Several Directors, etc have claimed (Clint Eastwood for one) that smoking was “necessary” to the film. :dubious:
But I have my doubts. I think few would notice and almost no-one would complain if it was missing.
I have never, ever heard anyone say “You know, I might have liked that film if it had more smoking in it”.
The only time smoking was noticeable by it’s absence was “Thank You for Smoking” (a great film, btw) .
Note that they put in only a couple of smoking scenes in Saving Private Ryan, but at no time did i feel the film was unrealistic.
True, smoking was endemic in that period. So were hacking coughs, stained teeth, or even everyday things like urinating, taking a crap, etc, but rarely are any of those commonly portrayed.
I actually started smoking again (years ago) after watching Pulp Fiction. I almost tried to go to the lobby to buy them DURING the movie I wanted a hit so bad … and this was after not having smoked for a couple years!
Sometimes it fits. Flight, a Denzel Washington movie from a couple years ago, had its main character smoking. It fit the character’s personality, basically that of a hopeless drunk & substance abuser.
I posted something about this in another thread. I’m active in regional theater and have spent a lot of time around actors.
The reason there’s so much smoking in movies is because most actors, directors, and screenwriters are smokers themselves. It’s as simple as that. All of their talk about how “smoking is necessary for the film” is, for the most part, disingenuous bullshit.
The tide is gradually turning. When I started in theater in the mid-80s, I would return home from rehearsals with my clothes reeking of cigarette smoke (and I’m not a smoker). Laws limiting smoking in businesses and public buildings have done a lot to curtail this, but in any professional theater you’ll still see actors dashing out to the alley for a smoke during intermission or after the show.
One of Arthur C. Clarke’s late novels (I forget which one) described 20th-century films being digitally altered to remove smoking, because people in the future found it so repulsive. At the time he wrote that, I didn’t think it was likely, but now I’m not so sure.
Yes, I had suspicions, but it’s been decades since I was in the business. Thanks.
I think it’s mostly a pay off by Big Tobacco. It’s really easy to do, they just have one of their non-tobacco spin-off companies hand over the product placement or other funding.
It does ‘take me out’ of a film or TV drama a bit when you have several characters drinking or doing drugs, but they are all clean-living enough to not smoke cigarettes at all.
The only scene that comes to mind of a character smoking where the act was specifically useful to the scene (well, other than bits where somebody uses a cigarette to ignite a pool of gasoline or whatever) is a brief moment in Aliens. Ripley is still traumatized from events in the earlier film, not sleeping (or having nightmares when she tries), working a crappy job well beneath her abilities, annoyed about being disbelieved and told she was crazy by corporate stooges… there’s a shot of her in a near-catatonic state, in her crapping future-slum apartment with a cigarette in her unmoving hand, burned down and showing several inches of unbroken ash. It shows her emotional withdrawal and disconnect, I figure. I don’t recall her smoking at any other point in the film.
George Clooney and “Good Night and Good Luck” needed the smoking, both for historical verisimilitude, and…it looked so darn good in the beautiful black-and-white photography. It was wonderfully artistic.
And…men of that period, not smoking, would have been as artificial and contrived as if they hadn’t been wearing shoes.
The most annoying and unjustified smoking in films has to be anything by James Cameron. It was bad enough in Titanic with his sleazy explanation that he wanted to “show that they were rebels”, but having Sigourney Weaver’s character smoke in Avatar was just utterly craven.
Smoking is “business.” It’s something the actor can do while speaking his lines that makes the the character come alive and allows for greater dramatic expression. A character can pause between lines to take a puff or to light a cigarette. Taking out a pack of cigarettes gives the actor something to do.
It also helps define character. At a basic level, going back to the old days, a cigar smoker was probably rich, a pipe smoker was probably an intellectual, and a cigarette smoker was a regular guy (though a female smoker was more likely a temptress). Now, it identifies a lower class person, or someone who’s obsessed or self-destructive.
Not to mention gestures like lighting another person’s cigarette – Hollywood shorthand for flirting.
In the 30s, you would often see people in moving making a drink (usually from a bar in the living room with a miraculously filled bucked of ice). It was the same thing: it gave the actors something to do while speaking.
I don’t know if smoking is “necessary” in most mvies, buit occasionally verisimillitude calls for it.
A movie about Groucho Marx that DIDN’T show him with his trademark cigar would be stupid and dishonest. Same with a WW2 movie that didn’t show Douglas MacArtrhur with a pipe.
On a sort of related subject, some years back, I was both amused and annoyed when the Franklin Roosevelt statue at the newly built FDR Memorial showed the President in a wheelchair (he NEVER appeared in a wheelchair in public) but without a cigarette in a cigarette holder!
COME ON, folks, that cigarette holder was FDR’s trademark! Taking it away was dishonest.
“Craven”? You mean he’s scared of the pro-smoking lobby who might torpedo his career if he doesn’t include a scene in a movie where a character smokes? And he wishes he didn’t have to include it, but he buckled under the pressure, like a bitch?
