A smoking star is loaded gun

The screenwriter Joe Eszterhas made cigarettes sexy. Now he accuses himself - and Hollywood - of murder. Ian Ball reports on the war of the weed

Joe Eszterhas, the highest paid screenwriter on the planet and the man responsible for such classics of celluloid sleaze as Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Sliver, has just apologised to the world. He is, he says, "an accomplice to the murders of untold numbers of human beings" and he begs forgiveness for the millions he stashed away in his bank account with his "bloody" hands.Murder? Blood? Repentance? Can this really be the same ebullient Joe Eszterhas who lorded it over American cinema for almost two decades in his self-created role of hairy Hungarian bad boy, the man whose screenplays and trashy characters relentlessly prodded viewers' coarsest instincts and emotions, the writer who openly revelled in his unofficial title of "the most reviled man in Hollywood"? His films may be dire - but no one has dared call them deadly. Until now.

Eszterhas's latest work - published by the New York Times - is a savage polemic against tobacco, which has caused more sharp intakes of breath than anything he has done since Basic Instinct. Writing as a reformed smoker who is "alive but maimed" after losing much of his larynx to throat cancer, he declares that tobacco "should be as illegal as heroin". With God at his side, he vows, he will end nicotine's long relationship with cinema.

"I've written 14 movies," he begins. "My characters smoke in many of them, and they look cool and glamorous doing it. Smoking was an integral part of many of my screenplays because I was a militant smoker. It was part of a bad-boy image I'd cultivated for a long time - smoking, drinking, partying, rock'n'roll.

"Smoking, I once believed, was every person's right. Efforts to stop it were politically correct, a Big Brother assault on personal freedoms. Secondhand smoke was a non-existent problem invented by professional do-gooders. I put all these views in my scripts."In Basic Instinct, smoking is part of a sexual subtext. Sharon Stone's character smokes; Michael Douglas's is trying to quit. She seduces him with literal and figurative smoke that she blows in his face. In the movie's most famous and controversial scene, she even has a cigarette in her hand."

The tobacco companies, writes Eszterhas, loved Basic Instinct so much that they launched a tie-in brand of Basic cigarettes: "My movie made a lot of money; so did their cigarette."

He has now, he says, "made a deal with God" whereby he will, if spared, "try to stop others from committing the same crimes I did."

"A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old. The gun will go off when that kid is an adult. We in Hollywood know the gun will go off, yet we hide behind a smokescreen of phrases like 'creative freedom' and 'artistic freedom'. These lofty words are lies designed at best to obscure laziness. I know. I have told those lies.

"My hands are bloody; so are Hollywood's. My cancer has caused me to attempt to cleanse mine. I don't wish my fate upon anyone in Hollywood, but I beg that Hollywood stop imposing it upon millions of others."

This remarkable mea culpa has fed into a lively debate between those who believe Hollywood should clean up its act and the libertarian camp. There are strong opinions galore, of course, a barrage of statistics, but the missing elements include common sense, logic and a sense of individual responsibility.

It must be said that the superior firepower is in the Joe Eszterhas contrition camp. Their forces are commanded by Rob Reiner, whom we first got to know as Meathead in the Archie Bunker sitcom All in the Family and who is now revered by many as Hollywood's Intellectual in Residence.

As co-founder of Castle Rock Entertainment, he was converted to the anti-smoking cause in 2000 when he saw Proof of Life, one of the films his studio had just released. "I thought, Wow, why is Meg Ryan smoking up a storm?" he recalled. "It didn't add to the plot."

Today Castle Rock has a policy of discouraging tobacco use. Any director, scriptwriter or actor who wants to light up on screen must first talk to Reiner. "They have to make a really good case," he says. "Movies are basically advertising cigarettes to kids."

Reiner gets his scientific backing from Dr Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and a tireless campaigner for the cause. He recently published a study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, showing that on average the 20 top-grossing films featured 50 per cent more smoking instances an hour in 2000 than in 1960. The American Lung Association also seeks to hold Hollywood accountable, claiming that 61 per cent of tobacco use in films last year occurred in films rated G, PG and PG-13, the films children can see without an adult.