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Hollywood continues to glamorise smoking 

Your Say: Hollywood continues to glamorise smoking  

• Tamil cinema’s role in anti-smoking campaign 

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control begins to be implemented. Article 13 of the treaty lists measures to substantially limit movie smoking. In India, Bollywood has been the primary measure of implementation. A 2004 study commissioned to study changes in Bollywood's tobacco imagery after the Tobacco Control Act (2003) was passed, found that the "imagery had markedly increased in the wake of tobacco advertising bans in other media."

When this was brought to the notice of the government, it amended the TCA to include a ban on all depictions of tobacco products and their use in film or television. The amended rules indicated that no individual can display tobacco products or their use. In films made prior to the notification, a scroll will have to warn the audience about smoking.

"Media plays a huge role and we intend to launch research on smoking and Tamil cinema as part of the 'Smoke-free Chennai' project," says Prasanna Kannan, State consultant for Tobacco Control. The State has also sent notices to those involved with recent films including 'Vettaikaran', 'Aasal' and 'Yogi' to remove smoking scenes.

Earlier this week, actor and producer Prabhu clarified that 'Aasal' starring actor Ajith featured awareness messages and the actor, too, had incorporated a message on the perils of smoking in the film.

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BRUCE: Power of the cinema is leading young people to smoke 

scientific evidence now indicates that movie studios are doing massive harm. While it's the tobacco industry whose products kill 439,000 Americans a year, it is exposure to smoking in Hollywood movies that generates 390,000 new teen smokers a year to replace them, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . . .

Take, for example, "Avatar," rated PG-13. Nominated for nine Academy Awards, it is one of the biggest films this year. It's a fantasy that takes place in the year 2154 on a distant moon.

Sigourney Weaver plays a scientist/ecologist who smokes. The smoking is completely without context or excuse. (How many scientists would smoke today, let alone in 2154?)

Studies controlling for every other conceivable factor find that kids 10 to 14 who see the most movies with smoking are three times as likely to start smoking as kids who see the least. . . .

But you don't need to take the word of independent researchers publishing in the world's most respected medical journals. Read tobacco industry files dating back to 1971. They describe how tobacco companies set out to systematically boost their products in major motion pictures. They figured out that they didn't even have to flash a particular brand. They beleived that seeing any kind of smoking in movies would keep it "fashionable," according to a study by the University of California, San Francisco's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

To put tobacco on screen, the companies invested millions in product placement until at least the early 1990s, when the paper trail disappears offshore. . . .

The R-rating alone would cut teen exposure to movie smoking in half and in the decades to come avert as many as 60,000 tobacco deaths a year -- more U.S. deaths than than are caused by car crashes and drug use combined.

The six top media CEOs can pick up their phones and make it happen today. Why not? Nobel prizes have been won for less!

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• Avatar Script 

GRACE

Jake, I’m serious -- you look like crap.

You’re burning too hard.

Jake takes the cigarette out of her mouth and stubs it out.

JAKE

Get rid of this ***, then you can lecture me.

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Hit & Run: Join the club  

The latest person to take a pop at the seemingly-unstoppable James Cameron juggernaut Avatar ($1bn takings and rising) is Stanton A Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California. He was quoted in The New York Times earlier this week damning scenes in which Sigourney Weaver's character Grace Augustine is puffing on a cigarette. Glantz has criticised the movie for glamorising smoking, and claimed it was factually inaccurate. "I know a lot of environmental scientists like the Sigourney Weaver character," he said. "Not one smokes."

The officious nature of Glantz's complaint aside (Cameron has since hit back to say that Grace was not meant to be a role-model), is his claim strictly true? It doesn't seem to hold water when considering environmentalists in general. Zac Goldsmith smokes scraggy roll-ups. It's a well-known joke among environmental circles that Yvo de Boer, the current executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is a big smoker. Barack Obama, who won near-unanimous backing from environmentalists, has a penchant for the odd gasper. Then there are the actor-environmentalists: Leonardo DiCaprio, who fronted environmental documentary The 11th Hour, is papped puffing. Robert Redford sucked a pipe in his youth, yet has campaigned against the development of tracts of land in the US and abroad. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Glantz.

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World Premiere of Garvanlieva's "Tobacco Girl" in France 

Premiere of documentary film "Tobacco Girl" of Biljana Garvanlieva will be held Wednesday at the International Festival of Audiovisual Programs (FIPA) in French town Biarritz. . . .

