Media Mom on Thank You for Smoking (Chicago Tribune)

`Smoking' is about thinking for yourself

By Nell Minow
Special to the Tribune
Published March 30, 2006


"Thank You For Smoking" is a satire with particular bite in Washington these days, as it hinges on the exploits of Nick Naylor, a seemingly soulless tobacco lobbyist.

But though lobbying scandals have been in the news recently, that's just a coincidence, say the film's creators.

"This film is about parenting more than it is about cigarettes," said screenwriter/director Jason Reitman. "You can select your friendships, you and your wife can get divorced, you can distance yourself from your family and surround yourself with people who agree with you, but you can't separate yourself from your kid." At the heart of the story is an indictment of "the Yuppie Nuremberg defense," which is how the film refers to characters who use "I'm just trying to pay the mortgage" as a moral rationale. The film makes it clear that the "mortgage" excuse is one way of saying we want to care for our families.

But it also points out the yearning to be someone our children will respect and want to live up to.

The example set by parents is clearly an important issue for both Reitman and for Christopher Buckley, author of the best-selling book on which the film is based. Both followed well-known and highly accomplished fathers in their choice of careers: Ivan Reitman is a Hollywood producer and director ("Animal House," "Ghostbusters"), and William F. Buckley is a writer and editor (National Review, "God and Man at Yale," the Blackford Oakes series of spy novels).

In the movie, Nick tells his young son Joey that what matters most is thinking for yourself.

"It's not a pro-smoking movie; it's not an anti-smoking movie. It's about political correctness," Buckley said. His inspiration for the book was a woman from the Tobacco Institute he saw on what was then called the "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS. She was responding to yet another set of statistics about the harm caused by cigarettes. When Buckley heard her say, "We try to work with these so-called scientific organizations," he says, "I fell in love. What an interesting job that must be."

Buckley met with her, and "the Yuppie Nuremberg defense" sprang from their conversation.

"I said, `There's a question I'm dying to ask but I feel a little awkward.' She said, `I know. What is a nice girl like me doing in a place like this? I'm just trying to pay the mortgage,'" Buckley recalls.

"Who at age 10 wanted to grow up and be a tobacco lobbyist?" he asks.

"Life has a way of inflicting compromise on us. I recently saw former Congressman Howard Baker greeted by another Washington lion, who said, `Howard, I hear you're flying the flag for Toshiba these days!' Bob Dole was doing Viagra ads. It's always about the mortgage. The world would really be better off if everyone rented."

"I couldn't have invented [disgraced lobbyist] Jack Abramoff," Buckley says. "It seems curious that the movie is coming out as a big Washington lobbying scandal is unfolding. There's a weird fortuitousness, but it's a different cat. [Tobacco lobbyist] Nick's not in it for the money. He has a weird nobility, a kind of defiance, and a libertarian streak. He doesn't like being told what to think or do."

In the film, Nick and his only friends, the lobbyists for the gun and alcohol industries, are not the only ones who have to decide what compromises they will have to make to pay the mortgage. Among other characters facing some moral quandaries in the film are anti-smoking crusaders -- a senator from Vermont and Lorne Lutch, the one-time star of a series of cigarette ads, now dying of lung cancer.

In one of the movie's key scenes, Naylor brings the former advertising icon of independent cowboy spirit a suitcase full of money. At first, Lutch refuses the money. Naylor begins by agreeing with Lutch and the next thing you know, Lutch is switching positions.

"That scene is absolutely artistic," Buckley says. "Naylor walks him through a series of doors until he finds himself saying, `I don't suppose I could denounce you for half the money.'"

Reitman wanted Sam Elliott, best known for cowboy-loner roles in films such as "The Hi-Lo Country" and "Tombstone," to play Lutch. Elliott at first said no, for moral reasons. He did not think the character should accept the money.

Reitman went to talk to him, knowing he had to be every bit as persuasive as his fictional lobbyist.

