New Yourk, USA
— When it comes to movie
character-building, cigarettes are
an easy choice. But the prop’s
mystique was traceable to reality,
of course. Before James Bond, there
was his creator: Ian Fleming, who
was known to smoke 80 cigarettes a
day.
In a similar vein, a bit of
character-building appeared over the
weekend in a Week in Review article
by Mark Mazzetti, who covers the
intelligence beat for The New York
Times. While exploring the
complicated relationship between
American and Pakistani spies, he
described the “odd affectations” of
Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who
headed Pakistan’s Directorate for
Inter-Services Intelligence until
last year:
During meetings, he will often spend
several minutes carefully
hand-rolling a cigarette. Then,
after taking one puff, he stubs it
out.
Amid high-stakes discussions about
tracking down the Taliban and Al
Qaeda, no one apparently bothered to
ask him why he so quickly discarded
the self-made smokes. The intrigue
was only enhanced by the C.I.A.’s
description of the general, included
in the article, as “a master
manipulator.”
Perhaps it takes one to know one. In
2003, Kirk Douglas explained why
smoking became so prevalent in
movies in a Times Op-Ed:
Many actors have trouble with their
hands. Should they put them in their
pockets? Should they put them behind
their back? Do they have them at
their sides? The cigarette answered
the question. You take one out of
the pack, you tap it, light it and
inhale deeply. Then you exhale. If
you are clever, you can learn to
blow smoke rings. You can point with
a cigarette. You can tap the ashes
into an ashtray, and put it out
gently in the ashtray or fiercely —
whatever the scene requires.
Or perhaps General Kayani was more
vain than manipulative. Joe
Eszterhas, who wrote the screenplays
of “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls,”
wrote in The New York Times in 2002
that he often added cigarettes to
the scene because actors “look cool
and glamorous doing it.”
Stricken with throat cancer from his
own smoking, Mr. Eszterhas began a
campaign against Hollywood’s tobacco
tendencies. There has been progress
in recent years, with Universal
Studios banning them from
youth-targeted films.
Mr. Eszterhas argued that nothing
was lost by cutting cigarettes out,
saying “there are 1,000 better and
more original ways to reveal a
character’s personality.” Just tell
that to General Kayani.
By
Mike Nizza
The New York Times
|
© 2007
Coalition for Tobacco Control in Pakistan, All Rights Reserved |