Lighting up the screen

As a bunch of movies opens in theaters this holiday season, will you be watching what the stars are wearing? How they’re acting? Whether they’re smoking?

Groups that work to keep young people from smoking certainly will be watching, probably with dismay. Research of top movies since the mid-1990s found that lots of films geared toward kids showed tobacco use. In fact, from 1999 through 2005, tobacco scenes appeared in 40 percent of live-action G- and PG-rated films, and in three-fourths of PG-13 movies.

Two recent PG examples: “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Akeelah and the Bee.”

You might think you’re not influenced by what’s in a movie. But people opposed to smoking say that seeing it over and over on the screen – from the “trailers” that publicize movies before they come out to the DVDs that circulate afterward – is a big reason why many kids take their first puff.

Studies have shown that watching characters smoke in movies – whether it’s the heroine or a bad guy – can increase your chances of smoking, says Cheryl Healton, of the American Legacy Foundation.

Her group, which focuses on the bad health effects of tobacco use, has been pushing Hollywood to break its smoking habit in films rated G, PG and PG-13.

Exceptions would be made for historical accuracy. For example, a movie about President Franklin D. Roosevelt could show him with the cigarette holder he often carried. But the same would not be true for a fictional character such as dog-napper Cruella DeVil.

Next month, the Weinstein Co. will become the first moviemaker to put antismoking public service announcements on DVDs that show smoking. Harvey Weinstein, one of the two brothers running the studio, which produced “Ella Enchanted,” smoked his last cigarette in 2005.

“It’s slow, but it’s happening,” Stanton Glantz says of the effort to include anti-smoking messages with movies.

Glantz is a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who directs a project called Smoke Free Movies. Each week its Web site, www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu, lists the top movies at the box office and on DVD, and notes whether they promote smoking.

The latest listing includes “Flushed Away” (promotes smoking) and “Nacho Libre” (smoke-free). Both are rated PG.

Though the movie industry says that directors and actors should be free to tell a story the way they want, it agrees that young people should stay away from tobacco. “Smoking is bad for you,” says Gayle Osterberg, of the Motion Picture Association of America Inc. “It’s not healthy. It’s not glamorous.”

But as long as there’s smoke in so many movies, there will be fire in this issue.