Force of Habit

What are you going to do, arrest me for smoking?

--Sharon Stone’s character in 1992’s “Basic Instinct.”

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Joel Schumacher first lighted up at age 9 and, as a reformed four-pack-a-day smoker, has little patience for the habit. In the mid-1980s, smoking was so prevalent while he was shooting “Flatliners,” “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “Lost Boys,” the director says, that he “almost developed black lung disease.”

These days, Schumacher discourages smoking on the set unless cigarettes are part of the story line. Yet his 1994 adaptation of John Grisham’s “The Client” opens with a scene in which a 10-year-old teaches an 8-year-old how to inhale.

Balancing social responsibility and artistic license is an industrywide challenge--one to which television has responded more effectively than feature filmmakers, according to a study being released today by the American Lung Assn. Though President Clinton’s recent crackdown on the sale and advertising of tobacco seeks to reduce cigarette use among minors, it doesn’t address what many consider to be one of the more enticing forms of exposure: the portrayal of smoking on the screen.

Cigarette ads were banned from TV in 1971, and network Standards and Practices departments have stringent guidelines about tobacco use in programming. Still, smoking occurred in 15% of the 230 television episodes reviewed during the last year by the lung association, although almost never by a main character.

Movies are another story. The depiction of smoking declined in the decades after the 1964 Surgeon General report, corresponding to a real-world decline in smoking by adult Americans from 42.4% in 1965 to 25.5% in 1994. But data compiled by a UC San Francisco professor of medicine shows it’s still greatly exaggerated on the big screen.

“Movies bear more resemblance to tobacco advertising than they do to reality,” said Dr. Stanton Glantz, whose 1994 study analyzed cigarette smoking in randomly selected films released between 1960 and 1991. “Kids come away thinking that the habit is widely accepted, practiced by people in positions of power when it’s actually minority behavior concentrated among the less-educated and the poor. Though on-camera smoking seems to be on the rise, the current system insulates the studios and affords them deniability.”

Since 1990, studios have refused to accept payment for the on-screen use of tobacco, leaving the portrayal of smoking exclusively in the hands of filmmakers. Some insiders insist that an under-the-table form of product placement is going on nevertheless--a charge difficult to prove and denied by the tobacco industry.

In period movies such as “Mulholland Falls” and “Kansas City,” not to mention film-noirish projects such as “The Last Seduction” and “The Usual Suspects,” smoking is part and parcel of the action just as it was in the 1930s and 1940s when stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck and Bette Davis held an ever-present cigarette. And with even less justification, modern stories rely too heavily on cigarettes to develop character and advance the plot, anti-cigarette advocates say.

In “Pulp Fiction,” John Travolta impressed Uma Thurman by rolling his own cigarettes, while two of the leads in the environmentally conscious “A River Runs Through It” smoked. Ted Danson puffed his way through the PG-rated “Getting Even With Dad” as do three of the five main characters in the 20-something romantic comedy “She’s the One.” “The Good Son” showed Macaulay Culkin lighting up . . . and even Randy Quaid’s Amish bowler inhaled by the end of “Kingpin.”

Inserting the smoking scene into “The Client” was a tough call, Schumacher said, but in the end he opted to be true to John Grisham’s bestseller. “Warner Bros. never brought up the issue but, then, no studio ever has,” he said. (Warner Bros. declined to comment.)

Tom Lauria, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Tobacco Institute, said he “denounces any effort to dictate to Hollywood the content of its work,” likening such efforts to the establishment of the Hays Code of the 1930s.

“Feature films depict a variety of activities but I take umbrage at the fact that, on TV, only villains smoke,” he said. “Being a nice person and smoking a cigarette aren’t mutually exclusive, so why invent new stereotypes? Just as we shouldn’t encourage drinking, smoking or other adult behavior on programs with wide youth audiences, we shouldn’t reduce society’s portrayal in media to a sandbox.”

Even so, having Sandra Bullock smoke in this summer’s “A Time to Kill” was “unfortunate,” Schumacher acknowledged. As shot, the film included a scene in which her character--a former smoker--reveals to Matthew McConaughey that she was puffing on clove cigarettes, purchased in a health food store. When the movie came in at four hours, however, that segment was cut.

“Presenting Bullock as an ‘enlightened smoker’ was another way of hitting home the differences between this odd couple, a bleeding-heart liberal and a Southern male chauvinist,” Schumacher said. “What you have now is the setup with no payoff . . . had I known, I would never have had her smoke. Sandra’s a role model and, as filmmakers, we have a responsibility. Even more so in child-oriented movies such as [Schumacher’s] ‘Batman Forever’ where Tommy Lee Jones smoked up a storm. But, then, no one minds when villains smoke.”

Feature films are five times more likely to depict the habit than TV, the lung association study found. In the 230 TV episodes reviewed by the group, tobacco was used in 21% of the dramas and 12% of the sitcoms. Fox Television was the smokiest, with 73% of its series portraying the habit in at least one episode compared with 44% on NBC, 38% on ABC and 33% on CBS.

In a study released in March, teenage reviewers overseen by a regional division of the lung association found that 77% of the 133 current movies analyzed portrayed tobacco use. Walt Disney Pictures was rated the best with an average of just six smoking incidents per movie, followed by 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures. At the bottom were Miramax Films and Castle Rock Entertainment with 45 and 34, respectively.

While only 3% of the American population smokes cigars, the product was depicted in over half of those movies with tobacco use. And only one-third of the movies reviewed displayed any kind of anti-smoking statement--from plot lines to “no smoking” signs.

