In the mid-eighties up through the early nineties do you remember watching movies and wondering why it looked like the set was on fire? It was as if a huge miasma had rolled into the sound stages and diffused the hell out of everything. I don’t know why but cinematographers of that time liked to smoke up the sets. What billowed out of foggers and then was wafted through the air as per the cameraman’s instructions was a concoction called cracked oil. Cracked oil got all over your clothes and your hair. If you breathed in too much of it (and if you spent all day on set YOU DID) the oil got into your lungs. I’m trying to think of a way of saying this nicely, but I can’t, somehow that oil got into your digestive tract and turned that slick and horrible too… It was, in a word, gross.
Switching gears – one day Mr. Sean Connery arrived on the set of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and saw the foggers spewing and the fans wafting and the director and crew poised to shoot. He stopped, dead in his tracks, fixed his eye on the gaggle around camera and intoned, “Gentlemen, you may have your smoke, or you may have me.”
Cantankerous or crazy good? I’d say crazy good.