The Issue
Smoking in movies is one of the Tobacco Industry’s oldest and most-successful tactics in targeting youth to use their deadly products. The Tobacco Industry knows that youth, their potential future customers, look up to celebrities, in some cases as their idols. So they use that against us, using Hollywood as a giant advertising scheme. Product placement and smoking scenes on the silver screen often reach an audience of hundreds of millions of youth worldwide, especially when the majority of smoking in movies is seen in youth-rated films. 56% of the top box office movies with smoking released from May 2007 to May 2009 were youth rated (G, PG and PG-13).
Think of a character in a movie you’ve seen that smokes. What type of person are they? It’s doubtful that they’re the nerd at school that gets beat up, or the guy that doesn’t get the girl, or the boring play-it-safe character. Because none of these characters are characters that teenagers aspire to be. Movie stars lighting up imply a variety of desirable traits that we look up to: sexy, dangerous, cool, rebellious, elegant, popular, and manly, to name a few.
And this technique seems to be working. In a study of youth, grades 5-8, the youth who saw 150 or more incidents of movie smoking were 3 times more likely to have tried smoking than youth you saw less than 50 incidents (Sargent, Pediatrics, 2005). Overall, smoking in movies is responsible for 52% of teenagers that start smoking. Studies have also shown that youth with high exposure to movie smoking view smoking positively, and have positive expectations for smoking.
This scheme of using the movies we watch, as advertisement for their deadly product, is one the Tobacco Industry has been using since Hollywood began. In 1927, the tobacco industry began paying actors who smoked, which shows exactly how much they use our movies as advertisement. Cigarettes have been glamorized in movies since the 1940s, with the film Now, Voyageur, in 1942, being a deliberate campaign to popularize cigarettes among women. Classic childhood and youth movies are another prime example of the long-lived love affair between Hollywood and Big Tobacco. Grease, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Muppet Movie, and 101 Dalmatians are all movies that I’m sure you’ve seen before, which contain gratuitous amounts of smoking.
And as long as Big Tobacco has been paying Hollywood to display cigarettes, they’ve been lying about doing so. Tobacco companies lied in front of the Federal Trade Commission regarding paid endorsements, saying that the movies that display their brands do so voluntarily. In 1998 the Master Settlement Agreement prohibited the tobacco industry from partaking in product placement activities. Yet, between 1999 and 2003, 68% to 88% of all big time studio films rated PG-13 included smoking, the highest rated studio being Walt Disney.
Even today the issue of smoking in movies continues. Though the Tobacco industry claims that they don’t pay any actors or any studios to smoke in their movies, smoking is still seen far too often in the movies we watch today, as well as product placement still existing. In fact, today the number of films visibly containing tobacco brands has increased, with Marlboro accounting for 75% of all brands displayed in 2008.
