Gone are the days when movies featured scenes of smoked filled-rooms with actors carelessly puffing away. The Centers for Disease Control and Prvention reported Thursday that cigarettes or other tobacco products are appearing less often on the big screen.
The study found a 72 percent drop in 2010 in the number of "onscreen tobacco incidents" in youth-rated films – G, PG or PG-13 -- from 2,093 incidences in 2005 to 595 in 2010. An incidence was defined as one person smoking or displaying a package of cigarettes at one time in one scene. Scenes where two people smoke count as two incidences.
In 2003, researchers at Dartmouth Medical School found teens who watched the most movies with smoking were almost three times more likely to start smoking than those who watched the fewest number of movies with smoking. Following the report, which was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the Department of Health and Human Services began to include reducing youth exposure to onscreen smoking in their plan to stop teens from lighting up.
Since the National Cancer Institute report, three of the six largest movie studios – Disney, Time Warner and Universal – have published policies to reduce tobacco use in their movies and have decreased tobacco incidents by 96 percent.
Among the three other major movie studios – Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, and Viacom – that don’t have explicit policies on smoking in films, incidents reduced by 47 percent on average.
“What happened is that the CEOs of Time Warner, Disney and Universal said they had to do something about the problem of smoking in movies,” Stanton Glantz, lead author of the study and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. “This goes to show if you put in place a strong policy, you can dramatically reduce smoking rates among teens and still have good movies.”
In 2010, 75 of the 137 top-grossing films showed no tobacco incidents compared to 49 of 147 in 2005. Even R-rated movies have seen a decrease, with 14 of 48 films having no tobacco incidents in 2010 compared to two of 43 in 2005.
Glantz said while the studios have done well to self-regulate, the Motion Pictures Association of America, a trade organization for the industry, needs stricter policies. He suggests the MPAA should require films that include smoking to carry an R-rating.
“The MPAA has so far refused to deal with this issue. They say they have dealt with this within their ratings policy by stating they consider smoking when determining a rating,” Glantz said. “I have yet to see a single movie rated R for smoking. ‘Rango,’ which is rated PG, had 60 instances of smoking.”
The MPAA said that smoking is often listed as a rating criterion. For the 2011 children’s movie “Rango,” about a chameleon who becomes sheriff of a lawless town in the Wild West, the film was rated “PG for rude humor, language, action and smoking.”
“The purpose of the rating system is not to reduce smoking. It is supposed to be a guide for parents. We include information about what is depicted in films,” MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman said in a telephone interview.
“Many things are taken into consideration for these ratings," she added. "Nearly three-quarters of all movies with depictions of smoking of any kind are already rated R.”
The report also recommends that states get involved to reduce smoking incidents in films. Glantz said almost all states offer movie producers tax credits or cash rebates totaling about $1 billion annually. But states are inadvertently spending more on films depicting smoking than they are to prevent youth smoking, he said.
“In 2010, 15 states spent $288 million subsidizing films that had smoking but spend $280 million on anti-tobacco campaigns,” he said. “States need to come together to put restrictions on these subsidies that would make movies that promote smoking ineligible.”
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