Smellaround with Les Blank

On the eve of D.C.'s Environmental Film Fest, the Washington Post profiles the foodie predilections of 69-year-old doc filmmaker Les Blank: "When he shows [his] 1978 film Always for Pleasure, about the food, music and indigenous culture of New Orleans, he has been known to whip up a pot of red beans and rice in the back of the theater. At presentations of... Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers—about the joys of cooking and eating "the stinking rose"—Blank can occasionally be spied tossing several heads of garlic into a toaster oven so that the aroma wafts over the audience at just the right mouth-watering moment. "In the film, when... Alice Waters asks, 'Can you smell the garlic?' the audience yelled back, 'Yes!' " Blank said recently... "I never insist on it," Blank says of his signature bit of showmanship, a technique he has dubbed "Smellaround."