I was commissioned to write this a few years ago. A24—the indie film production company—published a book about the fashion of the film set, the style of ‘film workers’. I worked on film sets for three, four years in the mid-nineties. I worked on Half Baked, where my job was to operate the elevator in Mount Sinai hospital—where scenes were being shot—whenever Dave Chappelle and Jim Breuer wanted to go downstairs to smoke a joint, which was often. I worked on Dirty Work, with Norm McDonald, on The Long Kiss Goodnight with Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson, and on Earth: Final Conflict, one of the lesser known Star Trek franchises. I worked on countless movies and television shows, and never found the environment inspiring, fashion wise. I found it cargo pants and cargo shorts heavy, riddled with cocaine, and essentially sponsored by Oakley.
Here we go.
Every hurricane, by nature’s design, rages chaotically around its own eye.
Beyond the context of meteorology, the ‘eye of the hurricane’ has become a pithy descriptor of many things.
A large, family Christmas dinner—historically raucous and populated by personalities—will include some sober, equanimous aunt or uncle, known for their ability to to manage drunks and feuding cousins with aplomb. The next morning, when forgiveness and hangovers have been established, they may be referred to as their family’s “eye of the hurricane.”
Every family is a weather system.
A film crew is a provisional family. A day on set, Christmas dinner.
On set, as during any family get-together, countless egos are present. Certain agendas, covert or overt, are in play. And always, as in any family, one figure occupies the centre. They either work to maintain, or actively challenge, any sense of calm. At a family get-together it’s Uncle Terry, with the unpopular opinions and strange girlfriend, or Aunt Linda, with the gossip about Terry and she brought her own box of wine, who dominate conversation, keep people in check, and clearly don't care what anyone thinks.
On the set of a film, Uncle Terry and Aunt Linda are always played by the director.
To maintain calm inside of chaos requires the ability to self-regulate. It could be argued that every living creature is a hurricane, and that each embodied hurricane requires its own eye, its own mechanism of self-regulation.
“Many directors are heavy smokers.”
This is what I learned when commissioned to write this essay.
On the set of a film, the eye of the eye is the classic, ever sexy, never less popular so never more cool, cigarette.
It makes sense. As someone who smoked for almost three decades, I can testify to the enormously self-soothing, self-regulatory power of the cigarette.
In 2023, the cigarette offers another appealing function. By virtue of its known toxicity, its rank carcinogenic (and often banned/illegal) status, the cigarette creates distance. To be in charge is to be both feared and admired. Cigarettes have become loaded guns; portents of gruesome death. In today’s climate, a director smoking openly on set might as well be polishing a machete. You get to know who’s interesting, who’s trustworthy, and who’s not worth considering when you flaunt your acquaintanceship with danger—and disdain for life, law and custom—in mixed company. If people approach, you can trust them with your life, and your craft.
Anyone else is a cop, a coward or a cuckold.
I quit smoking in 2021.
Smoking is the best thing, the dumbest thing, in the world.
I miss it terribly.
I miss it more when I see this photo of Francois Truffault, reminding me of one of the other wonderful things about cigarettes.
Smoking looks great. Smoking is stylish. Those who know how to smoke well are, generally, superior to others. They look better than people who aren’t smoking, so long as you don’t think about what they’re doing to themselves, allowing science and reality to taint something which should never be tainted by either.
Fashion.
I never once, in all my time as a smoker, thought to carry my pack rolled up in the bottom of my sleeve like Truffault has in this photo. What a genius! I’m tempted to start again just to see if I can pull off the look. In his ultra-French manner, stylishly storing his pack where no American ever thought to, he reveals the secondary—or tertiary—function of cigarettes for a director: unit of measurement, tool, time management device. Because just beneath that pack of smokes, his watch.
“Hurry up and wait,” is the classic description of time spent working on a film.
Nothing goes better with waiting than smoking.
Nothing is done in a hurry like smoking, stealing puffs, crushing the butt underfoot and moving on.
A cigarette, in the mouth of a professional smoker, can be smoked from end to end in seven puffs. Seven puffs can be as long as they need to be. One minute, six. Waiting for someone to adjust the lights; seven puffs. Waiting for someone to take their mark; seven puffs. Waiting for someone to call someone back from their trailer, to return from craft services, to run a line, to fix a camera; seven puffs.
There’s a story I like about Joni Mitchell, folk singer and esteemed member of the nineteen-sixties cultural avant garde.
Important to note is that Mitchell was and is an iconoclast—some musical analog of an auteur—a woman who succeeded in a male dominated industry, who called Bob Dylan a “plagiarist”, and Leonard Cohen a “phony Buddhist.”
Eight, maybe ten years ago, Mitchell was invited to give a lecture at the University of Toronto. Mitchell is known to be militantly pro-cigarette. In 2017 she granted an interview at Le Scala Presto, in Brentwood near Beverly Hills, to an awestruck journalist. She chose Le Scala Presto because, as detailed in the interview, it was “among the local restaurants willing to incur fines (for violating anti-smoking bylaws) just for the pleasure of having Mitchell dine and smoke there.”
Mitchell began her lecture at the University of Toronto—a city, which having lived there, I can testify is addicted to obeying the law and not ruffling feathers—by placing a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and an ashtray on the desk in front of her. Unlike Le Scala Presto, the university had not been “willing to incur fines for the pleasure” of having her speak there, and didn’t know she was about to light the first of many cigarettes, thus inviting the hapless, storied institution into an increasingly expensive orgy of bylaw infractions.
That day Mitchell did what Truffault might’ve done, and what any director lighting a smoke in mixed company does today; she announced that she was in charge. The academic equivalent of gaffers, cinematographers and production assistants, each imbued with their own unique status, instantly became extras in the scene she was directing, stripped of prestige of power. The movie called “Joni Mitchell’s Lecture” began, and, whether the institution liked it or not, she was now the writer, producer and director.
She also looked incredibly stylish on set.
God I miss smoking.