"You've played these noble characters your whole life," Reitman told Elliott. "This is a real character, vulnerable."

Elliot took the role, and Reitman thinks that his scene is the best one in the film. The characters are "doing this complicated dance, almost like choreography. The control is constantly switching. Who has the power? It switches every four or five lines."

Reitman says he chose Buckley's book because, "I'd never read anything that funny that was kind of brashly libertarian. It seemed to be a book about taking responsibility for your actions. Nick at first says he does it to pay the mortgage, but he cares about his son and teaches his son to be a decent human being."

"Joey gives [Nick] a chance to be a parent, to teach him to be an independent thinker. You can't just say to your kids `Don't smoke.' You have to teach them to make decisions. Joey is a window into Nick's soul."

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Nell Minow reviews movies each week as The Movie Mom for Yahoo! Movies and for radio stations across the country. She can be reached at moviemom@moviemom.com.

Interview with the director of "The Devil and Daniel Johnston"

I interviewed Jeff Feurzeig, director of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a documentary about the artist/singer/songwriter who has struggled with bi-polar disorder but produced prodigious amounts of highly acclaimed work.

I have to begin by asking why your interview of Gibby Haines [of the Butthole Surfers] takes place as he is in the dentist chair. Were you making a statement, was that his only availability, or both?

Both! I had seen the Butthole Surfers in their first tour in the 1980's. They projected medical films, like operations, on the screen in front of their fire, strobes, and naked dancing girls when they played. It was quite a spectacle. So this was a reflection of that, plus that was when he was available. He had seven cavities. But he was under novacaine and just kept on talking. The dentist was really into it.

I saw that you referred to Daniel Johnston's view of the world as "unfiltered." In what way? Isn't mental illness a filter?

Madness is the key that removes the filters we all have from our exterior and interior life, our public life and private life. Most writers, musicians, whatever,
their goal is to present their raw emotion what they're feeling inside. But I don't think everyone's able to do that. Daniel is able to do that and that is the
power of his music and art. Anything that he is feeling inside comes directly out all his thoughts and feelings, so incredibly raw and honest. To my ears
and eyes that is very refreshing. It sucks you into his mind.

He is an enigma. The only way to know him is through his music and art. I don't feel i know him because there is no give and take in that relationship. Any relationship is a two way street and he can't do that. Kathy [McCarty, who appears in the film] fell in love with the art and couldn't love the man. She did a tribute album and married his best friend.

In many ways they're all heroic, his parents are heroic. Jeff Tartakov [the manager who devoted his life to Johnston and then was replaced] -- this is a tragic story but out of that tragedy there is incredible beauty. Jeff was like [the Beatles' first manager] Brian Epstein, so devoted, believed so deeply. The movie is very much a tribute to him, for him as much as Daniel.

Do people respond to Johnston's real-life story or his art?

People laugh and cry. That's real. That's talent, period. All art is subjective and its up to the audience to walk away with everything or nothing. If they have open hearts and ears its a wonderful epic journey to take.

Why was making this film important to you?

That was my life's work. I thought about making this film since 1990. I've been obsessing about his art and music since 1985. It all came together on the radio show.

All the theories I had about him presented themselves as truths; there was incredible humor and comedy that should not be overlooked. The radio drama was just another medium that he did so well, like when he was playing all the roles and directing himself in those early films, making humor out of the darkness. He was like [the Woody Allen character] Zelig. He could transform himself. He is in control of his art. I believe he plays the guitar that way intentionally, not that he is not as good on the guitar as the piano. That authentic, straightforward, simple guitar music is his signature sound. This is the first time we've had a chancde to go as close to that fire that burns where madness and art and genius meet, but doesn't glorify it or sugar coat it on purpose.


Who understands him best?

If anyone understands him, it's probably his mom and dad. But the only way even the dad knows what's going on in his mind is when he reads the captions over his shoulder, to really know him is through his music and his art. Daniel is always the smartest person in the room but has arrested development. He's stuck in this high school world, those characters are very real to him and he has relationships with them. He's having a party in his head at all times. You can't really reach him. Maybe Casper the Friendly Ghost is closest.

