5/27/23
Newsletter #349
The Crack of Dawn
I believe that there is a correlation between smoking cigarettes and creativity. I think that nicotine is a creative stimulant, and if you look back just a little, damn near everybody who was creatively exciting or innovative in the past century smoked. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Creative or not, I’ve found that most smokers are generally the friendliest people; happy to give you a cigarette or a light and pleased to converse while you both smoke. Since we smokers are constantly ostracized and segregated these days, we have plenty to commiserate about. But smokers are generally talkative folk anyway. Perhaps it’s the stimulation of the nicotine. I think it is.
Jean Nicot, French ambassador to Portugal, introduced tobacco in France in the 17th century. He gave his name to the genus Nicotiana to which tobacco belongs.
It pleases me to find out that people I admire smoke. I love seeing old black and white photographs of all my favorite actors, directors and writers puffing away on cigarettes, cigars and pipes. The fact that you never see Rod Serling on film without a cigarette I find impressive.
When John Ford wasn't smoking a pipe, a cigar, or a cigarette, he chewed on a handkerchief.
The great film director William Wyler smoked so much, sitting directly under the lens of the camera, that he frequently blew takes because his smoke was drifting up into the shot. As he got older his wheezing had a tendency to screw up takes as well.
As a cigarette smoker, I’ve had a front row seat watching society turn against smokers, conveniently forgetting that we count, too, whether you like us or not. Isn’t that this fucking beloved first amendment I’m forever hearing about. Nobody is supposed to shame anybody else — even really fat people — but anybody can be overtly mean to a smoker. Well, don’t be mean to the fat guy, and leave me the fuck alone.
In Los Angeles now they have an official security force beside the police – men and women dressed in black with walkie talkies, but no guns – and their job is to rat on anything that looks amiss. They are rats. Their job is to fink. I was on Highland Ave. in Hollywood, right across from the Loew’s Hotel where I was staying, and there were no other people. I sat down on a cement abutment supporting a big AC unit for an office building and lit a cigarette. One of those rats in black, in this case a 30-year-old black woman, sternly told me, “Put that out, you could blow up the whole building.”
I have seriously spent most of my life wandering from restaurant to restaurant, writing in my notebook, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I wrote five screenplays in the Snow White Café on Hollywood Blvd. in the late 1980s.
But you don’t see a photograph of Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, when they’re not smoking.
That’s not true. I just went to Google images of John Wayne and there isn’t a single shot of him smoking. However, if you go to “John Wayne smoking,” there are hundreds of them. Did that happen by mistake?
Actors like Bette Davis, John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, who smoked a lot in a lot of their movies, had to be extremely aware of continuity. I got into a world of shit, continuity-wise, because of smoking in my first movie, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except. There is a scene of two characters in a bunker, standing over a map (some of my better lighting), and one is smoking a cigar and the other a cigarette. Because I didn’t know any better, I let them do whatever they wanted. And neither one ever took a puff at the same time. And it’s a reasonably long scene, like 4-minutes. Instead of cutting for the best performances, as one ought to, I had to cut based strictly on where the hell the cigarette and the cigar were. I made a number of desperate, though clever, cuts because of this. Several times it cuts from the wide, two-shot, just as one of the characters gets the cigarette or cigar to their mouths, then it cuts to a close-up just as they remove it from their mouths, like they changed their mind, like what they had to say was more important than smoking.
What these actors undoubtedly knew — that I had to figure out — was how to use cigarettes as a prop and not get into cutting/continuity trouble. In my movie, If I Had a Hammer, which takes place in 1964, I basically had everybody smoke cigarettes (including the pregnant girl, who is also drinking). I told the actors that if they wanted to use the cigarette as a prop to make a point, mark it in their script and always repeat it. Otherwise, light the cigarette, put it in the ashtray and forget it.
In front of the Loew’s Hotel in Hollywood, where the doorman stands, there are two benches to wait for your ride. No smoking. Smokers have to go around a line of shrubs to where there are no benches, but there is an ashtray. I watched the professionally friendly, heavyset, Latino doorman spend a great deal of his time informing tourists from around the world that they could not smoke there on those benches, but instead had to go behind the shrubs with the five to ten of the rest of us smokers. And indeed if there was any interesting conversation in front of that hotel, that’s where it was.
I’ll end with this terrific anecdote. Maybe twenty years ago I was attending a friend’s grandchild’s Bar Mitzvah at a synagogue not far from here. The service was entirely in Hebrew, so these were not Reform Jews, and I was bored out of my skull. Finally, I got up, exited the auditorium, left the building, walked up the 25-yard walkway to parking lot where they had inconveniently placed an outside ashtray. That’s OK, I was killing time, and that’s what cigarettes are for. Cigarettes are only satisfying while you smoke them. So, I lit my cigarette and took a happy puff. Ah, nicotine. A gray-haired man in a suit stepped up to me and felt compelled to command me to, “Put that out! You’re in front of a house of God.”
I held up the cigarette for better viewing, blew out my happy puff, and said, “Fuck you! Go tell God on me you stupid asshole.”
As Lou Costello used to say, “Don’t get me started.”
And a new day dawns, dag-nab it.