Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. With the recent passing of famed New York author Paul Auster, this month’s column remembers the time he created not one, but two films for Darth Weinstein.
Wayne Wang has gotta be the only filmmaker to get money from Harvey Weinstein for a sequel to a film he was still in the process of making.
Fresh from the critical and commercial success of his Disney-distributed, Oliver Stone-produced 1993 adaptation of his Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club, Wang went the indie route for his next film. He headed over to Miramax two years later to direct Smoke, a melancholy ensemble dramedy set in and around a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
Smoke was the first collaboration between Wang and novelist/screenwriter Paul Auster, whose “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story” (which originally appeared in the New York Times in 1990) inspired the movie’s script. Harvey Keitel plays Wren, who works at the aforementioned shop. The store has a crew of regulars — Giancarlo Esposito’s sharp-dressed smoker and Jared Harris’s mentally challenged lackey among them. We also have the late William Hurt as cigarillo-smoking writer (and Auster stand-in) Paul Benjamin. Still mourning over the loss of his pregnant wife, who was gunned down during a bank robbery, he befriends a wandering, secretive teenager (Harold Perrineau, all baby-faced) who saves Paul from almost getting run over.
Smoke is essentially a sympathetic, self-reflexive paean to the art of storytelling. Wang and Auster weave a yarn that pushes all the right buttons — and populate it with characters who delight in doing the same. (Both Hurt and Keitel give lengthy, enthralling monologues that are basically just short stories Auster wrote.) It’s also about men discovering the children they never knew about. Wren gets a visit at his shop from an eyepatch-wearing ex (Stockard Channing) who informs him that he has a crack-addicted daughter (a brief, bile-spewing Ashley Judd) living nearby. Meanwhile, that teenager travels upstate to get to know his long-lost dad (Forest Whitaker), an auto garage owner with an artificial arm and, of course, a story to tell.
Just like with Wang’s last film, Smoke got raves from critics and audiences, with the $7 million film grossing $38 million. Wang’s creative partnership with Auster (“a film by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster” starts off the opening credits) also received a lot of attention. Entertainment Weekly published an on-location report that mentions how odd it was seeing Wang confer with Auster while shooting scenes. (“…[Auster’s] collaboration with Wang has been unusually harmonious for an industry in which writers are often marginalized if not banned outright from sets.”) Wang and Auster had such a good time shooting the tobacco-shop scenes, where Keitel and the other actors got into character by ad-libbing and shooting the shit, they decided to do a companion movie immediately after wrapping up Smoke.
Wang got $2 million from Harvey and them to go back to the tobacco shop and make the spinoff comedy Blue in the Face, released just a few months after Smoke. Keitel and the guys return, along with a couple other actors. (Malik Yoba, who was a villainous gangster in Smoke, plays a watch-selling hustler.) Wang and Auster also get some special guests to pop their heads in. Roseanne Barr (who was in the running to play Channing’s role) kvetches up a storm as the fed-up wife of Wren’s boss (the late Victor Argo). A cutoff jeans-wearing Michael J. Fox gives Esposito a very peculiar, privacy-invading survey. (“Do you look at your bowel movements before you flush the toilet?”) Jim Jarmusch (stepping in for Hurt, who wasn’t able to return as Benjamin) shows up to smoke his last Lucky Strike and reminisce with Wren. Mira Sorvino gets her purse stolen outside. Lily Tomlin transforms into a vagrant dude who longs for a Belgian waffle. And Madonna stops by to give Wren a raunchy, singing telegram.
With both Auster and Wang sharing directing duties over the hectic five-day shoot (Wang got bronchitis halfway through, leaving Auster to film for a couple days), Blue is a completely improvised, hit-or-miss affair. The pair gave the actors scenarios to play with and just left the camera rolling, hitting us with long, uninterrupted master shots of actors either playing it cool and subtle or chewing up whatever scenery they can devour.
While not as well-received as Smoke (it only grossed half its budget), Blue is nonetheless a manic, messy love letter to Brooklyn and its residents/lunatics. Quick soundbytes (shot on both film and video) are interspersed from actual Brooklynites; Lou Reed gives a running, cynical commentary about living in New York, a town he’s been thinking of leaving “for, uh, 35 years now.” (“I’m almost ready,” he admits.)
With all the crazy shit that goes on (RuPaul comes outta nowhere to lead a quick dance sequence), the oddest scene – where Argo’s ready-to-sell boss has a heart-to-heart at the shop with the ghost of Jackie Robinson (Keith David) – was cooked up by none other than Weinstein. The story goes that Weinstein woke up Auster one night and told him to add in the scene with Robinson, since the movie is set in Brooklyn. (He wanted all the Dodgers to populate the store, but the boys talked him down to just Robinson.) Even though Auster publicly admitted he “loved the idea,” both he and Wang wanted to get rid of it. They thought they had a chance when test audiences didn’t dig it (“That’s pretty dumb,” one viewer allegedly declared), but Weinstein stubbornly made them keep it in.
Yes, the somber Smoke and the batshit Blue are a night-and-day double feature. However, Weinstein did try to sell them both as sexy must-sees, as evidenced by bit players (and future recipients of Weinstein’s sexual harassment) Judd and Sorvino being prominently featured in their movies’ respective ad campaigns. So, even though Wang and Auster set out to show that a filmmaker and an author can make some engaging, independent hangout cinema together, Weinstein used it as another opportunity to exploit some young starlets who he hoped would give his disgusting ass a full body massage.
Smoke and Blue in the Face are currently streaming on Pluto TV.