The Johnston family asked me to do this. They said I should share their story to help other families. They made me make them a promise to tell the truth. They said, "Don't leave out the drugs and LSD. Just make sure you tell everything."

In a world of voiceover superstars...

This hilarious 1997 clip from the Key Art awards features all five of those golden-voiced guys who do movie trailers.

Et tu, Sesame Street?

In a shameful example of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em so you, too, can make money by pretending that something harmful to children benefits them, Sesame Street has tarnished its once-impeccable reputation by entering the "Baby Einstein" marketplace. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood statement calls on Zero to Three to avoid tarnishing its previously impeccable reputation by withdrawing its endorsement. Zero to Three founder Barry Brazelton expressed his dismay in a letter sent by CCFC, according to the Washington Post.

But perhaps even more stinging is the rebuke by T. Berry Brazelton, the famous baby doctor who helped found Zero to Three nearly 30 years ago. "I absolutely support the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that children under two be kept away from screen media. It's too expensive for them physically as well as psychologically," he wrote late last week in CCFC's protest letter to Zero to Three.

Short films online

I am a big fan of You Tube and Google Video.  Yes, there are way too many clips of people lip-synching and dumb pranks and stunts. I know your babies/kittens/girlfriends are adorable, but forgive me for telling you -- not quite as adorable as you think. Many are dull, inept, and pointless. And people -- spelling and grammar count.

I keep going back because I really do enjoy the insouciance, irreverence, and immediacy of the best ones. I have particularly liked:

Why I Got Fired from Apple (featuring a poem about a Canadian Fed Ex lady)

A sweet song about true love and devotion from Tripod

The Star Wars Lego symphony, conducted, of course, by Darth Vadar.

Speaking of Star Wars, check out this very fine light saber clip, too.

This week's reviews: Shaggy Dog, Failure to Launch, and Hills Have Eyes

The critics are [insert adjective here] above all things.....

Just as "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" is about to be released, the author of the book has been exposed as a fraud. Not a James Frey/CEO of Radio Shack
"I exaggerated to make myself look better" fraud, but an all-out "this person never really existed and all of the facts are made up" fraud. The book was supposed to have been written by abused child/child prostitute/recovering drug addict/transgendered J.T. Leroy. Touted and befriended by various glitterati like Courtney Love and Lou Reed, the author of books that were lauded for their freshness, frankness, and maturity, it turns out that "Leroy" was the creation of a 40-something woman who handled the writing and phone calls and had her sister-in-law handle the public appearances.

The studio is adopting the attitude that if you can't hide it, make it the reason to buy a ticket.

The movie's tagline is frank, if self-aggrandizing: "Behind the greatest hoax of our time is the heartbreaking story that started it all." The greatest hoax of our time? That's a pretty hotly contested title in this era of imaginary WMDs and the Enron trial.

I almost said that the movie tagline was as grandiose as its imaginary author. It's just about impossible to resist metonymy -- using the fake Leroy story as a symbol for the movie -- or using the movie's title to comment on "Leroy." I'm going to watch and see how the critics try to do that without being too obvious.

First one out of the gate is pretty good. The New Yorker's Anthony Lane
says: "In short, if you think the heart is deceitful, you should meet the author."

Next?

Many thanks to the wonderful
cinematical site for directing me to this solo animation blog by Pixar's Jim Capobianco. Not only does it provide the pleasure of seeing a highly imaginative guy's highly individual effort (like a flute soloist having fun on a break from performing with a symphony), but he has some very worthwhile thoughts that apply to all of us when it comes to making time for the things that matter to us:

Here's the thing I realized, that what ever you can do on your project each day is valuable. May it be five minutes or five hours. 5 drawings or 5 feet of film. You are 5 minutes, 5 drawings closer to your goal. The important thing is that you do it. Even if you have to eventually throw out those drawings, you had to do them to get to the next five. So quit whining that you don't have the time because you do. By the way one show I can't give up is the Daily Show, which was a nice 30 minute break before diving into the work. Then they had to go and add the Colbert Report! Oh, the world and time are against you, fight back with those five minutes.

