Harvard group joins anti-smoking stand

Cadre of academics urge MPAA to address issue

By IAN MOHR

Harvard's School of Public Health has joined a growing raft of orgs currently urging Hollywood studios to curb cigarette smoking in movies seen by young people.

A cadre of academics from Harvard, as well as Johns Hopkins, convened at a closed door meeting recently with MPAA brass to address the issue of smoking on the silver screen. Also in attendance were execs from the major studios as well as NATO, the DGA, SAG and NBC.

There has been growing pressure on Hollywood of late from antismoking groups asking that standards for lighting up be incorporated into the ratings system. The issue was expected to come to a head at the recent ShoWest confab, but wound up still smoldering.

According to stats brought up by Harvard brass, 66% of the top-50 grossing films over a 12 month period spanning 2004 and 2005 contained depictions of smoking. And 68% of PG-13 films over that time showed lighting up on camera.

That broke down to 12.8 incidents of smoking per hour of running time - the highest in a decade - for the top-50 pics, and 14.2 depictions per hour of running time for the PG-13 movies.

R-rated films over the same time period averaged 20.4 depictions per hour, according to the academics' addresses.

In one speech, Harvard School of Public Health dean Barry Bloom urged Tinseltown honchos to "take substantive and effective action to eliminate the depiction of tobacco smoking from films accessible to children and youths, and take leadership and credit for doing so."

"Don't ignore the issue or put a fig leaf on it, like a descriptor on DVDs," Bloom added. "That would be the equivalent of the tobacco industry cynically putting smoking warnings on cigarette packages."

Harvard speakers said they see smoking on screen as more detrimental to movie patrons than vulgar language or other issues that ratings already cover.

"No one has died from hearing the f-word," said Bloom. "But 438,000 people in U.S., and five million worldwide, die each year from tobacco-related illness. We appreciate that movies are expensive, complex and demanding to make. If you are honest I think you will admit that most smoking in movies is both unnecessary and clichéd, and serves to make smoking socially acceptable to kids."

MPAA invited the academics to make presentations at the Beverly Hilton on Feb. 23. Remarks were made public this week by Harvard. Reps from the school had originally addressed the smoking issue back in 1999 in a meeting with Barry Diller and Hollywood studios, and have now rejoined the debate.

Jay A. Winsten, Harvard School of Public Health associate dean, and director for the school's Center for Health Communication, said that Hollywood previously helped to stigmatize druken driving through various campaigns in the 1980s spurred by orgs such as MADD. But that the movie biz was proving tougher to crack than television.

"I met with 250 executive producers and chief writers of nearly every prime time show, and made a simple request," Winsten said, recalling efforts to address the drunk driving issue. "To consider, on an occasional basis, and only if, from their point of view, it worked creatively for the show, incorporating a line or two of dialogue to reflect the evolution of a new social norm about drinking-and-driving that was already beginning to occur in the U.S."

In part as a result, he said, 160 prime time episodes of television subsequently incorporated a pro-designated driver message in their content, helping to impact drunken driving statistics.

"In contrast, the issue of smoking in films is much tougher to tackle through educational or advocacy approaches alone," he said. "Decisions about depicting smoking in films are made at many levels... and, it's tougher to convince filmmakers to forgo depicting smoking when, for a variety of creative reasons, they want to do so."

"What's needed is a movie ratings policy that creates an incentive for filmmakers to consider, and worry about, the depiction of smoking as a factor in the determination of a film's rating... the goal should be the elimination (with rare exceptions) of smoking from youth-rated films."

At ShoWest, MPAA and NATO reps said that they had acknowledged the requests for change by anti-smoking groups. But health orgs felt that the response wasn't enough.

That has left the cigarette issue still smoking.