Pushing Accountability on Hollywood

Why are Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts stonewalling thousands of middle and high school students writing to ask them to stop glamorizing smoking in their films?

Probably because that’s how the entertainment industry almost always reacts when challenged on the social effect of its products, especially on children. As a group, the big entertainment interests -- movie studios, record companies, television networks -- have pushed away parents demanding greater accountability as if they were so many stalkers trying to crash the red carpet at a premiere.

As control of the media concentrates into ever fewer hands -- a trend the Federal Communications Commission accelerated last week by relaxing restrictions on television station ownership -- the need grows greater to develop means for parents and other consumers to register their concern about the messages the entertainment industry delivers to kids.

Two promising efforts on that front are now germinating here. One, just developing, hopes to provide parents greater information on the movies, games, television shows, books and music their children are exposed to -- and then to organize those families into a political force lobbying for change. The second is targeting smoking in the movies.

The smoking project, known as the Smoke Free Movies campaign, is the brainchild of Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UC San Francisco.

Glantz, a rumpled, voluble activist, has been involved in anti-smoking efforts since the late 1970s. He first seriously focused on Hollywood’s role a decade ago, when he directed a series of studies that found smoking in films was rising through the 1990s, after generally falling during the quarter-century following publication of the landmark 1964 surgeon general report on tobacco’s health hazards.

Just as importantly, Glantz found that the on-screen references to tobacco were almost all positive: sexy, rebellious, cool, defiant. Characters were almost never shown hacking, much less recovering from lung surgery, or burying loved ones dead from cancer. “The images associated with smoking in the movies,” he says, “were the images of cigarette advertising.”

Since then, a steady stream of studies has documented the remarkable prevalence of smoking in movies aimed not only at adults but also teenagers and even younger children.

Researchers for groups as varied as the American Lung Assn. and the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group have consistently found that characters smoke in about 80% of the highest-grossing movies rated PG-13.

Does that matter? Given the way teens emulate the fashions of their favorites, it’s hard to imagine that watching glamorous stars light up makes kids less disposed to smoke.

In fact, some academic investigations, including a recent study by Dartmouth Medical School professors, have found that even considering other relevant factors -- such as parental tobacco use -- teens exposed to more smoking on film are much more likely to try it themselves.

Which brings us back to Brad and Julia.

Inspired by Glantz’s work, a student-directed New York state anti-smoking project named Reality Check decided last summer to launch a letter-writing campaign at Hollywood.

The students targeted Pitt and Roberts because they concluded the pair are the stars their classmates idolized the most -- and thus had the most impact when they smoked on-screen.

They added director Barry Sonnenfeld, because smoking is so visible in his “Men in Black” movies. They also sent letters to the Motion Picture Assn. of America, the industry trade group that runs the movie rating system.

In all, 202,000 letters were sent -- about 37,000 each to Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. The typical letter praised the stars and asked them to “please consider the health of the audience of [their] future movies.”

If the students had written to tell Roberts or Pitt they looked hot with a cigarette dangling from their lips, they probably would have received a friendly reply and a photo. But since they asked the stars to consider the effect of their actions on the fans who enrich them, they received only contempt.

Alison Rhodes-Devey, Reality Check’s youth program coordinator, says the students did not receive a single response from any of the targets. The closest to a reply was a nasty scrawl across an envelope from Roberts’ fan-mail readers, threatening legal action if the letters continue.

Roberts is still ducking; her publicist did not return several calls seeking comment. Cindy Guagenti, Pitt’s publicist, initially denied receiving the letters. After checking with an assistant, she acknowledged they had arrived but didn’t explain why they were ignored.

Glantz wants Hollywood to treat smoking the same way it does obscenity and impose an R rating on virtually all films that feature tobacco. (He’d have a “Winston Churchill” exception for films depicting historical figures who smoked.) With direct appeals to Hollywood failing, he says he may now begin lobbying Washington to act.

Which is where the other San Francisco-based media effort could come in. Veteran California children’s activist Jim Steyer has organized a Web site -- commonsensemedia.org -- that provides parents with terrifically detailed information on the sex, violence, language, drug use and smoking in movies and other forms of entertainment. Kids and parents can contribute their own reviews and assessments too.

With that free service as the foundation, Steyer wants to organize parents into a force pushing for greater media accountability. One long-term goal is to shift control for rating movies, music and games from the industries to the public. That’s the sort of change that could snuff out Hollywood’s seamy affair with Big Tobacco.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein.