Clearing the Air

James Dean, lean and long, a cigarette slipped almost as an afterthought to the side of a lazy smile; Bogie coolly lighting one up for Bacall; Marlene’s platinum curls swathed in a halo of blue smoke--Hollywood glamour and a slow-burning cigarette have gone hand in hand since the early days of cinema, when audiences lighted up Havanas in the orchestra pit and stars on the screen used cigarettes as the ultimate prop.

The movie and tobacco industries and their long-standing and invariably uneasy relationship is the subject of the Hollywood Entertainment Museum’s newest exhibition, “Smoke, Lies & Videotape.”

Moving chronologically through film, radio and television history, the exhibition attempts to deconstruct the complicated give and take involving cigarette manufacturers, Hollywood studios and an impressionable public.

“We want the visitor to move through the exhibit and to discover, in the way that we discovered when researching the project, how prevalent smoking is in the media and how that affects our own choices,” says Chris Horak, the museum’s curator.

The exhibition represents a directional change for the museum, which usually houses revolving art exhibitions and a host of Hollywood memorabilia (an extensive collection of costumes, photographs and vintage TVs and radios). But in the past two years, efforts have been concentrated on preparation for the “Smoke, Lies & Videotape” exhibition, which was funded by a grant from Prop. 99 and the Tobacco Control Section of the California Department of Health Services, Horak said.

Geared, according to museum President Phyllis Caskey, toward “a primary target of 16- to 24-year-olds,” the exhibition aims to educate teens about the tobacco industry’s long involvement in mass media. To do so, the organization plans to involve local schools through free tours and surveys.

Using clips from early film classics and modern television programs, as well as interactive touch screens (which offer trivia games and smoking facts) and personal MP3 players (which provide a running narration), the exhibition attempts to steer visitors through a revealing history of on-screen smoking.

Despite the state’s involvement and the obvious desire to dissuade young people from taking up a bad habit, the curators were hesitant to force-feed teens anti-smoking propaganda.

“We didn’t want to push people’s buttons in an obvious way,” says one of the show’s main designers, Barry Howard. “We want kids to go through the exhibit and come out having made their own decisions about smoking.”

Caskey agrees: “We wanted to let the images speak for themselves and allow you to draw your own conclusions.”

The exhibition does do a good job of keeping off the soapbox, at times perhaps too good. Watching Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly taking a slow, elegant drag in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” or Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway sharing the quintessential postcoital smoke in “Chinatown,” one can’t help but feel that what Tobacco Control might hope to demonize looks, well ... kinda cool (particularly with the help of clever camera work, the right lighting and a beautiful and glamorous star).

The museum’s negative stance on smoking, however, is more than clear in the characterization of the exhibition’s animated “host”: RJ “Lucky” Morris, a shady PR man who pops up throughout the tour with a mischievous grin and an ever-present cigarette. The point is clear that “Lucky” (whose not-so-subtle name is an amalgamation of the country’s largest tobacco companies) will do just about everything he can--be it clever product placement or celebrity endorsements--to give smoking a good name.

While the exhibit provides some fascinating cultural relics--Johnny Carson chain-smoking on “The Tonight Show,” a cigarette commercial featuring “The Flintstones”--the real issues, such as the ways in which media directly influence society and the moral complexities of corporate involvement with the arts, are left, unfortunately, on the sidelines. The exhibition tends to shy away from direct critique in favor of playful scrutiny, and, while it remains entertaining, it’s questionable how much of an effect this kind of ambiguity will have on the show’s prospective audience.

There are, however, a few moments in “Smoke, Lies & Videotape” that may give teens pause, particularly the footage of a young Steve McQueen happily hawking the very cigarettes that will eventually kill him, and the exhibition’s last stop, two tall plexiglass monuments inscribed with the names of celebrities who have died from tobacco-related illnesses. The list records the loss of talents such as Gary Cooper, Lucille Ball and Walt Disney.

It stands as a reminder of untimely death that illustrates, more powerfully than any film clip or vintage movie poster, that Hollywood’s promise of glamour through the seductions of a lighted cigarette is, in the end, all smoke and mirrors.

“Smoke, Lies & Videotape,” Hollywood Entertainment Museum, 7021 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. Open daily except Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Information: (323) 465-7900.