User:Wildroot/Smoking

Themes

• Owen Gleiberman (2006-03-22). "Rebel Rouser". Entertainment Weekly.

• "This film isn't about showing smoking is bad for you -- we all know that already," says Reitman. "It's about the fact that we need to feel empowered to take personal responsibility for our own actions, whether you are a corporation or a consumer. The only positive message to take is that the key is education. If people are taught to be aware, if we empower our children to make decisions for themselves, then we won't have to parent them every step of the way when they become older."

This plea for individual responsibility. Biggest challenge: "The main character is the head lobbyist for Big Tobacco. Traditionally he'd either be a villain or you'd expect the guy to have some sort of cosmic change of heart and go work for the Lung Assn. This isn't that film. You had to understand why Nick Naylor does what he does and actually love him for it." Breakthrough idea: "The creation of Nick's son Joey. The son was in the book, but you never really met him. Joey became the tool by which we understand what Nick does and why. Early on, I realized that if parenting was the answer to spin, then we needed to see Nick being a good father himself."

no cigarettes actually are smoked on screen? I didn't want to make a movie about smoking. I always saw cigarettes as the location of the film. It's a movie about spinning. It's a movie about personal responsibility. I didn't want any cigarettes on screen because I thought that would be misleading. While it's not anti-smoking, it's very important that people don't think that this is a pro-smoking movie. It's about freedom of choice. In light of revelations of decades of tobacco industry manipulation and malfeasance, do you think it really just comes down to simply a matter of choice? Yes. Look, the tobacco industry has done a lot of despicable things, but I think people are aware of that. Everybody knows that they're misleading, everybody knows that they're trying to spin the truth, and that's because everybody spins the truth. Has the tobacco industry done things wrong? Yeah! (laughs) They do awful things! They make a product that kills people! But it's a legal product. When it comes down to people smoking, it's a personal choice and I think they deserve that choice. the goal was to make a funny, entertaining, accessible movie, which I think it is. But you can't ... get away from the fact that the reason why it's funny is because we're so used to lying and spinning that when you finally hear the truth, it sounds pretty funny.

Wyatt Mason writes: Another target that our satirists have been skewering is our confusion about the responsibility that corporations, governments or, indeed, parents, have to tell the truth.

In any case, the movie, about a man who has to grapple with issues of truth and responsibility.

No, I don’t want to make social agenda films. There are enough directors doing that, and that’s not really what’s in my heart. You know, to a certain extent I’m a fairly cold libertarian. I think Thank You for Smoking kind of explored it best for me in that I’m this weird mix: I’m a libertarian guy, but I have a big heart, and they’re constantly butting heads. And Thank You for Smoking for me was my movie dedicated to the fact that I can’t somehow make amends with the fact that I have a heart, I want to help people, and simultaneously I believe, you know, in the Darwinian sense of life. And so I guess I approached this with the same way I approached Juno, with teenage pregnancy, and with the cigarette issue, which is I want to have as honest an approach as possible. I think that’s what makes—hopefully makes—my film different. I mean, hopefully, that’s what makes Thank You for Smoking different from The Insider.

Production

Development

Mel Gibson's Icon Productions acquired the film rights to Christopher Buckley's novel prior to its release in 1994. The actor initially saw himself starring as Nick Naylor in the adaptation. Icon announced Thank You for Smoking as Gibson's next film, but he proceeded to work on Braveheart. Due to the satiric nature of the book, the studio lacked a way to film it and the project lacked a usable script. In a November 2000 interview, Gibson explained the original script was not "nasty enough [for me], but now I think we're getting a line on it." Meanwhile, director Jason Reitman became interested in heading an adaptation after reading the book, and independently wrote a draft for Icon executives in 2011, after discovering they owned the film rights to the novel. Reitman saw himself as a comic writer with a voice similar to Buckley's, and consciously attempted to maintain the satiric flavor of the book for his draft. The script was received favorably by Icon, and Gibson called Reitman to tell him how much he loved it. The project marked Reitman's first feature length film as a director, though he previously directed short-features and commercials and had worked on the set of his father, Ivan Reitman, also a director. Over the next three years, Thank You for Smoking languished due to a lack of financing and a distributor, as most studios wanted Reitman to rewrite his script to include a more anti-smoking and uplifting ending. According to Reitman, studios wanted Naylor to have a change of heart by the film's end and repent for his past. Despite Gibson's enthusiasm for Reitman's script, the actor occupied himself on The Passion of the Christ. Having sold his founding interest in PayPal, dot-com tycoon David O. Sacks became interested in pursuing a career as a self-financing independent film producer. He was willing to entirely finance the $10 million budget and let Reitman keep most of his original draft. Sacks spent the next year and a half negotiating over the rights from Icon, and teamed with Edward R. Pressman's production company, ContentFilm, in November 2004 to produce Thank You For Smoking.

