New Yourk, USA — When it comes to movie character-building, cigarettes are an easy choice. But the prop’s mystique was traceable to reality, of course. Before James Bond, there was his creator: Ian Fleming, who was known to smoke 80 cigarettes a day.
In a similar vein, a bit of character-building appeared over the weekend in a Week in Review article by Mark Mazzetti, who covers the intelligence beat for The New York Times. While exploring the complicated relationship between American and Pakistani spies, he described the “odd affectations” of Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who headed Pakistan’s Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence until last year:
During meetings, he will often spend several minutes carefully hand-rolling a cigarette. Then, after taking one puff, he stubs it out.
Amid high-stakes discussions about tracking down the Taliban and Al Qaeda, no one apparently bothered to ask him why he so quickly discarded the self-made smokes. The intrigue was only enhanced by the C.I.A.’s description of the general, included in the article, as “a master manipulator.”
Perhaps it takes one to know one. In 2003, Kirk Douglas explained why smoking became so prevalent in movies in a Times Op-Ed:
Many actors have trouble with their hands. Should they put them in their pockets? Should they put them behind their back? Do they have them at their sides? The cigarette answered the question. You take one out of the pack, you tap it, light it and inhale deeply. Then you exhale. If you are clever, you can learn to blow smoke rings. You can point with a cigarette. You can tap the ashes into an ashtray, and put it out gently in the ashtray or fiercely — whatever the scene requires.
Or perhaps General Kayani was more vain than manipulative. Joe Eszterhas, who wrote the screenplays of “Basic Instinct” and “Showgirls,” wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that he often added cigarettes to the scene because actors “look cool and glamorous doing it.”
Stricken with throat cancer from his own smoking, Mr. Eszterhas began a campaign against Hollywood’s tobacco tendencies. There has been progress in recent years, with Universal Studios banning them from youth-targeted films.
Mr. Eszterhas argued that nothing was lost by cutting cigarettes out, saying “there are 1,000 better and more original ways to reveal a character’s personality.” Just tell that to General Kayani.

By
Mike Nizza
The New York Times