Curb film smoking and aid teens, expert advises
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/12/06
DEL.ICIO.USThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/12/06
When the PG-13-rated car-thrill movie "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" hit theaters this summer, people worried that it might influence its teenage audience to drive recklessly.
Perhaps they also should have worried about the heavy smoke in the film that came not from car exhaust, but from cigarettes.
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"The more smoking in the movies kids see, the more they smoke," says Stanton Glantz, head of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California at San Francisco.
Smoking on the silver screen has a greater impact on teenage smoking than either parents or peers, Glantz, co-author of "The Cigarette Papers" and "Tobacco War," told the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in Atlanta earlier this week. He estimates that 390,000 American teenagers start smoking each year as a result of the movies.
A series of studies in three countries over the past decade have shown a direct correlation between the amount of on-screen smoking teens have seen to their likelihood of lighting up.
Film depictions range from Gwyneth Paltrow seductively sucking on a Kool in the 1998 R-rated modernized version of "Great Expectations" to an animated cow lighting up at the end of the PG-rated "Barnyard" this summer.
When Humphrey Bogart or Orson Welles puffed away in the classic films of the 1950s, they reflected the culture of the times. Since then, the rate of smoking among adults has decreased from 45 percent to 22 percent—yet actors smoke on-screen at about the same rate they did five decades ago, Glantz says.
Whether it's a chain-smoking Cruella De Vil in "101 Dalmatians," or a binge-smoking Julia Roberts in "My Best Friend's Wedding," kids are bound to be exposed, he says.
But Glantz has a plan.
He wants the Motion Picture Association of America to give an R rating to movies that depict smoking and to include anti-smoking ads with films that include smoking, regardless of their ratings. He would grant exemptions for films such as "Capote" that depict historical figures who smoked, and those with strong anti-tobacco messages.
He also thinks films should certify in the closing credits that they have received no pay for tobacco product promotion. And he thinks tobacco brand placement in movies — such as the Man of Steel bursting through a Marlboro logo in "Superman II" — should be eliminated.
If the Motion Picture Association of America can "enforce a rule about the f-word," Glantz says, "they can do this."
His proposals have been endorsed by a range of medical organizations including the World Health Organization, American Heart Association, American Lung Association and American Medical Association. This month, his cause will get a major boost when the American Medical Association Alliance, the grass-roots, volunteer arm of the AMA made up of physicians, medical students and their family and friends, officially takes up the cause of "Screen Out," a Glantz effort to mobilize parents against unnecessary tobacco use in film.
Not only doctors, but also lawyers are pressuring the Motion Picture Association. The country's state attorneys general have mounted their own campaign to pressure moviemakers to reduce smoking scenes and to have anti-smoking trailers added to movies.
The Motion Picture Association has not acted on their suggestions, but association spokeswoman Kori Bernard said talks are under way. "No one thinks we should encourage or glamorize smoking," she says. "At the same time, we have to preserve freedom of speech in storytelling."
Anti-smoking crusaders cite studies in the United States, Germany and Mexico that purport to show a link between exposure to on-screen smoking and teenage tobacco use.
One of the largest and most recent, a survey of 6,500 adolescents 10 to 14 years old reported in the journal Pediatrics in November 2005, concluded that "exposure to movie smoking is the primary independent risk factor for smoking initiation in U.S. adolescents in this age group." That study was funded by the National Cancer Institute, an arm of the National Institutes of Health in Washington.
Researchers counted tobacco depictions and timed on-screen use in more than 500 box office hits over several years, then surveyed adolescents about which films they had seen. That and previous studies showed "this is a very important causal element in adolescent smoking in the United States," says James Sargent of Dartmouth Medical School, a lead researcher on the project.
Even when accounting for factors such as risk-taking personalities and parental use of tobacco, studies show clear correlations between exposure to on-screen smoking and tobacco use among teens, he says.
That exposure can be considerable, said Sargent, who conducted an Academy of Pediatrics workshop with Glantz. Middle-schoolers watch about three movies a week — or 150 a year — including videos and DVDs. Most of those probably show somebody smoking.
A random sample of films over the decades showed that the rate of incidence of tobacco use declined from an average of 10.7 uses per hour in 1950 to just 4.9 in the early 1980s, according to a 2004 report of the study in the American Journal of Public Health. By 2002, it was back up to 10.9.
To check for smoking in a movie, go to scenesmoking.org. For information about the effort to curb on-screen smoking, smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu.
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