More Hollywood Studios Say ‘No Smoking’

By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 30 — In the movie musical “Dreamgirls” last year, James “Thunder” Early, Eddie Murphy’s soul-singing, chain-smoking character, was so infuriated by a fumbled food order that he mashed his cigarette into a chicken sandwich that was supposed to have no mayonnaise.
That portrayal and scene could still fly these days at DreamWorks, which made the movie. But if Universal Pictures were to produce the movie today, Mr. Murphy might consider having his character switch to chewing gum.
The biggest studios are usually like-minded when it comes to what is fit to portray on screen. But they have become divided lately in confronting one of the entertainment industry’s touchiest issues: smoking in movies that reach the young.
Under pressure from an antismoking lobby unsatisfied by a promise that the industry’s trade group made in May to consider tobacco use as a factor in film ratings, the six largest studio owners have been patching together individual responses to those who want cigarettes out of films rated G, PG or PG-13.
Smoking opponents view the result as surprising progress toward a virtual ban on tobacco images in all but films with R or NC-17 ratings.
Yet Hollywood is also waking to the realization that a committed band of advocates is rapidly changing what is permissible in the movies. And that precedent could embolden other groups campaigning to rid movies of portrayals of gun use, transfat consumption or other behavior that can be proved harmful to the public.
“It’s a chilling idea,” said Bill Condon, who wrote and directed “Dreamgirls” for the DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures units of Viacom.
General Electric, the corporate parent of Universal Pictures, decided last April that, with few exceptions, “no smoking incidents should appear in any youth-rated film” produced by the studio or its sister units, Focus, Rogue and Working Title Films.
“Movies are supposed to reflect reality,” Mr. Condon said. “You’re taking away a detail that is one of the more defining aspects of a lifestyle.”
The extent to which depictions of smoking actually spur the young to smoke remains a subject of debate. Widely cited research by Dr. James A. Sargent of the Dartmouth Medical School showed a connection between adolescent exposure to smoking in movies and addiction to tobacco. But Dr. Deborah Glik, director of the Health and Media Research Group at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the connection appeared strongest among those who were already predisposed by other factors to smoke.
In any case, corporate Hollywood is in a hurry to find the right side of the issue. The companies are being prodded by a network of antismoking campaigners, some of them flush from Big Tobacco’s settlement with various state attorneys general, and already successful in much of the country in banning smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places.
The Rev. Michael Crosby, who coordinates antismoking efforts for the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, compared the state of play to a horse-race game in a carnival, with each company leaping past the other in recent months. “G.E. is now ahead,” said Mr. Crosby, who has been pressing the studios on the issue via shareholder resolutions and executive meetings for the last decade.
Before G.E. moved with what is widely regarded as the toughest antismoking policy to date, Time Warner had said it “strongly discourages” smoking in youth films produced by its Warner Brothers and New Line units, and seeks to limit smoking depictions in films marketed to what it called mixed audiences.
In July, the Walt Disney Company said it would ban smoking in its Disney-branded movies, like the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, while trying to discourage tobacco use in youth-rated movies from its Miramax and Touchstone units. A spokesman for the Sony Corporation’s Sony Pictures Entertainment said the studio — which showed tobacco use in all three of its PG-13 rated “Spider-Man” films — has a policy under which it tries to discourage the depiction of tobacco products in youth-oriented films.
Viacom is meanwhile scrambling to devise a smoking policy of its own, having been assured two weeks ago by Mr. Crosby and his allies that it was increasingly out of step with its studio brethren. That warning came about because antismoking groups had recently discovered that the News Corporation and its 20th Century Fox Film division were already on the bandwagon, thanks to a strict though intentionally unpublicized policy of rooting tobacco out of youth-friendly films for the last three years.
Since 2004, the studio’s production manual has mandated that no principal character can be seen to smoke in a film set in contemporary times and to be rated G, PG or PG-13 unless the studio’s president of production signs off on the scene. Tobacco ads and promotions are not supposed to be visible in Fox movies. Even antismoking messages on screen are not to have been provided by tobacco companies.
The reduction of on-screen smoking is a pet project of the studio’s co-chairman, Tom Rothman, according to both Mr. Crosby and industry executives who requested anonymity because they did not want to offend a competitor or were not authorized to discuss the policy.
Yet Mr. Rothman has been reluctant to make a public issue of the studio’s policy, for fear that it might open the door to demands from groups with other causes, or put the studio at a competitive disadvantage with filmmakers who see blanket restrictions on smoking as threatening the credibility of their work.
Indeed, James L. Brooks, one of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood, was not stopped by that policy last year. His Gracie Films delivered the animated PG-13 rated “Simpsons Movie,” featuring enough tobacco (even in the trailer) to earn a “black lung” rating from the scenesmoking.org Web site, which monitors smoking impressions in movies.
Mr. Brooks and Fox executives did not respond to queries about why the smoking portrayals were allowed despite the policy.
Even the most aggressive studios have built wiggle room into their policies. To date, no company has said that it would bar smoking in the many films that are produced independently and later acquired for distribution by a studio. Thus, the hard-bitten, soft-hearted table server played by Cheryl Hines in the PG-13 rated “Waitress,” picked up by Mr. Rothman’s Fox Searchlight at the last Sundance Film Festival, can still wield a cigarette near the pregnant character played by Keri Russell.
Neither has any studio figured out how to deal with directors who may rely on their contractual right of “final cut” to include such scenes. Sony’s guidelines allow for exceptions if the scenes are needed for historical authenticity or to deliver an antismoking message. And even at G.E. and Universal, the policy says the presumption against a smoking scene can be “rebutted” based on its importance to the film, the difficulty of removing it, and whether or not the picture will be marketed to adolescents.
Advocates are naturally suspicious that such loopholes will only delay what they see as progress. “In about five years, they’ll live up to promises they’re making now,” said Michael Passoff, associate director of As You Sow, a socially responsible investment group based in San Francisco that has pressed studio owners on the smoking issue.
Eventually, the approach of the industry’s trade group, the Motion Picture Association of America — which relies on the ratings system to reduce tobacco impressions reaching the young — may diminish the need for individual solutions.
“This is still a new policy, and it’s going to take time to develop,” said Seth Oster, the association’s executive vice president and chief communications officer. Mr. Oster said 22 films have had warnings about smoking attached to their ratings since the system went into effect. And at least one film, “Saving Sarah Cain,” released by the News Corporation’s FoxFaith unit, has had its rating bumped to PG from G because it depicted tobacco use.
Some opponents of smoking on film see a chaos of individual policies as the prelude to an inevitable broad agreement to banish tobacco from all but adult-rated films.
“I think success is going to come very suddenly,” said Stanton A. Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, and whose proposal would led to an R rating for virtually all tobacco use in movies. “It will take the monkey off the individual companies’ backs.”
Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts who is chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, said he would prefer to see an industrywide antismoking initiative, perhaps like the agreement in 2000 to limit the marketing of violent films, though he did not expect that to happen without further hearings.
Should an industrywide policy happen, of course, some young viewers might turn to entertainment they find less pinched, and more authentic. Not incidentally, the pilot episode of “quarterlife,” a new series about recent college graduates planned for direct distribution on the Web, concludes with a soulful discussion between two friends on a cigarette break.
Or, as Mr. Condon pointed out, the push for tobacco prohibition in film for the young might simply add new cachet to what is forbidden. “If they succeed, they may well glamorize smoking again,” he said.