“Smoking is used to portray rebellion and ‘cool,’ ” said study supervisor Trisha Gibson. “Our goal is to reduce the glamour aspect of cigarettes, to show the real harm they inflict. Among California teens, smoking has increased from 9% to 11% in the past three years.”

Television is more responsive because there are regulatory mechanisms in place, said Larry Deutchman, senior vice president of production and marketing at the Entertainment Industries Council--a Virginia-based nonprofit group that encourages responsible presentation of social issues.

“At the networks, there’s a Jiminy Cricket on the premises, a Standards and Practices Department with a philosophical statement about portraying smoking, which gives them the right to scribble a note in the margin of a script. And while the Federal Communications Commission can’t oversee content, it does have some leverage in the form of license renewal.”

All four major television networks discourage the depiction of smoking. When considered necessary to the story line, the implications of the habit should be shown, they say.

Recent depictions include detective Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz) on ABC’s “NYPD Blue,” who gave up cigarettes for three seasons, only to pick one up again after his son was killed. On NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” the detective played by Andre Braugher gave up cigarettes shortly after the actor did--only to suffer a stroke in the season finale. The stressed-out “ER” doctor played by Sherry Stringfield, meanwhile, is one of the few leads who continues to light up.

Fox’s “The X-Files” features an unnamed, ongoing character who smokes. But since he has been referred to as “The Cancer Man,” it’s a step in the right direction, the lung association says.

Roland McFarland, vice president of Broadcast Standards for Fox, said the network regards cigarettes as a “harmful drug”--one it is careful not to popularize. “I’d like to know more about those portrayals cited by the lung association,” he said. “There are contextual considerations. We wouldn’t take smoking out of a prison yard or a war film but we do keep it in the background where prime-time programming is concerned. And since smoking was found in such a small percentage of shows to begin with, the numbers are less consequential.”

The children’s cable channel Nickelodeon has a no-smoking policy for its original programming, but faces a dilemma when airing vintage shows, according to Diane Robina, a vice president of programming at the network. Though it’s impossible to edit out all of the smoking imagery in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or even “Looney Tunes,” any “endorsement” of the habit is automatically snipped. In newly restored episodes of “I Love Lucy,” the original opening--in which sponsor Philip Morris showed cartoon stick figures of Lucy and Desi smoking--was replaced with one of a heart first used on syndicated versions.

In 1989, the film industry began to change course after Congress turned up memos documenting tobacco product placement deals--most notably, a $42,500 payment for 1980’s “Superman II” and $350,000 for 1989’s “Licence to Kill.”

The following year, the Entertainment Resources & Marketing Assn.--a product placement trade group that includes representatives from the studios--decided to stop representing tobacco products. Had such placement continued, Deutchman said, the government would have required studios to include a tobacco health warning in the closing credits--a scenario equally distasteful to the tobacco industry.

“The industry mirrors real life in its growing opposition to cigarette smoking,” said Dean Ayers, president of the product placement association. “But just because the studios won’t deal with tobacco companies doesn’t mean that a director can’t ask the prop-master to put a pack of Lucky Strikes in a shot. When you see smoking on-screen, it’s the creative people who are making those calls.”

Joshua Ravetch, New Line Cinema’s director of production resources, whose job includes making product placement deals, said that “as responsible Clintonians,” his company doesn’t want to be part of pushing the habit.

“In the end, the choice lies with the director,” he said. “We might raise the issue in an initial meeting with him but if he wants a scene in which ‘an actor lights up and reflects on her life,’ there’s nothing much we can do.”

Cineastes say smoking and actors have always been interconnected--with on-screen smoking initiated by the actors themselves.

“Fred MacMurray once told me that a cigarette is a prop--something to take your mind off the problems of delivering lines, something to do when the camera is on you,” said Richard Jewell, associate dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television. “For him, it was an important component of the acting process.”

Many point to a resurgence of smoking among young actors today, but UC San Francisco’s Glantz says that’s beside the point. “Though studios deny the existence of product placement deals, money is changing hands at some level,” he said. “Water doesn’t run uphill.”

Fox TV’s McFarland agreed: “The tobacco industry has become aggressive. Since TV is no longer an option, it approaches filmmakers, prop people, set decorators, with financial inducements to place and popularize tobacco products. That’s a given in this industry.”

Bob Reilly, secretary-treasurer of Local 52 of International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, which represents, among others, property masters and set decorators, says no one’s ever offered him a kickback--and he’s been in the business since 1963.

“A lot of things go on under the table,” he said. “But, to my knowledge it’s not a common practice. I’ve heard that charge with regard to a number of products, though never before with cigarettes. Particularly in the wake of Clinton’s attack on the tobacco industry, some anti-smoking folks will do whatever it takes to pan the product.”

The Tobacco Institute’s Lauria said he knew of no under-the-table activity. “Our member companies have repeatedly stated that there is no investment in product placement--on any level--in the entertainment area,” he said.

Sometimes a story line demands the inclusion of cigarettes, however--as in the case of Wayne Wang’s 1995 “Smoke.” Because the under-$6-million budget didn’t provide for stocking the cigar store that served as the centerpiece of the film, producer Peter Newman asked tobacco companies for help.

“I had no problem with it since there was no payment made or strings attached,” he said. “Just like I had no problem tackling that material. No one--of any age--was going to wake up the next morning and find himself addicted to cigars any more than watching ‘The Godfather’ would encourage someone to join the mob. To me, the cigar store was a crossroads in an anonymous world. ‘Smoke’ was a metaphor for people coming together. It was reality portrayed in a responsible way.”