Filming

Principal photography began on January 25, 2005. During the filming, Reitman made the conscious decision to omit any smoking of cigarettes. The only scenes that include smoking are older films the characters watch, such as when John Wayne lights up in Sands of Iwo Jima.

Release

Thank You for Smoking premiered a the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2005. The tremendous positive reception caused a bidding war between Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics over the right to distribute the film. Both studios issued competing press releases claiming that they had secured rights for the film's distribution. Sacks later claimed that he never reached a firm deal with Paramount, and noted that Fox Searchlight had offered $7 million for distribution, while Paramount Classics offered $6.5 million. Allegedly, Sacks called Paramount at 1:15 a.m. saying he was uncomfortable with their initial deal. Ruth Vitale, co-president of Paramount Classics said "He can't resell the film" and noted "I can only think that because of his naiveté and inexperience he would do this."

• Rebecca Murray (2005-09-13). "Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics Claim 'Thank You for Smoking' Deals". About.com. Retrieved 2010-01-10.

After turning in for the night, the Par team was informed Sunday morning that "Smoking" had actually been sold to Fox Searchlight in the wee hours. Fox Searchlight issued a press release Sunday afternoon saying it had landed worldwide rights, excluding Italy, France, Benelux, Switzerland and Scandinavia. However, Paramount Toppers Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein insisted they had a handshake deal in place with Sacks and his reps at William Morris Independent, and that the pic could not go to another distrib. "We own the movie," Vitale and Dinerstein said. "We are looking forward to working with Jason Reitman and the film. But we are dealing with a new, fresh producer in the movie business. This is the first time he's done this." A Searchlight rep countered Par Classics' claims, saying, "The fact is that we have a signed deal. We believe that we're the distributors of the film, and the producers agree. We issued a joint announcement. In the heat of the festival, there are a lot of companies vying for different films. And we are thrilled we have this one." "Smoking," a rare comedy project on the fest circuit among a raft of heavy indie dramas, preemed Friday (September 9th) as a special presentation and quickly gained attention from distribs, including Par, HBO and New Line's Picturehouse, Focus and Searchlight. Par and Searchlight were left to duke it out when bids began hitting the $5 million mark.

debuted to strong reviews at the Sundance Film Festival and is now rolling out across the country, reaching Seattle on Friday.

Before the film was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, internet rumors claimed that an extended nudity scene between Eckhart and Holmes had been cut down due to pressure from Holmes' husband, Tom Cruise. Reitman and executives denied that such a scene had ever existed but welcomed the publicity it garnered for the film. Reitman later said that "Half the questions that I've been getting are thoughtful questions about the moral of lobbying and how does satire work. And the rest is just, 'Is there actually any nude footage out there?'"

• Release date: March 17, 2006.

New York premiere at the Museum of Modern Art.