The story focuses on a 14-year-old girl Mumine, who grows tobacco together with her parents. They are part of the Juruk community in Macedonia, Turkish people that came to Southern Europe 600 years ago, populating the country's mountainous areas.

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ARCHIVE: WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: HOLLYWOOD & TOBACCO: REALITY CHECK STRIKES AGAIN! (PDF) 

What’s wrong with smoking in movies?

Forty years after the U.S. Surgeon General first concluded that smoking causes lung cancer, tobacco companies still sell over twenty billion packs of cigarettes a year in the U.S.1 Tobacco kills 453,000 Americans annually — 400,000 from smoking, 53,000 from secondhand smoke.2 Heart disease, emphysema (loss of breathing capacity) and cancer from smoking make tobacco the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. today.

With all the toxic ingredients in cigarette smoke, it’s almost like sucking on a car’s exhaust pipe. So how do tobacco companies get hundreds of thousands of Americans, 90% of them under age eighteen,3 to start smoking every year?

Well, it’s not hard to sell an addictive drug once customers are hooked. Getting people to light up the first few times is the big hurdle. And researchers have found out that most young people try tobacco because they see it in the movies — a lot.

In the past five years, almost three-quarters of movies rated G, PG and PG-13 included smoking.4 And studies show that movies recruit more new young smokers than all tobacco advertising.5 The good news? If tobacco were left out of movies rated for kids, the effect of smoking in movies on kids would be cut in half.6 It all comes down to the seven major Hollywood studios and their choice to “greenlight” smoking in movies they want kids to see.

Educating audiences and convincing the studios to stop smoking in youth-rated films is what this handbook is all about.

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ARCHIVE: DOUGLAS: My First Cigarette, and My Last  

My father, a Russian peasant, came to this country in 1910. Like all of his pals, he smoked. It's hard for me to picture my father without a cigarette in his mouth.

After many years of smoking, my father was told by his doctor that he would die of cancer if he did not stop smoking. So he quit cold turkey. Here's how he did it: he always carried one cigarette in the breast pocket of his shirt. When he felt the urge to smoke, he'd take the cigarette out and look at it fiercely. With a growl, he would say, in his Russian accent, "Who's stronger? You -- me?"

He would glare at the cigarette: "I stronger." And he'd put the cigarette back in his pocket. He did that for a few years, but it was too late. He died of cancer at age 72. . . .

. My first picture was "The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers," with Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin, in 1946. I was intimidated, but proud to be playing the role of Miss Stanwyck's husband. I arrived at the set, very excited, to do my first scene with her. But I had spoken only a few lines when the director, Lewis Milestone, stopped the action and said, "Kirk, you should be smoking a cigarette in this scene." . . .

When I became famous, tobacco companies supplied me with cartons of cigarettes every month. One day in 1950 I was in my den, smoking as usual. I exhaled and through the smoke I saw a picture of my father on my desk. I thought of him on his deathbed. I stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. I took one cigarette from the pack and threw the rest in the wastebasket.

I held up the cigarette and studied it. My father's words came to me: "Who's stronger? You -- me?"

"I stronger." I put the cigarette in my shirt pocket and never smoked again. . . .

Hollywood started me smoking, literally putting a cigarette in my hand. Who knows how many moviegoers have started smoking because of what they have seen on the screen? Too many movies glorify young people smoking. It doesn't have to be this way. I have done at least 50 pictures where I avoided smoking. In one film, "The Brotherhood," I played a Mafia character and chewed on a cigar. In a scene from a film I just did, "The Illusion," when offered a cigarette, I say: "I don't smoke. I have cancer."

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ARCHIVE: Signed, sealed and delivered: “big tobacco” in Hollywood, 1927–1951 

Hollywood endorsements in cigarette advertising afforded motion picture studios nationwide publicity supported by the tobacco industry’s multimillion US dollar advertising budgets. Cross-promotion was the incentive that led to a synergistic relationship between the US tobacco and motion picture industries, whose artefacts, including “classic” films with smoking and glamorous publicity images with cigarettes, continue to perpetuate public tolerance of onscreen smoking. Market-based disincentives within the film industry may be a solution to decouple the historical association between Hollywood films and cigarettes. . . .

