A great essay by Mark Harris, who helped produce  director James Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, over at Vulture discusses whether he could get the movie— whose 15th Anniversary 4K Restoration is screening at the IFC Center in New York and other selected cities on January 26th, 2022 — made today.

The short answer is no.

RELATED: Don’t Miss 15th Anniversary Restoration & Re-Release of ‘Shortbus’ Coming In January

How will a new generation of moviegoers who are seeing Shortbus for the first time take it all in — the threesome, the spectacularly large orgy, the BDSM, the now almost subversive feeling of joy that the film takes in all forms of sexual pleasure? “I think you should always be sensitive to any kind of vulnerability in art,” John says. “To many people, sex is not a vulnerable thing, but to many it is. Sex is scary. Young people are having less and less sex every year. I was reading some studies that [said] that trend started when the film came out — that the height of young people having sex was 2006. And now, for the young person, Gen Z, who’s in a morally correct liberal mode, sex is suspect in and of itself. There starts to be a feeling that if anyone is having sex, someone’s being exploited, and if you’re on film, even more so. And some of that correctness, that desire to protect the vulnerable, actually fig-leafs a panic about sex.”

“I don’t think I could get Shortbus financed today,” he says. “So I’m thrilled that it’s coming out now, but also a little nervous.” He doesn’t know how audiences will react, he says. “But I want to remind people that everyone on that shoot still says it’s their favorite creative experience.”

When I rewatched Shortbus recently, I also felt that it probably couldn’t be made today — not because of its sexual explicitness, although that would doubtless be scrutinized through a stern contemporary lens of power dynamics and problematics and representation but could probably survive all that and maybe even wink at it, but because of its optimism. It’s a movie full of joy and delight — not just in sexual discovery and self-discovery, but in the awkward, itchy, uncomfortable, embarrassing stuff, in the fact that sex is messy because people and their feelings are messy. In a way, the movie’s conviction that the mess is part of the fun seems like its most transgressive aspect. Today, contemporary sensibilities might demand that the sex in Shortbus be framed as a refuge or escape within a late-capitalist dystopia, instead of an invitation to get naked and jump in, in a city that glows with various secret pleasures just waiting to be unlocked. Wants the sex scenes to be hot and the movie to be fun, I had written after my first meeting with John. In 2003, as mission statements went, that seemed solid. Today, it seems revolutionary.

Read the full essay here.