What happened to the KATIE HOLMES sex scene that was totally missing from the screening at Sundance because I totally heard it was like TOM CRUISE breaking into the projection room or something and it was like a five-hour sex scene and the movie was totally going to get an NC-45 rating how crazy is that? "It disappeared for a week, just a very prominent week," said Mr. Reitman, who looked as if he had not been asked that question for at least three minutes. "It was a result of a projection issue. The movie you saw tonight had it." Oh that scene? That was it? "The L.A. Times did an article two days later saying, 'Was it the Mormons or the Scientologists?' and that's what set it all off," he continued. "People started speculating. And I think people just felt like, 'Well, if we're going to make stuff up, let's go all out.' And people started saying there was nudity, people said it went on longer than they thought, people said it was steamy and sensual and it's none of that."

Fox Searchlight promoted the film using Myspace, which is also owned by the News Corporation.

Reception

Critical response

Based on 177 reviews collected by Rotten Tomtoes, 86% of the critics enjoyed the film, with an average score of 7.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Delightfully unscrupulous characters and searing cynicism prick all sides of the anti-smoking issue with hilarity and intelligence." Thank You for Smoking was more balanced with the 38 reviews in the website's "Top Critics" poll, receiving a 74% approval rating and a 6.9/10 average score. By comparison, Metacritic calculated an average score of 71/100, based on 36 reviews.

Box office

• http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=thankyouforsmoking.htm

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1184088,00.html

Limited Release: Mar 17, 2006

April 25, 2006: Jason Reitman‘s political satire “Thank You For Smoking” added just five sites - rising to 1,020 screens from 1,015. It saw its overall weekend gross drop 38% to $2.78 million from the previous weekend’s $4.49 million. Last week, Fox Searchlight chief operating officer Stephen Gilula told indieWIRE he expected the film to top out theatrically at a satisfying $20 million. It is now at $15.78 million in its sixth week.

Accolades

• http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944/awards (3 or 4)

2007 Independent Spirit Award nominees: Reitman for Best Screenplay, Aaron Eckhart for Best Male Lead.

Home media

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,1540540,00.html

Proposed television series

• November 2006: NBC is lighting up a TV spin on "Thank You for Smoking." Rick Cleveland ("Six Feet Under") is aboard to write and exec produce the small-screen version of the indie pic. David O. Sacks, who produced the film, will exec produce the TV take via Room 9 Entertainment and NBC U Television Studio. Christopher Buckley, who wrote the book on which the movie was based, will serve as a consulting producer. TV take will pick up where the feature left off, with Naylor running his own firm. "The idea is that there's a never-ending array of clients he could have," Sacks told Daily Variety. "But it has to be something where Nick is on the wrong or unpopular side of things." Potential clients could include fast-food companies, environmental polluters or politicos caught with their pants down.

• October 2007: NBC ultimately passed. USA Network is lighting up a TV version of "Thank You for Smoking." James Dodson is writing the script for the project, which Room 9 Entertainment's David Sacks is exec producing via Universal Media Studios. TV take -- which will likely go by a different title -- will pick up where the 2006 feature left off. Nick Naylor, having kicked some of his more evil lobbyist habits, will use his rhetorical skills to help people more deserving of aid. "He'll live somewhere between the morally ambiguous character of the movie and Robin Hood," said USA programming chief Jeff Wachtel. Wachtel went to college with Christopher Buckley, author of the novel on which the pic was based. Exec had been interested in a series version, but "the challenge was how to make that character live successfully in our network," Wachtel said. "Jim Dodson came in and answered the question for us."

External links

• Photo gallery

Director Jason Reitman hired James Whitaker as the cinematographer after having been impressed with his work on The Cooler. Reitman and Whitaker decided to film Thank You for Smoking in anamorphic widescreen 2.40:1 [aspect ratio (image)|aspect ratio]]. "People generally don’t think of comedies as being widescreen, but I like the way the backgrounds become soft and slightly dreamy," Whitaker explained. Most of Thank You for Smoking was shot on location in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. For the office where Naylor works, the production found a spot on the 13th floor of L.A. Center Studios. The tobacco-club sequence was filmed at a former hotel in Pasadena, and it commences with a long Steadicam shot that follows Naylor down a staircase, through two rooms and into the main room. Although it was filmed as one long shot, the material was cut up in the final edit.