The Parents Television Council released a new report on violence and other inappropriate content in programming designed for young children. They generously invited me to contribute a statement and appear at the press conference to share my concerns.

This week's reviews: 16 Blocks and Aquamarine

Tyler Perry talks to VH1 about his favorite movies

In this interview, Tyler Perry, writer/director/composer and actor in the title role and two other parts in "Medea's Family Reunion," lists his favorite African American movies. It's a great list, and I was especially glad to see the underrated "Josephine Baker Story" on the list. It must have been a special thrill for him to have its star, Lynn Whitfield, play the scheming Victoria in his films.

I've just seen my life flash before my eyes

Take a look at Salon.com Arts & Entertainment Video Dog -- it has a four-minute compilation of the title screen of about a zillion movies.
And here they are one at a time.

Getting to know an Unknown White Male

Confounded doctors admit that they’ve only seen it in movies and textbooks. But in this documentary a mystery, perhaps the ultimate mystery occurs.

A healthy and successful young man wakes up on a train to Coney Island to discover – nothing. He has no idea who he is and nothing to indicate his name or address. He has completely lost his “episodic memory,” all of the details of his own personal experience – relationships, education, work, his own subjective reactions to the world. He retains the basics of his “semantic memory,” enough to let him conclude that the place to go for help is a police station. But everything else is just…gone.

And so, he goes from discovering an almost endless nothing to discovering an infinite everything. Like a visitor from another planet, he is an adult man for whom everything he sees is brand new. His family and friends are reassuring but also confusing – is he still the man they say they cared about if he cannot remember any of the shared experiences they describe? The wonders the rest of us take a little bit for granted, from the ocean to chocolate mousse, come to him pure and undiluted.

After a few days of detective work, he learns his name: Doug Bruce. But after months of medical tests and trying to remember the people and places everyone tells him were once part of his life, he still does not know who Doug Bruce is. Or, he does know who Doug Bruce is. He just doesn’t know who he was.

A documentary, “Unknown White Male,” takes us on this journey with Doug, the man who lost his memory. Director Rupert Murray was a close friend of Doug’s before he lost his memory. “I wrote him a letter and said, ‘Hi, I used to be a friend of yours and I'd like to make a film.’“

His movie is not just the story of Doug’s journey to finding himself but a meditation on the nature of identity, memory, and connection.

Murray and I met in Washington D.C.’s Madison Hotel to talk about the film.

What were you trying to say with this film?

I hope that people will apply this story to their own lives. That's the really interesting thing about this; it’s an amazingly rare story, an amazingly rare medical condition visited upon a unique character. The film allows you to experience in your own life the revelations and experiences that Doug does. With a documentary you allow yourself -- the way I filmed it particularly -- I wanted you to experience what it might have been like to wake up in Coney Island and not know where you are, to taste ice cream at age 35 for the first time.

How is Doug now?

He’s finished school, starting to become a photographer, still with the girlfriend you see in the film.

Why did he decide to go back to studying photography when everything in his life was so uncertain and unsettled?

It was something for him to do at the time, something other than wandering around the streets of New York watching. Everything was so new to him that he found it fascinating to watch people behave, how men reacted around women, how people dressed. Photography was a new experience for him that he felt quite at home with. He wanted to know whether he could regain that skill. A lot of it was already wired into his procedural memory but he was a quick learner with a huge appetite for information and experience. His memories are still there, he just doesn't have access to them.

How did you use the techniques of film to create the sense of unsettledness as he tries to cope with his lost of memory and of freshness as he encounters everything for what feels like the first time?

By filming those particular items and putting them in the film. It sounds very simple, but that’s what it was. That was all me eating in that time lapse, by the way. I cut it together, a montage of me going to four restaurants around my office, as Doug described the feeling of eating different foods for the first time.