As in the 1930s, nothing today prevents the global tobacco industry from influencing the film industry in any number of ways to achieve its own strategic objectives. It would be more accurate to view motion pictures (and video programming) not as disinterested artistic works but as commercial platforms (which occasionally achieve the status of art) serving a variety of agendas, not all of which — as in the case of product placement deals struck by producers — consistently respect the work’s artistic integrity or the unsuspecting audience in search of entertainment or inspiration. Policy makers who recognise the historic and contemporary role played by Hollywood films in expanding and renewing the market for tobacco products should not hesitate to modernise rating systems to exclude smoking from films marketed to youth, thereby taking steps necessary to break the long standing commercial connection between movies and smoking.

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ARCHIVE: HARMETZ: FILM; History Is Written in Smoke  

Although attitudes toward cigarettes on screen have gradually become as politically correct as those toward safe sex, animal rights, feminism and the American Indian, cigarettes do continue to convey recklessness, rebellion and defiance. From 12-year-olds smoking behind the barn in real life, to Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon lighting up in "Thelma and Louise" (1991) on their way to becoming outlaws, cigarettes flout authority.

That defiance is a key to the runaways Lula (Laura Dern) and Sailor (Nicolas Cage) in the 1990 film "Wild at Heart." But Lula, who started stealing cigarettes from her mother's purse in sixth grade, also shares with Sailor that satisfying after-sex cigarette that has dressed a thousand movies.

Until some brave new world allows frontal male nudity, cigarettes will probably remain a handy shorthand for potency, even though, in our less subtle age, guns have taken over much of that function. But there will always be neurotic protagonists like Nick Nolte in "The Prince of Tides" proving their inner torment by the way they smoke and the fact that they smoke.

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Popular Documents - Smoking in Movies 

Despite declining tobacco use and increasing public understanding of the dangers of smoking, smoking in movies has returned to levels observed in 1950, when smoking was nearly twice as prevalent as it was in 2000.1

The documents below help illustrate the development of tobacco product placement in the movies.2 They are presented chronologically by company to provide context as you browse them. For more information, visit Smoke Free Movies.

Discussion: Why is Sigourney Weaver smoking in Avatar? 

Sigourney Weaver does not condone smoking - Photo  

Did James Cameron accept money from the tobacco industry in order to have Sigourney Weaver smoke in his movie? It is pathetic to see gratuitous smoking in movies. I am disappointed in James and Sigourney. This has got to stop.

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• SCOTT: Smoking in 'Avatar' and the Limits of Boundaries on Ratings 

Of all the corny lines and ready-made catchphrases in Mr. Cameron's script, perhaps none has turned out to be so provocative as one uttered by Grace Augustine, the scientist played by Sigourney Weaver: "Where's my damn cigarette?"

In the view of anti-smoking activists, the correct answer should be: Nowhere, at least not in any real or imaginary world governed by a PG-13 rating. The logic of the Smoke-Free Movies campaign, which seeks an R rating for almost all instances of on-screen puffing, is straightforward enough. If the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board advises parents about sex, violence, language and drug use, why should it not also shield children from exposure to a lethal (if legal) product that hooks, sickens and kills hundreds of thousands of people a year? . . .

Does it matter that Grace's smoking, according to Mr. Cameron, is meant to emphasize the less attractive aspects of her temperament, including that she "doesn't care about the human body"? And if that mitigation seems like a bit of a stretch (in the future, how likely is it that scientific laboratories on distant moons will allow what their earthbound counterparts forbid today?), what about some of the other recent instances tarred, as it were, by the opprobrium of Smoke-Free Movies? The principal smoker in the animated "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is a villain, and if the hero in "Sherlock Holmes" takes a draw or two on a pipe, well, he is Sherlock Holmes. . . .

underneath the public discussion about smoking (or gun violence, or sexual promiscuity, or whatever social problem has seized the momentary spotlight) is another, much more confused discourse: about movies and about the ways they mirror and occlude reality. . . .

And what the supporters of the Smoke-Free Movies position may underestimate is the extent to which a taboo creates temptation. The audience most susceptible to the glamour of the R rating is also the demographic most at risk of starting to smoke. Exiling cigarettes to the ostensibly forbidden but easily accessible land of the R might have the unintended effect of making them seem more alluringly grown up.

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