" I've writen fourteen movies. My characters smoke in many of them, and they look cool and Glamorous doing it.
Smoking was an integral part of many of my screenplays because I was a militant smoker. It was part of a bad-boy image I'd cultivated for a long time smoking, drinking, partying, rock'n'roll.
Smoking, I once believed, was every person's right. Efforts to stop it were politically correct, a Big brother assault on personal freedoms. Second-hand smoke was a non-existent problem invented by professional dogooders. I put all thse views into my scripts.
In one of my movies, Basic Instinct, smoking is part of a sexual subtext. Sharon Stone's character smokes ; Mickael Douglas' is trying to quit. She seduces him with literal and figurative smoke that she blows into his face.
In the movie's most famous and controversial scene, she even has a cigarette in her hand. I'm sure the tobacco companies loved Basic Instinct. One of them even launched a brand of " Basic " cigarettes not long after the movie became a worldwide hit, perhaps inspired by my cigarette-friendly work. My movie made a lot of money ; so did their new cigarette.
Remembering all this, I find it hard to forgive myself. I have been an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings. I am admitting this only because I have made a deal with God.
Spare me, I said, and I will try to stop others from commiting the same crimes I did. Eighteen months ago I was diagnosed with throat cancer, the result of a lifetime of smoking. I am alive but maimed. Much of my larynx is gone. I don't think smoking is every person's right any more. I think smoking should be as illegal as heroin.
[...]
I 'm desperate to see my four boys grow up. I want to do everything I can undo the damage I have done with my own big -screen words and images.
So I say to my colleagues in Hollywood : What we are doing by showing larger-than-life movie stars smoking onscreen is glamorizing smoking. What we are doing by glamorizing smoking is unconscionable. Hollywood films have long championed civil rights and gay rights and commonly call for an end to racism and intolerance. [...] Yet we are the advertising agency and sales force for an industry that kills nearly 10,000 people daily.
A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12 or 14 year-old ( I was 12 when I started to smoke, a geeky inmigrant kid who wanted so vey much to be cool). The gun will go off, yet we hide behind a smokescreen of phrases like " creative freedom" and " artistic expression ". Those lofty words are lies designed, at best, to obscure laziness. I konw. I have told those lies. The truth is that ther are 1,000 better and more original ways to reveal a character's personality.
Screenwriters konw, too, that some movie stars are more likely to play a part if they can smoke because they are so addicted to smoking that they have difficulty stopping even during the shooting of a scene. The screenwriter writing smoking scenes for the smoking star is part pf a vicious and deadly circle.
My hands are bloody ; so are Hollywood's. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don't wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it upon millions of others ".
Teste de Joe ESZTERHAS, publié sur le 'Toronto Star' un hebdomadaire canadien...
Bon, evidement j'ai savamment ôté les commentaires de petit chrétien rédempteur qui va demander pardon à son "good Lord", mais le fait est là.
Sur le coup, j'ai aimé ce texte par sa justesse. Je ne vais pas arreter de fumer maintenant pour autant.
J'y reflechit beaucoup pourtant, passe du 'je freine ma consommation' à 'vite un packet et puis meerde!'.
J'ai des passages 'immagination de l'interieur de mes petits poumons roses qui se salissent...', et evidemment ceux 'bonheur de la nicotine qui me parcours les veines; plaisir de poser la cigarette à ses levres, inspirer, profiter...'
Je n'ai pas envie de me casser la tête. Ca fait 3 ans que je me dis 'j'arrete quand je veux', mais pas une fois que je l'avais réelement envisagé. Il m'est arrivé de ne pas fumer pendant 2 voire 3 semaines pendant ces 3 ans. Aujourd'hui, c'est quitte ou double.
J'ai 18 ans. Mais au damn de mes parents, de Mylene et d'autres, de mon porte monnaie, de ma santé, malgré le nombre de fois où je me suis posé le fatal ultimatum et où je ne l'ai pas respecté, ce n'est pas aujourd'hui, voire même en 2009, que je m'arreterais.
