"There are no crowds out there demanding to see smoking scenes in movies"
About this Quote
Nobody’s lining up for cigarettes the way they line up for car chases, sex scenes, or superhero landings, and Joe Eszterhas knows it. The line is a scalpel aimed at Hollywood’s favorite defense: that everything on screen is there because the audience wants it. By framing the absence of “crowds” demanding smoking, he exposes how flimsy that alibi is. If the market isn’t asking, then why does it keep showing up?
The intent is pointedly practical. Eszterhas, a writer who made his name in the glossy, adult-thriller ecosystem of late-20th-century studio filmmaking, is talking about craft choices that masquerade as inevitabilities. Smoking is often used as shorthand: cool, danger, erotic boredom, post-coital punctuation, a way to give a character “edge” without writing one. His subtext: it’s not storytelling necessity; it’s a habit of aestheticizing addiction, maintained by industry inertia and, historically, by tobacco influence and product placement.
What makes the line work is its simplicity. He doesn’t moralize about health or accuse viewers of weakness. He attacks the prestige of the image. “Demanding to see” is sarcastic on purpose, yanking smoking off the pedestal of “realism” and dropping it into the category of optional decoration. The context is a long-running cultural fight over whether movies merely reflect behavior or actively sell it. Eszterhas is insisting that, at least here, the camera isn’t a mirror. It’s a megaphone.
The intent is pointedly practical. Eszterhas, a writer who made his name in the glossy, adult-thriller ecosystem of late-20th-century studio filmmaking, is talking about craft choices that masquerade as inevitabilities. Smoking is often used as shorthand: cool, danger, erotic boredom, post-coital punctuation, a way to give a character “edge” without writing one. His subtext: it’s not storytelling necessity; it’s a habit of aestheticizing addiction, maintained by industry inertia and, historically, by tobacco influence and product placement.
What makes the line work is its simplicity. He doesn’t moralize about health or accuse viewers of weakness. He attacks the prestige of the image. “Demanding to see” is sarcastic on purpose, yanking smoking off the pedestal of “realism” and dropping it into the category of optional decoration. The context is a long-running cultural fight over whether movies merely reflect behavior or actively sell it. Eszterhas is insisting that, at least here, the camera isn’t a mirror. It’s a megaphone.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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