Thirty years of Basic Instinct: An irreverent time capsule that speaks volumes of the strides cinema has made since

If you would like a quick snapshot of how much the tastes of the moviegoing public have changed in the past 30 years, reflect on this. The biggest film of March 1992 was Basic Instinct, an erotic thriller featuring an established movie star in explicit onscreen couplings with a sexy up-and-comer. The scribe claimed that “Verhoeven’s intention is to make Basic Instinct as a sexually explicit thriller,” as if that were not Eszterhas’ intention with a screenplay that contained, per the Los Angeles Times, “half a dozen extensive and detailed lovemaking scenes.” Elsewhere, however, Eszterhas also claimed Verhoeven intended to sensationalise the bisexuality of the film’s female lead. Eszterhas and Verhoeven cheerfully reunited just before production commenced in San Francisco in April 1991, with the screenwriter reviewing the director’s alterations to his script and determining they “shared the same vision” for the film. [ In her memoir, Stone said she was tricked into the immediately notorious frontal nudity of the scene.> Clad in a sleek white dress, her icy blond hair pulled back tight, Stone is the very picture of the ’90s-era femme fatale; she lights up a cigarette, and when she is warned that smoking is prohibited, she replies, sinfully, “What are you gonna do, charge me with smoking?” Her back-and-forth with Curran is not exactly James Cain, but it is played the right way: Douglas steams and stammers, a typical film noir heel, while Stone delivers her dialogue with the devilish gleam of a sly actor having a great time.