I we all knew James Franco has been thrown in before, but these girls paid to take a "sex scene" acting class. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/03/766586090/james-franco-sued-by-former-students-for-sexual-exploitation-and-fraud When he opened Studio 4 in 2014, Sarah Tither-Kaplan was one of its first students. Franco taught a class called Sex Scenes. According to the complaint, students had to audition for the class — and pay an extra $750 for it — but Tither-Kaplan says she was thrilled to be selected. "I really respected him as an actor, and the fact that I was selected based off of an audition meant to me that I was valued for my talent," Tither-Kaplan says. She assumed the Sex Scenes class would teach her how to "maneuver in sex scenes professionally as an actor," but it "did not do that at all." "In fact, I didn't know anything about nudity riders, the detail required in them, the right to counsel with the director about nude scenes, the custom to choreograph nude scenes ahead of time to negotiate them with the cast and the director — I knew none of that throughout that class," Tither-Kaplan says. In 2016, Franco made a docuseries based on his Sex Scenes class that he posted on his Facebook page. The videos have since been taken down, but one is still available on Vimeo. It's described as the first class in which students talk about the scenarios they came up with when they auditioned. As the class progressed, Tither-Kaplan says, students were encouraged to take risks with their bodies. She says she wanted to be a team player, so she went along. "I wanted to do my best, and I wanted to make friends there, and I wanted to have it really mean something for me," she says. "So I did what seemed to be the thing that they wanted in this class, and that was get naked and do sex scenes and not complain and, you know, push the envelope. And ... I felt encouraged when I just went for it." And she says she was rewarded for it. "After I did the Sex Scenes master class, and did the nude scene, and the sex scene in my short film, I started working with them very regularly," Tither-Kaplan says. "And not a lot of other students got that chance."