do. To that end, "His crew actually created a functioning porn site for the characters to use while filming, all the way down to the search function and thumbnails from actual porn videos." It wasn't totally original, though. Reitman did have a well-known site in mind, telling HuffPo's Roy Sekoff, "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." The motivation for going the extra inch was for... what else: character development. "What do we do when we're alone? First, we go online and look up a lot of things and we had to figure out a way to make that cinematic," he told Sekoff. "But there's a lot of sexuality to being alone, whether it's physical or simply looking at stuff." Verisimilitude was also the goal. "We had to think of the internet as a location," Reitman explained. "Normally in a movie, you have to build a bedroom, a school classroom, a hallway, a restaurant. And we had to do those things. But we spent more time, more money, more man hours building the actual internet that the actors were exploring." Judging from the roundly negative reviews of this movie, perhaps more time should have been spent building a better screenplay. Photo: Diractor Jason Reitman, left, and right, actors Travis Tope (Chris Truby) and Olivia Crocicchia (Hannah Clint).