Not even a decade of double-overtime at ILM could remove the rafts of smoke from Hollywood's heritage
Jump to full article: Den of Geek (uk), 2008-10-17
Author: Peter Morae [item undated]
Intro: What, then, are we going to do about the century of screen smoking that sits enmeshed in the very best - as well as the worst - output of cinema over the last 100 years, and television over the last 60 or so? And how can we convincingly omit a practice that was almost universal at a period in time that new historical drama - such as Life On Mars US - might be attempting to depict?
Since 'retro' became so magnetic and profitable - from the sale of old US TV shows in large and affordable DVD box-sets, to actually setting a show like Life On Mars in one of the smokiest and grittiest periods of New York's 20th century history - this is about as thorny a problem for the anti-smoking contingent in Hollywood as it could possibly be.
In the Life On Mars pilot show, as our review noted, people are seen with lit cigarettes, but hold them as if they were incense sticks. Clinton-like, there's no obvious inhaling going on. You can almost see the elaborate storyboarding and political wrangling behind the depiction of smoking in Life On Mars US - the compromises, the arbitrators, the wrangling, and the legally-required presence of the New York Fire Department as soon as one of the shabby tecs lights up a herbal fake in an enclosed set.
By the most conservative estimates, 40% of male adults were smokers in the US in 1973. You can probably add a few percentage points for stress-driven jobs like police work, and loads of points for the criminal fraternity, so any cop drama set in that period is going to have to look smokey or it's going to have to look 'wrong'. . . .
The solutions for historical drama are not clear, but obviously you can't continue to have historical characters nursing cigarettes that they never smoke. Nor can you claim that all your characters fall within the non-smoking bracket in whatever period of history you're trying to depict - even the most rudimentary understanding of demographics won't support it. . . .
In the meantime the tobacco industry rubs its hands at the cultural loophole that lets historical drama fill the silver screen with a miasma of tobacco; for it, Hollywood's future is definitely in the past.
. . .
But while 20-25% of the Western population still smokes, the tobacco paradox will continue to contribute to the problem in the form of legacy content; in what's already 'in the can', on our screens, our re-runs and in our DVD players. The struggle to get that 20% of smokers in the population down to 0% will still prove to be the (continuing) work of decades rather than years if we're to do it without another Volstead act. In the current depressed mood, bringing with it a wistful atavism for times and styles past, it's not the easiest moment for Hollywood to detox.
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