We've never known David Cronenberg to pull any punches, which is why we're more than a little skeptical of the Rosanna Arquette Crash BreastMilkGate scandal presently unfolding thanks to Page Six. It all goes back to 1996, when the actress joined Cronenberg's infamous NC-17 paean to car-crash sexuality less than a year after giving birth to her first daughter. The director, whose handling of everything from mutant children to maggot babies over the years seemed so normal until then, later gave the elder, breastfeeding Arquette a long once-over before her sex in the wreckage with James Spader:

Cronenberg kept staring at me, like in this weird way, and I said, 'What? What?' And he goes, 'I'm really hoping you'll lactate.' . . . At one point, while we were filming, I screamed and my poor milk just shot off.

I [said] to him, 'Oh, I think you may have gone too far' . . . He cut [the scene] and later sent that little bit of film to me . . . I remember saying to [him] . . . 'Well, you cut out the most significant thing I have ever done on film."

Quite a claim from a woman less than a decade removed at the time from Amazon Women on the Moon, and certainly quite a claim from the set of a film where pretty much everything that could go did go. We have to assume her "poor milk" just never made the shot itself; otherwise we just know Cronenberg would have plugged a copy into the Lactated and Unrated Director's Cut DVD years ago.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• ROSANNA'S SCENE TO FORGET [NYP]

Tags: crash | david cronenberg | milked for all its worth | rosanna arquette