Hollywood Urged to Quit

A while ago, a friend who is an esteemed film editor here mentioned that he and his fellow film editors would sometimes go to a movie and click their fingers every time there was an edit. I had never really thought about how many edits there were in a film - hundreds and hundreds as it turns out - but I soon found myself clicking silently and annoyingly through every film I watched. Sometimes I would lose the plot of the film so caught up was I in noting the frequency of the edits. Try it when you are next watching a film on television. I bet you find it addictive.

Fortunately, that phase has passed but only, I fear, to be replaced by a new one. Last week, the veteran Hollywood scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas wrote an extraordinary mea culpa in the New York Times. Eszterhas, who wrote Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Sliver and Fist, admitted in the piece to being "an accomplice in the murder of untold numbers of human beings".

The reason for his confession was that, as a defiant smoker from childhood, he had often inserted smoking scenes into his screenplays and felt that by so doing he may well have encouraged young people to smoke. "A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old," as he put it.

Now Eszterhas has throat cancer and has "made a deal with God. Spare me, I said, and I will try to stop others from committing the same crimes I did." To this end, he is urging all of Hollywood to stop glamourising smoking in movies. No more moody scenes when the tough guy lights up like Humphrey Bogart. No more ciggies hanging provocatively from lower lips of leading ladies.

Of particular concern to him are the smoking scenes he wrote into Basic Instinct, and the smoke that Sharon Stone blows into Michael Douglas's face in that film. Basic Instinct remains his best-known work, not least for the fact that Eszterhas set a new benchmark for screenwriters by getting a $3m (about £2m) fee for it. Now he thinks that the launch of a cigarette called Basic may even have been inspired by the movie. "My hands are bloody," he concludes. "So are Hollywood's."

Now another writer, Frank Freudberg, who wrote an anti-tobacco novel called Gasp a few years ago, has joined battle. In a piece in the Los Angeles Times this week he has urged Eszterhas to put his many contacts to good use and write a screenplay that would undo some of the damage.

"How about Leonardo di Caprio [who smoked charismatically in Titanic] on hands and knees spitting up blood on a shiny linoleum hospital floor?" suggests Freudberg. Er, yes, how about it?

Now in order to take my mind off scenes like that I find myself obsessively counting the number of times cigarettes are lit in films. Last night, I saw a Spanish film about Mad Queen Joan but it was set in the 15th century shortly before Benson and Hedges came into existence, so I remained on tenterhooks throughout.

Hollywood is no doubt watching whether Joe's deal with God works out for him, especially as it appears that no agent was involved in it. If it does, stand by for lots of films when only villains smoke and then die horrible deaths in iron lungs. And perhaps a remake of Breathless.