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Thank You For Smoking (USA, 2005, 92 min, dir: Jason Reitman, cast: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello)

Why are Hollywood moguls always portrayed as hucksters in movies? Because they are brilliant con men. Thank You for Smoking is a puff that will be remembered because it was director Jason Reitman’s first feature (based on Christopher Buckley’s book). Most of it doesn’t rise above Saturday Night Live: a very low bar to jump. One exception is the Hollywood mogul scene (see clip). “Mogul” is a term Hollywood appropriated from “Mughul:” a dynasty of kings descended from Genghis Kahn. That’s like claiming you own the Brooklyn Bridge because Washington Roebling (who built it) was your great great uncle.

In an effort to forward the tobacco lobby’s campaign to get people smoking again, their chief spokesman, Nick, visits a Hollywood super agent. In short order, in front of a Japanese print meant to invoke the Hollywood mogul’s bible, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; the Powerful One outlines a movie to promote smoking. Set it in the future, he consuls. People are put off by smoking now, but in a future, on a space station, it could be cool again.

It is parody. It is also brilliant. His description of a future couple lighting up cigarettes after weightless sex evokes an image of kinky sensuality. Therein lies the contradiction that goes through dozens of films where the Hollywood mogul scene is played out: he is always a misanthropic con man who is brilliant. Take a look at the mogul scenes in these movies: Alex in Wonderland (1970), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Player (1992), Swimming With Sharks (1994), Wag the Dog (1997), Tropic Thunder (2008) and don’t forget six years of the HBO series, Entourage.

Even the Motion Picture Academy has noted this brilliance by inventing a special mogul Oscar award. They call it the Irving G. Thalberg Award for “Creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg, a Hollywood exec and producer of the 1930’s, was the prototype for the Hollywood mogul. He cast a shadow so long that F. Scott Fitzgerald used him for his hero, Monroe Stahr, in his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. (Robert De Niro played him in the movie, The Last Tycoon).

Producers fight to force the Academy to give them a “Thalberg.” It’s not a regular Oscar, it’s a separate award modeled on the head of Irving Thalberg. The question I asked myself when I saw the Hollywood mogul scene in Thank You for Smoking was: what motivates such extraordinary brilliance that we never tire of parodying it? Most Hollywood insiders would give you a short answer: money. They are wrong. You can make money lots of other ways and you don’t have to read screenplays all weekend. I think it is the need to tell stories.

In the soul of every great con man is a great storyteller. How else can you convince the mark to put down his money? Motion pictures were merely a new medium for the flimflammer’s art. And who is to say all great art doesn’t have at least a little of the same brilliance? If we could get Michelangelo to kick back and talk in his office, he’d probably tell us he had a great idea for a naked David placed right in the public’s eye: where they’d have to look up at his penis from below. “Wow, ” he’d say with his feet on his desk and his hands gesturing, “I can see the crowds!”