When Backdraft was released, several firefighter's union locals hired a cinema for the afternoon and had a private sceening to benefit a nearby burn center.

Picture a cinema filled with firefighters, nurses and paramedics, most of whom have a pretty good heat on to begin with. All of whom are rummaging around in coolers for another beer. None of whom will suspend their disbelief for a moment.

Nothing against Ron Howard, the director. He's made generous contributions to firefighter's causes, and tried for authenticity wherever possible. However, where's there's smoke there's (say it with me now) fire. Except in Backdraft where the firefighters walk upright through clear atmospheres with merry little gas jets burning around them. Interior firefighting is done largely on one's hands and knees, groping around and peering through the blackness looking for a glow.

Apparently getting flashed over by fire is an inconvenience which can leave you with a nasty heat rash, but if you keep moving, you're O.K.

Heat, you may have noticed, rises. Not in Backdraft, where fire runs across the floor, not the ceiling. They had to turn the sets upside down for those shots.

But the best, all time, throw popcorn at the screen and hoot scene, comes when the probie firefighter and his girlfriend do the horizontal mambo in the hosebed of a fire engine. They are pictured on a bed of fluffy white, clean firehose. Firehose gets pulled through ash, soot, burning garbage and things one tries hard not to think about. Following the most careful cleaning, it's grey, smelly, and often harboring bits of glass and dirt which have escaped the scrub brush. Not where you would put your privates, or anyone else's. Additionally, firehose is coupled together every fifty feet with a big, cold metal fitting. Not a one was visible in that load of hose. The only coupling there was human.

Lots of laughs, though. And the beer was good.