LA Times Jumps On Smoking In Films Debate

Written on September 26, 2008 by Marc Eastman in Newsish

The LA Times jumped on a research paper yesterday that is, in some vague and mysterious way, anti-smoking. You can see the LA Times story here…

Now, this is generally neither here nor there for me, but this particular article and report are talking about movies. Researchers at Stanford and the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UCSF apparently did a lot of study and discovered that a whole lot of actors in the 30s and 40s were paid a lot of money to endorse cigarettes. Not only that, the studios involved in films got a lot of benefit in the form of cross-promotion when, I assume, the big names smoked in their films.

???

Time is heavy on the hands of tobacco researchers, yes?

The LA Times article goes on to give us this snippet from the resulting paper –

“Movie industry executives claim the right of artistic freedom and often say that smoking is part of character development or the need to create a realistic scene. But the exploration of the early studio-era contracts suggests that smoking in the movies was a mutually beneficial business deal with effects that linger today, said Dr. Stanton Glantz, the lead author of the paper, which is published today in the journal Tobacco Control.

“People say smoking is part of filmmaking. It creates characters and mood. But our paper showed this was all business. Some of the people in those ads didn’t even smoke. But one side effect it had was it completely embedded smoking into the culture of Hollywood. This cultural connection drives smoking in film,” he said.”

Now, I’m not pro-smoking, and mostly because I don’t really know what it might mean to be pro-smoking, but you’re sure to have gathered that this article and study tick me off a bit. It’s not that I’m opposed to anti-smoking advocates. It’s really that I’m opposed to flawed logic and manipulative, nonsense research in all its forms.

The two paragraphs above begin with logical fallacies. The “But” in each implies that what follows the “But” proves that what comes before the “But” is untrue. A fair enough form of statement, but in this case the two sides of the “But” are in no way related. Whether people made money is not relevant to whether or not smoking is part of character development, or otherwise a “real” tool of filmmaking.

I’m here to tell you that it is a very “real” and useful tool of filmmaking. The recent film Married Life is a great example. The two main male characters smoke, and they smoke very differently, and it says a lot about their characters. Roger Ebert even mentioned the fact in his review.

The LA Times article goes on to mention a new report from the National Cancer Institute which “…indicates that smoking in movies influences children and teens to smoke.” The upshot of the rest of the article is the idea that MPAA ratings should give an R rating to movies in which characters smoke.

This is largely because, “Removing smoking in movies accessible to children and teens would reduce youth smoking by 50%, said Glantz, a professor of medicine at UCSF.”

Has there ever been a more nonsense statistic? What dartboard had 50% on it there?

Have you ever noticed that no one puts out a study indicating that eating broccoli in movies influences children to eat broccoli? How about going to church, or doing your homework, or obeying traffic laws? All these things actually do happen in movies, but they don’t “work.” But, drinking, smoking, driving hot cars, responding positively to buxom women in bikinis, being stinking rich, and curiously enough liking ranch dressing… these things all “work.”

See, everyone is scared that the movies make smoking look cool, and then people are going to want to smoke. Guess what, smoking is cool. If enough people tell you not to do something, that’s how it becomes cool to do it. Now, the big fix is to put an R rating on smoking itself.

What?

Being that thing that causes a movie to get an R rating is just one of the ways the thing becomes cool!!! And, yeah, this will really save all the minors. Remember when you were 14 and never saw any R rated movies? That sucked, huh?

Hey, fine, let’s be anti-smoking, but can anti-smoking dollars be put to better use at least? Come on, there’s a study now that says actors were paid to endorse a product. Thanks for the heads up there Johnny McNewsflash.

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