States ask Hollywood to cut film smoking

AP | 8/27/03 | TIM MOLLOY

[kattracks]

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Attorneys general from 24 states are asking the film industry to reduce the amount of smoking in films to prevent teens from taking up the habit.

In a letter Tuesday, the attorneys cited a June study from Dartmouth Medical School that said children who watch movies in which actors smoke heavily are three times more likely to smoke themselves than those exposed to less smoking on-screen.

The letter to Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti did not offer any specific steps.

"We're not saying any law has been broken," said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, one of the officials who signed the letter. "We're just asking out of a concern for the health of our kids that the industry do what it can to ensure that kids don't start smoking."

MPAA spokesman Rich Taylor said Valenti had received the letter and would respond appropriately.

"Smoking is, if you'll recall, a legal activity," he said when asked what the MPAA was currently doing to reduce teen smoking. "That being said, he'll be reading carefully the letter and the study it references."

Brendan McCormick, a spokesman for Philip Morris USA, said the major tobacco companies agreed in the nationwide settlement signed in 1998 not to pay for product placement or to grant permission to films that want to feature their cigarettes. He declined to comment on the letter.

The Dartmouth study involved 2,603 children who were between 10 and 14 at the start of the study in 1999 and had never smoked when they were recruited. They were asked at the beginning of the study which movies they had seen from a list of 50 movies released between 1988 and 1999.

Investigators counted the number of times smoking was depicted and determined how many smoking incidents each of the adolescents had seen. Exposure was categorized into four groups, with the lowest level involving between zero and 531 occurrences of smoking and the highest involving between 1,665 and 5,308 incidents.

Twenty-two of those exposed to the least on-screen smoking took up the habit, compared with 107 in the highest exposure group, a fivefold difference. However, after taking into account factors known to be linked with starting smoking, such as rebelliousness, the effect was reduced to a threefold difference.

The letter was signed by the attorneys general of Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia, as well as the Northern Mariana Islands.

[kattracks]

Murder, mayham, all kinds of violence, teen sex, abortion, etc. in movies are ok, but smoking will have a negative on kids?

Am I missing something here?

[Roscoe]

Smoking what?

[Dahoser]

Yes, they haven't figured out how to tax those other things.

[Caipirabob]

Actually, brilliant remark! Let the state "tax" Hollywood for each time someone smokes in a movie! We could move on to a "profanity" tax... yeah! That's the ticket! Then we could even have a "bad acting" tax! Hell, Alex Baldwin alone could cover the deficit with 10 minutes of airtime!

*grin*

[lentulusgracchus]

I don't smoke, but I can't get behind this logic. I doubt that, in a film like The Swimming Pool, in which Ludovine Sagnier and Charlotte Rampling share a joint, get sloshed on gin, surreptitiously read each other's diaries and other writings, display lots of shrubbery that we didn't need to enjoy in order to "get it", and finally help one another bury a dead body that one of them has killed, seeing one or the other of them light up a Gauloise is going to push me over the edge of personal dissolution.

[metesky]

However, after taking into account factors known to be linked with starting smoking, such as rebelliousness, the effect was reduced to a threefold difference.

One of the keys to the anti-smoking jihad is exposed and it's got nothing to do with health.

[Madame Dufarge]

"Smoking is, if you'll recall, a legal activity,"

For the time being.

Such a predicament. Once smoking's outlawed, the study money will dry up - then what?

Of course, the "obesity" studies will fill the void until body weight is regulated by the state.

By that time the sheep-like populace will be begging the oligarchs to map out their lives for them, it's so much safer and we'll all be living forever.

[raybbr]

I agree with them for different reasons. I don't think writers can write anymore. Especially dialogue. That's why there is more screaming and the use of loud music in movies today. A character smoking adds nothing to the character but it adds screen time. Movies today are horrible. They rely on special effects rather than writing to tickle your imagination.

[aardvark1]

Haven't these same people been saying for years that movies don't influence behavior and so they justify gratuitous violence and sex as "harmless." But smoking, we all get hooked on cigarettes when we watch actors on the screen light up. Nothing else influences us but the cigarettes. Someone ought to tell the advertising industry that we arent' influenced by this other stuff.

[bedolido]

Murder, mayham, all kinds of violence, teen sex, abortion, etc. in movies are ok, but smoking will have a negative on kids?

Am I missing something here?

My thoughts exactly... good points

[Republican Red]

I actually would be a big supporter of a tax on movies - period. Call it an entertainment tax.

[weegee]

a June study from Dartmouth Medical School that said children who watch movies in which actors smoke heavily are three times more likely to smoke themselves than those exposed to less smoking on-screen.

Cultural slouching BUMP.

Loose sex, profanity, disrespect, violence, crime, illegal drug use, drunkeness, etc. in films has no impact on audiences but smoking, smoking does. Right.

This is a dumber act from the states than the "Freedom Fries" thing ever was but this won't get ridiculed in the popular press (it would be politically incorrect).

[fortunecookie]

So true. You took the words out of my mouth. Don't forget glamoriztion of ecstasy and other drug use, prostitution, and the constant underlying thread demonizing traditional family and its values and religion - I should say certain religions. And the political propaganda and grandstanding. Repeat the mantra - Democrats goooood, Republicans eeeevilll.

[Publius6961]

How many others caught the program "Failure is not an option" last night on cable? It was a partial history of the space race and trip to the moon.
I was laughing the whole two hours, because if they attempted to excise the smoking scens, there would be 30 seconds of tape left.

Here we had what were arguably the sharpest engineering problems-solving minds of the 20th century, doing the impossible with slide rules, pencil and paper and crude computers, and it seemed every one of them was a smoker.
Cigarette butts in ashtrays everywhere. I laughed a lot while watching, even though it was definitely not a comedy.

I just kept thinking of the controlling twits who come out of the woodwork here at FR to spew their tiny controlling venom at smokers, mainly claiming intellectual superiority because of their neuroses.