Blue in the Face is not a sequel to Smoke. Although it draws on settings and characters from that film, it sprints off in an entirely new direction. Its spirit is comic; its engine is words; its guiding principle is spontaneity. As producer Peter Newman aptly put it when first presented with the idea: it’s a project in which the inmates take over the asylum.
The original plan for Blue in the Face was far simpler than the swirling free-for-all it eventually became. The premise was to go back into the cigar store that appears at the beginning and end of Smoke and create a little portrait of Auggie Wren’s world. Minor characters from the first film would become major characters in the second. Besides Auggie, just one other major character from Smoke would participate—but only in a minor role.
Our approach to all this was primitive in the extreme. We would invent situations for these characters and have each one last the length of a roll of film, approximately ten minutes. Two takes per scene would be sufficient, we felt. One to warm up and then another to get it right. We would present each skit as a chapter, continuous and uncut, and add musical interludes between the chapters for the sake of variety. With only three days of filming available to us, we didn’t see how there would be time for much else.
The notes I prepared for the actors were written in extreme haste, literally dashed off in the time it took to put the words on paper. Their sole purpose was to rough out the general contents of each scene, and they were never meant to be anything more than crude signposts, a rapid shorthand to remind us of what we thought we were supposed to be doing. Even as I typed them up, I knew that everything was subject to change.
Not only were we asking the actors to improvise their lines, we were counting on them to create entire scenes without any rehearsals. The success or failure of the film was in their hands, and we had to give them absolute freedom to go where they wanted to go.
Most of the situations were cooked up in the back seat of a car—riding downtown in evening traffic after the Smoke dailies. Wayne and I would throw out ideas to each other at random: What if? … How about? … What do you think of? … We figured that we would need eleven or twelve scenes, both as a minimum and a maximum. As a minimum because we knew in advance that much of what we shot wouldn’t work, and we didn’t want to get caught with too little material. As a maximum because we didn’t think it would be possible to shoot more than four scenes a day.
Miramax gave the go-ahead in early June. Smoke was in the middle of production then, and so while Wayne went to the set every day to work on that film, I met with the actors in restaurants and offices around town to prepare for the other. Little by little, new actors joined the cast and new roles had to be devised for them (Dot, Pete, Bob, et al.), but our basic approach remained the same: give the performers their marks, turn on the camera, and see what happened.
What happened proved to be fairly extraordinary. Some scenes failed, some actors were better at improvising than others, but by and large everyone performed at an astonishingly high level. We accumulated nine or ten hours of footage during those three days (July 11, 12, 13), and the minute we saw the results, we knew that we would have to throw our original conception of the film out the window. Situations would have to be broken up, a new and complex order of scenes would have to be found, and when normal editing devices didn’t work, we would have to resort to jumpcuts, dissolves, and other little tricks to keep the action moving.
It was at this point that editor Chris Tellefsen became a full partner in the enterprise. Working closely with Wayne and myself, he shaped the material we gave him into the wild and wooly film it now is. There was no script to follow, no plot to rely on, no preordained structure to help simplify decisions. It was all a matter of instinct, of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the
original footage, and then drawing on those strengths to assemble the finished movie. Wayne and I spent countless hours in the cutting room with Chris, trying out scores of different ideas in an ongoing triangular conversation, and his energy and patience were unflagging. In every sense of the word, he is a co-author of the film.
What this film is, however, is difficult to pin down. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s vulgar and rambunctious and silly—and to see it as anything other than a high-spirited celebration of daily life in Brooklyn would be a serious mistake. And yet, for all its nonsense, I believe there’s something in Blue in the Face that makes it more than just a frivolous diversion. A certain rawness, perhaps. A certain way of rolling with the punches that’s best summed up in the line Giancarlo Esposito delivers to Lily Tomlin: “This is Brooklyn. We don’t go by numbers.” People smoke like chimneys, people argue, people get in each other’s faces. They roll up their sleeves and yell, they insult each other, they say obnoxious things. Nearly every scene in Blue in the Face is about conflict. The characters are embattled, highly opinionated, relentless in their anger. And yet, when all is said and done, the film is genuinely amusing, and one walks away from it with a feeling of great human warmth. I find that interesting. Perhaps that means a certain degree of conflict is good for us. Perhaps we need an occasional release from all the high-minded pieties that tell us how we’re supposed to talk to each other. I’m not saying this is so, but it’s definitely a question worth pondering.
However you want to describe it, the film we put together from those three days of shooting turned out to be much richer and funnier than we were expecting. There were obvious weak spots, but all in all the experiment had paid off. When we screened it in October for our backers, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, they responded enthusiastically. Good as they felt it was, however, they were convinced it could be even better. It was hard to disagree with them. They offered to finance another three days of shooting, and the moment we left their office, the mad scramble to go back into production began. The actors and crew had to be reassembled, new actors had to be hired, replacements for certain jobs had to be found, and it all had to be done in no time flat. Our main actor, Harvey Keitel, was leaving the country in nine days to begin work
on another film, and he wouldn’t be returning to New York for several months. It was now or never.
Somehow, we managed to pull it off, and on October 27 we all went back to the cigar store for another round of shooting. We wrapped the following Monday, Halloween. By the time we were ready to leave the set, it was dark outside, and the Brooklyn streets were filled with children dressed in costumes. Some of them, mis— taking the Brooklyn Cigar Company for an actual store, wandered in to ask for candy. The store itself might have been make-believe, but it had real candy in it, and so we filled the kids’ trick-or-treat bags with chewing gum and chocolate bars from the shelves. It seemed like a fitting way to say good-bye to our imaginary world, the perfect ending for Blue in the Face.
December 29, 1994