Two Separate Jason Reitman Commentaries
The Thank You for Smoking DVD provides two audio commentary tracks, both featuring screenwriter/director Jason Reitman. He's alone on one, and on the other he's accompanied by actors Aaron Eckhart and David Koechner, who plays the gun lobbyist. Basically, Reitman tells the same anecdotes on both commentaries. If you've got things you need to do, one of the two will probably be enough, and the solo track seems to me preferable.
Reitman categorically denies the rumor that Tom Cruise and/or the Scientologists had anything to do with the sex scene involving Katie Holmes not being shown at Sundance. He blames the incident on an end-of-reel problem.
Reitman also says that Buckley's novel has Nick at one point in the Reflecting Pool of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but the Park Service wouldn't allow filming there, even though they had permitted something similar for the movie Forrest Gump (1994). But Reitman came up with an effective alternative: he depicts the protagonist on the statue of Lincoln in a pietà.
Deleted Scenes, Charlie Rose, Two Featurettes
The DVD contains 13 deleted/extended scenes with a total run time less than 16 minutes. You can watch them with or without Reitman's commentary. The two I found most interesting were "Cigarette Slap" and "Smoking Is Right."
There's also an 18-minute segment from TV's The Charlie Rose Show. Rose interviews Reitman, Eckhart, novelist Christopher Buckley and producer David O. Sacks. Sacks was a co-founder of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002, leaving him with money to finance movies.
The DVD contains two short featurettes. One is a nine-minute making-of, in which Reitman states that Thank You for Smoking is "a film about personal freedom and personal choice." The other featurette is the five-minute "America: Living in Spin," which has clips of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton using language deceptively to make things look better for themselves. In this featurette, Reitman says about his film, "This is not a movie about cigarettes. This is a movie about talking. This is a movie about spin."
DVD Details
Below I have given the details for the Thank You for Smoking DVD.
Release Date: October 3, 2006
Feature Film Run Time: 1 Hour 32 Minutes
Anamorphic Widescreen (2.40:1), Color
MPAA Rating: R for Language and Some Sexual Content
English 5.1 Dolby Digital
Spanish Dolby Surround
English Captions for the Hearing Impaired
Spanish Subtitles
French Subtitles
Audio Commentary by Screenwriter/Director
Audio Commentary by Screenwriter/Director and 2 Actors
Deleted Scenes (13 scenes totaling 16 min.)
The Charlie Rose Show Interview (18 min.)
Featurette: "The Making of Thank You for Smoking" (9 min.)
Featurette: "America: Living in Spin" (5 min.)
Poster Art Gallery
Art Dept. Gallery
Storyboard Gallery
Theatrical Trailer
Soundtrack Spot
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