How do you plan for a movie when you have no idea how it is going to end?

Welcome to the world of documentaries!

Do you consider yourself friends? Is he a new friend or your old friend?

Both -- we're very close now. He’s there and he's not there. The more I get to know the new person the more the old person becomes very old, very far away. He is essentially the same, getting closer, converging with to the person he was going to be.

But he used to be sarcastic and more guarded. He seems so different now.

If you had a bad car accident you'd be frightened about riding in a car, you’d make the most of your day, you’d try to be nicer to people. Catastrophes have an effect on your life; if they didn’t you wouldn't be human. He is different because of the all-encompassing effect on his life. Having to deal with the situation that was that emotionally draining gave him great strength. It is a lesson to us all that he held it together and got it under control and worked through it.

Stephanie Zacherek's Overlooked Performances list

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek has a terrific piece about the performances that should have been nominated for Oscars. I was especially happy to see her mention Joan Plowright's wonderful performance in "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont." Since she makes a full disclosure, I will, too. The wonderfully sensitive script was written by my friend Ruth Caplin. Here's what Zacharek has to say about Plowright:

Let's end with one performance that relatively few people caught in theaters; this is one that will have to be savored on DVD. Judi Dench is a marvelous actress, and in the performance she gives in "Mrs. Henderson Presents" she is, at least, serviceably enjoyable. But in a more perfect world, the actress the voting members of the Academy would have noticed is Joan Plowright, in a small, sweet picture called "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont." (It was directed by Dan Ireland who -- full disclosure -- is a friend of mine.) Plowright plays an aging widow of modest means who moves into a humbly appointed London hotel, where she finds a small community of new friends who are around her own age. But she also happens to meet a much younger man, a somewhat aimless aspiring writer (played by the impossibly charming newcomer Rupert Friend, who also played Wickham in "Pride & Prejudice"), with whom she finds a kinship that renders their age difference inconsequential.

Plowright isn't particularly well known to American movie audiences except as an "older" actress; her long and varied career in the English theater is a life apart from the Plowright most of us know. But Plowright intuitively understands the difference between playing a character and playing an age. How many of us have heard older friends and relatives lament that even though they feel 20 inside, their bodies are giving out around them, betraying the people they really are, and really want to be? Plowright opens that world of feeling to us in this compact, resolutely unsentimental performance. We may not know much about what the young actress Plowright was like onstage, and yet somehow, she's right here before us, in Mrs. Palfrey, particularly in the look of mischievous willfulness that flashes across her face now and then. Even her tentative, careful steps betray traces of youthful vitality.

I suppose we should be grateful that the Academy is willing, at least in the nomination process, to pay some attention to actresses over 65. It's just too bad that this time it couldn't be Plowright. She's had a longer career than most American moviegoers are aware of. Maybe it takes that many years to know how to play, to any convincing degree, the feeling of being 20.

How do we know great acting?

I have a great deal of respect for the Washington Post's fine critic Ann Hornaday (her "idolspize" piece was a real gem), but found myself disagreeing a bit with today's Imitation Flavored article about what distinguishes performing from impersonating.

She puts Reese Witherspoon in "Walk the Line" and Jamie Foxx in "Ray" into the second category. Okay, I liked both very much but that's just a difference of opinion and taste. Samw with her (widely shared) admiration for Amy Adams in "Junebug," which I thought added little to the exquisite work she did in "Catch Me if You Can." For me, "Junebug's" standouts were the always brilliant Celia Weston and the always-intriguing Alessandro Nivola. The scene where he sings a hymn a capella is the highlight of the movie for me.

I agree with her completely that what makes a performance great is when it is "about people and their lives, rathr than mere characters and a plot" and that we love to see performances where we can't catch them acting.