Bert’s Bar, where the MOD Squad eats lunch. Three scenes take place there, all of them in the same corner booth at the back of the room. The scenes were shot at a bar in Los Angeles. “That was probably our most challenging location,” says Whitaker. “I really wanted to pull them out of that corner booth into the center of the room so I’d have an easier time lighting!” Instead, he used toplight: Gem Balls going through a frame of either 250 or 1/4 grid. “We boxed it in so the light wasn’t spilling everywhere and added whatever we needed for fill.”

During prep, Whitaker and first-time director Reitman talked a lot about Wes Anderson’s films. “Everything in those movies is carefully set up and kind of presented,” muses Whitaker, “and we wanted [a similarly] conservative yet stylized look and feel. We moved the camera only when we wanted to accentuate a point.” An example is the sequence in which Naylor reads a damning article that a journalist (Katie Holmes) has written about him. The sequence consists of four or five vignettes: a Hollywood agent (Rob Lowe) reading the article in a newspaper; Naylor’s boss reading it in his office; members of the public reading it; and a man reading it on the subway. “Those compositions are almost architectural in nature,” says Whitaker. “When we get to the shot of Naylor, there’s a slow push in and then — wham! — he slams the paper down on the table and we go right into his face.”

Throughout the shoot, Reitman and Whitaker would “go into a room, look around, and say, ‘This room would look great from here. Now let’s put the actors in it,’” recalls the cinematographer. They deviated from that only for scenes of Naylor and his son. “We’d go for more traditional coverage — longer lenses, more two-shots, more over-the-shoulders,” affirms Whitaker. “The goal was to emphasize them together.”

Thank You was predominantly shot with a single camera, a Panaflex Millennium that Whitaker operated, but occasionally a Millennium XL (operated by Danny Nichols and Tom Lohmann) was added to the mix. Whitaker notes that Lori Killam and Jim Roudebush at Panavision Woodland Hills “took great care of me.” He used Primo primes, C-series lenses (for Steadicam and handheld work), E-series 135mm and 180mm lenses, and an 11:1 (48–550mm) Primo zoom. The 40mm lens turned out to be ideal for the look the filmmakers wanted, so it was the workhorse lens. 1st AC Donald Burghardt “did a great job,” adds Whitaker.

Day interiors and exteriors were shot on Kodak Vision2 250D 5205, and Vision2 500T 5218 was used for all night material and for a fe¬w day scenes that needed the extra speed.

Several sequences in the picture were shot on video. When Naylor appears on two talk shows, “we used the Digi-Beta cameras that existed in the studios where we shot,” says Whitaker. “When we wanted to show things happening from Naylor’s perspective, we switched to film.” For a “safety video” Naylor watches in his hotel room, Reitman wanted a really low-quality look and opted to use an old video camera. A montage of Naylor’s trip with his son was recorded in the MPEG mode of a digital still camera, as though father and son had shot it themselves.

Whitaker tested some special lab processes during prep, including Deluxe Laboratories’ propriety CCE and ACE silver-retention processes, but he always thought a digital intermediate (DI) would be the best way to finish the film. The filmmakers received approval to do a DI after wrapping, and Whitaker subsequently graded the picture at EFilm with colorist Natasha Leonett.

He says he is particularly pleased with a scene depicting a U.S. Senate hearing that was shot on a very short schedule. “We lit the room [the Mason’s Lodge in Pasadena] with two 8,000-watt Fisher helium balloons, and we supplemented that with small, homemade box lights. We used 60-watt household bulbs in the box lights, which are made of metal and have foamcore sides. You can put in whatever diffusion you want; we went mainly with full grid. We had box lights in two sizes, 2 by 2 feet and 4 feet by 16 inches. They’re beautiful, and you can mount them on C stands or anything else.”

• Tobacco-industry spokesman Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, right) enjoys lunch with his fellow "Merchants of Death" (Maria Bello and David Koechner), who represent the alcohol and firearms industries.

• Finish adding useful info from the Soundtrack and Release sections