Hollywood urged to kick the habit

The anti-smoking lobby wants the US movie industry to ban all cigarettes. But is it a sin to puff on screen, asks

MATCHLESS: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in ‘To Have And Have Not’, 1944

WHEN the makers of the Ghostbusters reboot were working out which parts of the original film to reuse, you can bet chain-smoking wasn’t among them. One of the strangest sights in Ivan Reitman’s 1984 action-comedy is the cigarettes constantly drooping from the lips of its leading men.

Three decades on, it’s jarring to see the heroes of a family blockbuster contentedly dragging on a cigarette. But is it also harmful? A new class action lawsuit says Yes.

The complaint, filed in California last month against the Motion Picture Association of America, six major studios and the National Association of Theatre Owners, alleges that since 2003, smoking in films has led 4.6 million under-16s to become smokers themselves.

The James Bond, Transformers, Avengers, X-Men, and Hobbit franchises are among the accused.

The lawsuit demands that any film featuring so much as a waft of cigarette smoke should receive an R rating: only cinemagoers who are themselves old enough to smoke could buy tickets to a film with a smoker in it, even if that smoker is Gandalf or an Autobot.

Statistics tend to show that teenagers who watch films that feature smoking are more likely to have tried cigarettes themselves, but the causal relationship between the two isn’t proved. That’s not to say one doesn’t exist, though — and in the past, tobacco companies themselves have banked on the connection.

In the ’30s and ’40s, 33 of the era’s top 50 box office stars, including Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and John Wayne — all prolific screen smokers — were paid millions of dollars to personally endorse particular brands of cigarettes.

By 1990, when health concerns about smoking could no longer be ignored, the Cigarette Advertising and Promo- tion Code had been updated to rule out product placement (of cigarettes, at least) in films and TV.

Pressure groups prompted a congressional hearing in 1989, at which the murky links between the film and tobacco industries were dragged into the light. Among the scandals were a payment of tens of thousands of dollars by Philip Morris to place Marlboro and Lark cigarettes in Superman II and Licence to Kill, and Sylvester Stallone’s 1983 agreement to feature Brown & Williamson tobacco products in “no less than five” films, in exchange for a $500 000 fee.

Hollywood’s subsequent show of contrition is why Ghostbusters ’ cigarettes look so dated — and in its DVD commentary track, Reitman points out that in 1989, “by the time we did Ghostbusters 2, the Ghostbusters never smoke on camera”. (Deadpans Harold Ramis: “No, they did ecstasy.”)

This isn’t strictly true: in the sequel, Ray’s occasionally seen chewing on a cigar, and he contemplatively sucks on a pipe behind the counter of his occult book shop. But smoking is certainly nowhere near as prevalent.

When Reitman’s son, Jason, wrote and directed the Big Tobacco satire Thank You For Smoking in 2005, cigarette smokers in the movies were almost exclusively what Rob Lowe’s product placement maven calls “RAVs: Russians, Arabs and villains”.

On the rare occasions they aren’t — as in the TV series Mad Men — they’re period-appropriate, often deployed with a distancing wink. In the lawsuit’s view, though, any such distinctions are immaterial. All screen smoking is bad for you.

But there are crucial advantages to smoking in films, which such campaigns can never concede: it gives actors a useful, nonverbal, subtle way to tell us something about their characters, from Michael Corleone’s deadcalm manipulation of a Zippo in The Godfather, to Norma Desmond’s talonlike cigarette-holder in Sunset Boulevard.

There are, of course, lower-tar alternatives. Brad Pitt is a master of conveying character through eating. In Moneyball, he gets the same kind of dramatic mileage from a mouthful of popcorn that Humphrey Bogart would have done with a 10-pack.

The second advantage — the very nature of the ritual of smoking, coupled with the smoke itself — is considerably trickier to get around. Because both, UNFILTERED: Uma Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction’, 1994

It gives actors a useful, nonverbal, subtle way to tell us something about their characters

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?: Dan Ackroyd in ‘Ghostbusters’, 1984 intrinsically and unavoidably, are — how best to put it? — cool. On screen, smoking adds movement to stillness, and pricks the dark with momentary flares of warmth and light. It’s a catalyst for intimacy, and particularly in the film noir era, there was often no fire without it.

Thus far, Disney is the only studio to have formally kicked the habit, vowing in 2007 that no smoking would appear in a new Disney film.

After a complaint in 2006 over smoking scenes in two vintage episodes of Tom and Jerry, Turner Broadcasting voluntarily cut tobacco-related imagery from more than 1 700 HannaBarbera cartoons in its library.

Scenes in which Tom is fed through a lawnmower and has his tail scorched by a waffle iron remain intact. Sometimes we have to trust ourselves to know when something’s only a movie. — ©