We disagree, though, on how to find that. Hornaday has a great quote from acting coach Larry Moss: "a performance that has enormous technique, filled to the brim with what I call emotional justification" (so far, so good). But then he explains where it comes from: "that's the private work the actor does to identify within himself the emotional cost of a character's desires." That's a good description of the "method" style of acting. But I don't think that's the only way to achieve a great performance and I am pretty sure that there's no way to tell from the outside whether an actor is plumbing his own emotional depths to create the character from the outside in or using some other technique. I saw a discussion on PBS some years ago between Helen Hayes, a traditional outside-in performer, and Maureen Stapleton, a method actor. Their gracious good manners and considerable acting chops did not quite disguise the way each was disturbed by the other's description of how she prepared for a role. But I've seen both perform, on stage and on screen, and whatever they did to get there is fine with me. If you can get past the obsequious self-regard of James Lipton's notecard questions, you can get a wonderful sense of the range of techniques and approaches of different actors on "Inside the Actors Studio." Sally Fields was especially thoughtful and candid on this point.

I don't think our readers care much about how actors find their characters. Such a focus is a distraction from the main work of art, like walking around behind the magician to see how the trick is performed, rather than focusing on the impact of the illusion. You can't say that both aren't equally valid (or you'll come across as bossy) but you can say that her approach is better suited for mechanical engineers who want to analyze how the trick was performed than for an audience of thrill seekers who want to be charmed and regaled.

Critics and paying audience members should look for performances that make use think -- make us know -- that the character has a life that goes beyond the scene and beyond the edges of the screen. We want to know that this character buys groceries and goes to the dentist and is wondering whether he remembered to lock the door, even as he's cross-examining a witness or shooting at the bad guys. The actors who show us a real person instead of star power and wisecracks are the ones we should treasure. With any luck, they will keep us so absorbed that we won't have time to wonder whether they got there from dredging up childhood traumas or picking up mannerisms from someone they saw in the street.

An article that influenced me a great deal described the "movie magic" of certain classic performances created by editing an actor's takes, as when Hitchcock reoriented the action around Montgomery Clift's eccentric head jerks to make it appear that he was turning his head to look at something happening off screen. The result was what appeared to be an unusually focused "performance." Whether that performance was Clift's or Hitchcock's should not matter to the audience or to the critic.

You be the editor

anyfilms.net gives you six scenes from a movie and lets you assemble them in any order you like. All the elements are there -- a pretty girl in a bar, a mysterious suitcase, lots of money, some underwear, and a gun. Try all the combinations and see if you can solve the mystery.

The Sounds of Movie Critic Silence

A new study by marketing professors concludes that

most critics passed on films that generally fell within the neutral range. But 13 of the 46 critics in the study showed a greater tendency to be silent about movies that their colleagues disliked. On the other hand, three critics -- Hazel-Dawn Dumpert of LA Weekly; Elvis Mitchell, formerly of The New York Times, and Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today -- seemed more likely to pass on films that won a "thumbs-up" from other reviewers.

The authors say that next they will focus on which critics seem to have the greatest impact on box office. This study of "silence" is interesting in light of the astonishing number of "cold opens" this year, the number of movies that were not screened for critics in time for reviews before opening day.

The Five Best Movies for Shareholders

Sometimes my two jobs overlap. An interview with me in Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine this month inludes my thoughts on The Five Best Movies for Shareholders.

Vote for the worst movie ever

Slate is conducting a contest to determine the worst movies ever in three categories: western, biopic, and musical. Be sure to listen to this podcast to enjoy the commentary and clips from the nine nominees and cast your vote by March 2 with an email to badmovieguy@gmail.com.

Lazy Muncie

One of my favorite things about the new technology is the way it enables people to respond to art -- entering into a dialogue or adding an enhancement, the way Marcel Duchamp responded to the Mona Lisa by giving her a moustache. This response to the SNL's "Lazy Sunday" is a delight that gave me more laughs in three minutes than "Date Movie" and "Pink Panther" did put together. If you don't think so, you can go to Fort Wayne!