The Sessions

The Sessions (2012)

The festival hit of the year!

Though a childhood bout with polio left him dependent on an iron lung, Mark O'Brien maintains a career as a journalist and poet. A writing assignment dealing with sex and the disabled piques Mark's curiosity, and he decides to investigate the possibility of experiencing sex himself. When his overtures toward a caregiver scare her away, he books an appointment with sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene to lose his virginity.

Date of release
2012-05-02
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (638)
Runtime
1h 35m
Genres
Drama, Romance, Comedy
Director
Ben Lewin

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 2 · Nominations: 1. Including: Sundance Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic; Sundance Special Jury Prize for Ensemble Cast

The Sessions is a 2012 American drama film written and directed by Ben Lewin. It is based on the 1990 article "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate" by Mark O'Brien, an American poet. Paralyzed from the neck down due to polio, he hired a sex surrogate to lose his virginity. John Hawkes and Helen Hunt star as O'Brien and sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene, respectively.

Production

O'Brien was a journalist and poet who was paralyzed from the neck down by polio since his childhood. O'Brien breathed with the support of an iron lung for much of his life. At age 38, he hired sex surrogate Cheryl Cohen-Greene to help him lose his virginity. The film is based on an article O'Brien published about his experiences with Greene, "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate", which appeared in The Sun magazine in 1990.

O'Brien's life was chronicled in the 1996 short documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, directed by Jessica Yu, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. He died in 1999 at the age of 49.

Writer and director Ben Lewin, a polio survivor himself, first read about O'Brien's experiences with a sex surrogate from O'Brien's article "On Seeing a Sex Surrogate" on the Internet. He stumbled onto the article while researching sex and the disabled for a semi-autobiographical sitcom project.

John Hawkes said Lewin met and read with several disabled actors to take on the role of O'Brien but said "none of them felt quite right" for the character. Hawkes was drawn to the script due to Lewin's own experiences as a polio survivor.

To simulate O'Brien's posture, Hawkes used a soccer-ball-sized piece of foam which he laid onto the left side of his back in order to curve his spine. Consequently, some of his organs began to migrate, and he was told by his chiropractor that as a result his spine lost movement.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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