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Gee, thanks, Joe. You didn't know, in your script for "Basic Instinct," for example, that you were creating attractive, heroic characters whose smoking was much of what made them cool? You had no inkling that adolescents would imitate them as soon as they walked out of the theater? But you knew, I guess, you were getting $3 million a script.
When my anti-tobacco novel "Gasp" (about a journalist diagnosed with lung cancer and determined to destroy the tobacco industry) was published 1996, it got great reviews, made headlines around the world, even triggered an FBI investigation.
My agents shopped the novel to almost every studio in Hollywood. They were stunned when time and again they were told that there was little room on the big screen for a grim take on what cigarettes do to those who buy them.
Studios said it was unbelievable that Marty Muntor, my hero, could make the leap from mild-mannered news editor to the man who crippled Big Tobacco by poisoning cigarettes. . .
I respect Eszterhas' cancer-ward conversion, despite its late date. But there's more that he may wish to apologize for: Was he part of filmdom's inner circle that squelched the artistic talent that had plenty to say about the tobacco industry and its sub-rosa marketing division, Hollywood?
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