Smoke Free Movies
SmokeFreeMovies recently came to my attention when my girlfriend told me about a lecture (PPT) she’d just attended by Stan Glantz. Dr. Glantz is somewhat of an eccentric in the Public Health community and started the project on a lark, knowing that Big Tobaco has a history of working with major movie studios — but then he discovered that smoking in movies does significantly stimulate smoking in kids.
Personally, I thought the idea was a little goofy, but he presents some pretty interesting statistics (like: characters in movies smoke 300% as much as people in real life) and their goals are very modest, and seem completely reasonable to me. In particular, they’d like to see smoking given the same consideration as profanity and alcohol in determining if a movie should get an R Rating.
If nothing else, it’s interesting to see some of the Ads the organization has run in industry publications to promote their cause within the Hollywood system. (They are listed in reverse chronological order, so I suggested starting at the bottom and reading up). Of particular interest to me was the Ad they made after finding out about the letter writting campaign of a group of High School kids in New York who wrote 202,000 letters to various Hollywood big shots and got only two replies: one refusing delivery, and one from Julia Roberts’s people threatening legal action if they sent any more letters.
October 16th, 2003 at 11:38 am
:-( the links don’t work.
October 16th, 2003 at 12:07 pm
which links don’t work for you? … they all seem to work fine for me (even the PPT link that i wasn’t sure would work more then a few days)
March 22nd, 2004 at 3:36 pm
You say Dr Glantz’s claim is that characters in the movies smoke 300 time more than people in real life.
The link says 300 per cent more. That’s 3 times more, not 300.
March 24th, 2004 at 8:57 pm
Hmm, John’s right … I botched the “300”.
sorry ’bout that