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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Newsweek: Stubbing Out Smoking in Movies [01/21-2]
Excerpts from: Stubbing Out Those Film Butts Citing a desire to prevent young people from smoking, an academic fights to leave cigarettes on the cutting-room floor
By Jennifer Barrett Ozols Newsweek [01/20/05]
If it was up to Stanton A. Glantz, “Ocean’s Twelve,” “Spider-Man” and even “Elf" should have received R ratings. Glantz, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of its Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, says any film that features tobacco use should get the restrictive rating, except those that also depict the associated health hazards or feature historical figures who smoked (as Howard Hughes in “The Aviator”).
Four years ago, he launched the Smoke Free Movies project (www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu) to argue his point to Hollywood. Since then, at least two published studies have established a link between on-screen depictions of smoking and teens mimicking that behavior. A Dartmouth Medical School report published in the journal Pediatrics last July showed that kids are three times more likely to smoke if they repeatedly see on-screen actors puffing away.
Armed with such research, Glantz has been lobbying the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to consider tobacco as it does alcohol or profanity when determining a movie’s rating. NEWSWEEK’s Jennifer Barrett Ozols spoke with Glantz about his campaign and Hollywood’s reaction. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Why focus on tobacco use in movies?
Stanton A. Glantz: I’ve been very critical of many of the efforts aimed at youth prevention because I don’t think they work—things like preventing access to kids. You can make it hard for kids to buy cigarettes but then they just get them somewhere else. If you make a graph of teen smoking rates compared to how vigorously you restrict youth access, there’s no correlation. But it seemed to me that movies were a tremendously potent influence.
Have you noticed an increase in smoking in movies aimed at kids and teens?
I started to notice that in the late 1980s and early 1990s there seemed to be more smoking in movies than there used to be. And we started to measure it. We noticed that smoking in movies fell in the ‘60s through the mid-1980s. And then it just shot up. In the past, up until the mid to late ‘90s, most smoking was in R-rated movies. But in [the] last few years [it] shifted out of R and into PG-13 movies. By shifting it back, it would greatly reduce kids’ exposure.
But does seeing people smoke in movies really make kids want to light up a cigarette?
It’s very clear from the research that smoking in movies is a main reason kids start smoking. And there have been published studies now showing that the more kids see smoking in movies the more likely they are to smoke.
How much of a difference would an R rating make for movies that depict tobacco use?
I believe that if we can get an R rating for smoking, we could cut the amount of youth smoking by about 200,000 a year.
How do you come up with that number?
We think about 390,000 kids start smoking each year after seeing smoking in the movies. If we can cut the dose—or the amount of smoking they see—then we’ll see less smoking. That rating substantially reduces the likelihood that kids will see it. Kids are less likely to see R-rated films, though they still see them. More importantly, R-rated movies make less money than those rated PG-13, so if directors want a blockbuster, they want a PG-13 rating. And that means editors would cut the smoking out of a film to get that rating.
What do you say to critics who argue that your agenda is akin to censorship?
Censorship is when you tell someone they are not allowed to say something. We are talking about labeling here. Censorship would be if we never permitted smoking.
What about classic movies that depict smoking? Would those be re-rated?
We always hear about “Casablanca.” But we’re not talking about re-rating old movies. We want to change the rules for the ratings of the movies going forward. Also, if there’s a real historical character who really smoked—I call it the "Winston Churchill exception"—that would be exempt. Or if the movie accurately portrayed the negative side of smoking, that wouldn’t trigger an R rating either.
You suggest that movies that show smoking also run an anti-tobacco ad. Why?
There’s been research showing it counteracts the effect of seeing smoking in the movie, but it doesn’t affect the likeability of the movie or whether a kid would recommend a movie. We also think they should post a certificate at the end of movies, where it says things like “No animals were tortured in the making of this movie,” saying that they got nothing to put cigarettes in the movie ... These would not have an impact on the content of the movie. It would just be labeled properly.
Some directors argue that showing smoking in movies just reflects real life.
There’s more smoking in movies today than there was in the 1950s. Yet in the 1950s, about 44 percent of adults smoked, while in 2002, only 22 percent did ... We have been very careful to stay away from being proscriptive on how movies are being made. I’d be resistant to anyone telling me what I can or cannot say. But you can’t ignore the effect this is having on kids.
How much progress have you made?
When I started out, most people thought I was out of my mind. They thought the suggestion for an R rating for smoking was the most ridiculous thing they ever heard. Here we sit four years later and I have state attorneys general expressing interest, the World Health Organization is interested in making it a component of their campaign, [many organizations] have endorsed the recommendations and there are youth advocacy programs in 18 states working on the issues and hundreds of thousands of letters written to the MPAA and to Hollywood each year. This is really turning into a social movement.
But Hollywood still seems reluctant. Do you think you’ll eventually win them over?
[MPAA president and CEO] Dan Glickman is willing to listen to the evidence, but he is a creature of the studios, and they are still stonewalling this. But I think once it cracks—and it will—it will happen overnight. It’s like clean air. Once smoke-free legislation happened in one place, it happened all over. Once we can get one studio to move on this, or one big name to move on this—so it becomes clear they can do the right thing and not jeopardize their career—things will change very suddenly. We are going to win this.
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