Cigarettes Are Doing Big Box Office
Though banished from bars, and herded from restaurants and office buildings, smokers still have free rein in California’s most glamorous venue--the movies, where actors are posing with brand-name cigarettes more frequently than they have in decades, according to a new study.
The rate of so-called actor endorsements of tobacco brands jumped about tenfold in the 1990s, say Dartmouth Medical School researchers who examined 250 of the most popular movies of the last decade, from “Ghostbusters II” and “Kindergarten Cop” to “The Last Boy Scout” and “Men in Black.”
“We adults don’t really notice how much smoking goes on in movies, unless we’re looking for it,” says Dr. James Sargent, the pediatrician who led the study, which was published last week in the Lancet, a British medical journal. “But kids are like sponges; they pick up all this stuff. And when you think that most of them are seeing two or three movies a week, well, they’re getting more exposure to smoking in movies than they are in real life, in their communities.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in the late 1980s, while Congress was considering regulating paid tobacco advertising in movies, the nation’s top cigarette manufacturers publicly pledged to stop using Hollywood to market their products. Their joint statement said, in part: “No payment, direct or indirect, shall be made for the placement of our cigarettes or cigarette advertisements in any film produced for viewing by the general public.”
Nonetheless, some of the most popular flicks produced since then have been almost as smoky and logo-laden as the stock car racing circuit.
The Dartmouth team found that 87% of popular movies contain tobacco use and that about a third display identifiable brand-name logos, either as part of the scene itself, or in the background, on billboards or storefronts. This is about the same rate of brand placement that prevailed before the industry ban in 1989, Sargent says.
And it’s almost as common in movies geared to teens as in those made for adults, the report found. About one-third of the top 250 movies between 1988 and 1997 were rated G or PG, and more than half of the total were comedies or dramas.
Most disturbing for public health researchers is the increase in the frequency with which actors smoked or handled cigarettes whose brand name was clearly visible. While only 1% of movies included such scenes before the ban, the study found, that figure had jumped to 11% by 1997. “The use of a product by an actor gives it a status that cannot be beat,” says Sargent, “and adolescents are clearly one group that is especially vulnerable to this message.”
Other surveys have shown, for instance, that teens whose favorite actors sometimes smoke on screen, such as Bruce Willis or Julia Roberts, are more likely to smoke themselves than are kids whose favorite star seldom lights up on screen, says Sargent.
Says Edith Balbach, director of the Tufts University Community Health Program, “I think kids are simply less able than adults to separate an actor from the character he or she is playing.”
No one but Hollywood insiders can say whether such brand placement qualifies as paid advertising, or how that payment is made. But the Dartmouth researchers offer several possible explanations: Maybe actors who smoke off-screen figure out ways to incorporate the habit into their characters. Maybe tobacco manufacturers have arrangements with actors or writers.
Movie makers have said that making a film true to life sometimes means including characters who smoke.
Regardless, say public health researchers, the overall effect is the same: cigarette ads. “The movie people all say they’re trying to reflect real life,” says Stanton Glantz, a UC San Francisco professor of medicine. “But at a time when smoking as a habit is in the tank, especially in California, movies look a lot more like cigarette ads than they do like real life.”