Hollywood Has Trouble Kicking The Habit Movies A Smoke Screen For Cigarette Ads, Critics Say

The brash young Wall Streeter flicks a flame to light his wife’s cigarette, then plucks one from the pack for himself. Next, he stretches across a table and gets his father-in-law’s cigar going.

The billowing smoke isn’t confined to Hollywood’s new romantic comedy “She’s the One.” Such box-office stalwarts as John Travolta, Bruce Willis and Whoopi Goldberg all puff through their recent films.

Despite legions of Americans who have kicked the habit, smoking on the silver screen has not diminished since the surgeon general first linked cigarettes to cancer, heart disease and other ailments 3-1/2 decades ago, two studies show.

In a society that has banned smoking from many public places, kicked the Marlboro Man off roadside billboards and determined that secondhand smoke is a health hazard, the celluloid behavior can seem strikingly out of kilter.

Filmmakers insist the smokes are just props, a way to define tough or rebellious characters, enhance romantic scenes or evoke earlier eras when smoking was common.

But anti-smoking advocates fume that Hollywood, willfully or not, is glamorizing cigarettes. They note that TV shows largely have given up tobacco and suggest that more imaginative ways exist to summon nostalgia - tail-fin Cadillacs and Nehi grape soda, for two examples.

Moreover, the on-screen haze is reviving concerns that the tobacco industry is paying for its products to appear in movies. Such “hidden advertising” would violate the long-standing federal requirement that tobacco ads include the surgeon general’s warning that smoking is hazardous to health.

“At the very least, (filmmakers) are being grossly irresponsible,” said Dr. Stanton Glantz, a University of California professor of medicine who has chronicled Hollywood’s habit.

Glantz, in a random sampling of scenes from 62 top-grossing films released from 1960 to 1990, found that overall tobacco use in movies has remained level over three decades.

And even though smoking by the lead characters has dropped somewhat, it still was more than three times that of real people in similar demographic groups - 65 percent to 19 percent, by Glantz’s reckoning in 1994.

A more recent study by the American Lung Association looked at 133 films released in 1994 and 1995. It found that 102 of them - 77 percent - featured characters either smoking or holding tobacco products. And compared with television, the lung association said, feature films are five times more likely to depict tobacco use.

“If they simply showed tobacco use realistically, that would be a gigantic step forward from the current situation,” Glantz said.

Smoke abounds in an Associated Press sampling of nearly a dozen recent films:

In “The Bridges of Madison County,” Meryl Streep, as a lonely farm wife, accepts a cigarette from Clint Eastwood, roaming magazine photographer, in a smoldering prelude to their taboo passion.

In “Corrina, Corrina,” also set in an earlier time, a cigarette dangles from Goldberg’s lips the moment she steps off the bus in her role as a sassy nanny. And she chain-smokes her way through an all-female road trip in “Boys on the Side.”

Travolta, playing a Stealth bomber pilot in “Broken Arrow,” chain-smokes through a treacherous extortion plot. He also smokes in “Pulp Fiction” and “Get Shorty.”

Willis is shrouded in smoke at a poker game in “Nobody’s Fool”; a Marlboro box lies next to his cards. Across the table, Paul Newman, playing the town troublemaker, sucks on a stylishly thin cigar.

In a telephone interview, Newman voiced concerns that movie icons unwittingly might be luring people to smoke, particularly teenagers. If old people “like me smoke, it doesn’t make a difference,” Newman said. “If you get John Travolta smoking, that’s a different point.”

The worries about under-the-table advertising hark back to 1989 when the issue flared in Congress.

Memos had surfaced detailing product placement deals in which marketers paid to have brand-name products appear in films. The deals in question included $350,000 paid by Philip Morris to feature Lark cigarettes in “License to Kill,” a James Bond movie, and $42,500 paid to have Lois Lane, played by Margot Kidder, smoke Marlboros in “Superman II.”

The negative news stories compelled the makers of “License to Kill,” in production that year, to belatedly add the surgeon general’s warning to the credits.

Today, film and tobacco companies vehemently deny they are making placement deals, and the film industry insists that only creative considerations guide decisions to include cigarettes. And if no money is changing hands, filmmakers contend, they’re not required to run the health warning.

Others in Hollywood go further and suggest tobacco is no longer hip.

“Smoking is rather passe now,” said John Parkinson, vice president of marketing for Danjaq Inc., whose subsidiary produced “Goldeneye,” the latest tale of Agent 007, last year.

“It was one of the updatings of James Bond that we did. He still drinks, he still womanizes, but he doesn’t smoke anymore.”