Tobacco.org

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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