The leader of World No Tobacco Day is targeting Hollywood, writes Sarah Paris
The cigarette dangling from the corner of Humphrey Bogart's mouth is still fashionable in Hollywood films half a century after Bogie died from throat cancer. On Saturday, World No Tobacco Day, the World Health Organisation will be shining a spotlight on the film industry's role in seducing young people into smoking. The campaign was the brainchild of Stanton Glantz, a professor at the University of California in San Francisco and head of the Smoke Free Films project.
Glantz is a longtime activist and guardian of the "cigarette papers", 4,000 pages of secret tobacco-industry documents leaked to him by an anonymous source. His new crusade has a simple premise: the more smoking kids see in the movies, the more likely they are to start.
Glantz has been asking Hollywood to adopt four measures to protect young viewers. By far the most controversial is an R rating - restricting admission for teenagers - for any film that shows smoking. Industry professionals were outraged at this potential "censorship".
"In America," says Prof Glantz, "if someone uses the word 'fuck' in a movie, it gets an R rating. Smoking on screen convinces kids to start using a highly addictive product which will kill half the people who get addicted to it. We think this should be taken as seriously by Hollywood as saying 'fuck'.
"Look at the actual smoking in movies," argues Glantz. "With very rare exceptions, it's out of context, it's not realistic and it could be eliminated without losing anything." An example is In The Bedroom, in which Sissy Spacek's character begins smoking. Todd Field, its writer, director and producer, says smoking was a way to show the stress Spacek's character was under.
"First of all," says Glantz, "the likelihood of a middle-aged doctor's wife starting to smoke, even under stress, is not all that great. And why in the world would she start smoking Marlboros?"Marlboro is a brand smoked primarily by teenage boys. "It's a good movie, but look at the scene when those Marlboros turn up. They're right in the middle of the screen, and they made sure there was a light shining on it so you would see the brand clearly. This is no accident."
The product placement that Prof Glantz alleges was once common. Sylvester Stallone promised in 1983 to use one brand in at least five feature films for a fee of $500,000. By the end of the decade, cigarette companies had pledged to stop paying to place their products.
So why did films' use of tobacco rise in the 1990s? Why would writers, producers and directors show more smoking on screen than ever? "If Hollywood is getting paid off, as they historically have been, they're corrupt," Glantz says, "and if they're doing it for free, and giving the tobacco industry hundreds of millions of dollars of free publicity, they're stupid."
He doesn't think the entertainment industry is stupid. He suspects money is still the driving force. He hears about offers of cars or places to live and of tobacco companies secretly coming in as investors. He can't prove any of this, he says, as nobody will go public.
But he is confident. "It might take a couple more years, but I think we're going to win. There's nowhere for them to hide any more."
You can get more information from www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu and www.wntd.com