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Hollywood's Smoke Alarm
Onscreen puffing is recruiting a new generation of kids.
The American screen has long been a smoky place, at least since the 1940s,
when Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager showed how to make and seal a
romantic deal over a pair of cigarettes that were smoldering as much as the
stars. Today cigarettes are more common on-screen than at any other time since
midcentury. 75% of all Hollywood films show tobacco use, according to a 2006
survey by the University of California, San Francisco.
Audiences, especially kids, are taking notice. Two recent studies,
published in the Lancet and Pediatrics, have found that among children as young
as 10, those exposed to the most screen smoking are up to 2.7 times as likely as
others to pick up the habit. Worse, it's the ones from nonsmoking homes who are
hit the hardest, perhaps because they are spared the dirty ashtrays and musty
drapes that make real-world smoking a lot less appealing than the sanitized
cinematic version.
Now the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH)-the folks behind the U.S.
designated-driver campaign-is pushing to get the smokes off the screen. "Some
movies show kids up to 14 incidents of smoking per hour," says Barry Bloom,
HSPH's dean. “We’re in the business of preventing disease, and cigarettes are
the No. 1 preventable cause."
If there's one thing health experts know, it's that you don't influence
behavior by telling people what to do. You do it by exposing them to enough
cases of people behaving well that it creates a new norm. What made the
designated-driver concept catch on in the 1980s was partly that Harvard and the
ad agencies it worked with persuaded TV networks to slip the idea into their
shows. There's a reason a designated-driver poster appeared in the bar on
Cbeers, and it's not because it made the jokes funnier.
"The idea appeared in 160 prime-time episodes over four years," says Jay
Winsten, HSPH's associate dean. "Drunk-driving fatalities fell 25% over the next
three years."
Harvard long believed that getting cigarettes out of movies could have as
powerful an effect, but it wouldn't be easy. Cigarette makers had a history of
striking product-placement deals with Hollywood, and while the 1998 tobacco
settlement prevents that, nothing stops directors from incorporating smoking
into scenes on their own.
In 1999 Harvard began holding one-on-one meetings with studio execs trying
to change that, and last year the Motion Picture Association of America flung
the door open, inviting Bloom to make a presentation in February to all the
studios. Harvard's advice was direct: Get the butts entirely out, or at least
make smoking unappealing.
A few films provide a glimpse of what a no-smoking-or low
-smoking-Hollywood would be like. Producer Lindsay Doran, who once helped
persuade director John Hughes to keep Ferris Bueller smoke-free in the 1980s
hit, wanted to do the same for the leads of her recent movie Stranger Than
Fiction. When a writer convinced her that the character played by Emma Thompson
had to smoke, Doran relented, but from the way Thompson hacks her way through
the film and snuffs out her cigarettes in a palmful of spit, it's clear the
glamour's gone. And remember all the smoking in The Devil Wears Prada? No?
That's because the producers of that film kept it out entirely-even in a story
that travels from the U.S. fashion world to Paris, two of the most tobacco-happy
places on earth. "No one smoked in that movie," says Doran, "and no one
noticed."
Such movies are hardly the rule, but the pressure is growing. As Harvard
closes in from one side, a dozen health groups including the American Medical
Association are calling fox reduction of smoking in movies and on TV; and 41
state attorneys general have signed a letter seeking, public-service ads at the
beginning of any DVD that includes smoking. Like smokers, studios may conclude
that quitting the habit is not just a lot healthier but also a Lot smarter.
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