BREAKING: Cigarette Smoking Will Now Affect Movie Ratings
Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand, Movie Marketing
Last month, I brought you news of the Harvard School of Public Health's proposed plan to take depictions of smoking out of movies marketed to young people. This February, Harvard and Johns Hopkins academics made a presentation on the matter to the MPAA, as well as executives from all the major studios. (You can read in-depth notes on the materials presented and view PowerPoint presentations from the meeting here). In 1999, a similar meeting had little to no impact. But times have changed, and today the HSPH's plan is being put into effect. Smoking will now affect movie ratings. It was just announced that the Motion Picture Association of America "is expanding its current consideration of teen smoking to all smoking when evaluating and assigning a movie rating."
Said Harvard School of Public Health Dean Barry R. Bloom at the meeting that brought the change about: "No one has died from hearing the f-word. But 438,000 people in U.S., and five million worldwide, die each year from tobacco-related illness. We appreciate that movies are expensive, complex and demanding to make. If you are honest I think you will admit that most smoking in movies is both unnecessary and cliched, and serves to make smoking socially acceptable to kids." The MPAA agrees, releasing a statement today saying: "In the past, illegal teen smoking has been a factor in the rating of films, alongside other parental concerns such as sex, violence and adult language. Now, all smoking will be considered, and depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of an historic or other mitigating context may receive a higher rating." I'm no fan of censorship, but I can agree that smoking should be held to the same standards as sex and violence. A kid's a lot more likely to start smoking than he is to blow up a building based on seeing it in a movie. What do you guys think?
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
5-12-2007 @ 1:35PM
Greg said...
seriously, the world needs to get the sticks out of their asses. since when did smoking in movies become a global issue? cmon its life, people do what people want to do. pretty soon its gonna get so bad that theyre going to give a movie an R rating because someone slipped and their pants rose up to expose skin on their ankle and they say thats pornography or "public indecensy". LIGHTEN UP!!!
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5-12-2007 @ 1:42PM
Amber said...
this just seems like overkill. yes smoking is bad for the body. people know smoking is bad from the moment they learn fire and fire smoke is bad. i could understand the push for it if maybe you didnt have to set the things on fire before you put them in your mouth.
teens are gonna smoke anyway, lots just because you dont want them too.
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5-12-2007 @ 2:47PM
D bassist with Noctaluca said...
hahahahah!! This is absolutely pathetic. What will they 'rate' next in movies? I have some suggestions:
A) drinking soda with 'high-fructose' corn syrup
B) buying/wearing clothes made in sweatshops
C) driving gas-guzzlers (suv's, muscle cars, etc)
D) using cell-phones while driving
what kind of society are we developing here?
In the 1993 movie 'Demolition Man' there are cameras and microphones everywhere. You get issued citations for smoking, kissing, cursing, etc in public.
Also, people are smarter than this, and MOST smokers understand that their lifestyle determines their death-style. People have the choice to goto non-smoking establishments, and in their own house they can decide if it is smoke-free.
I'm not particularly impassioned about the MPAA's ratings. Just the freedom and liberty aspect. You really should be to!
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5-12-2007 @ 8:59PM
leah said...
Most movies focus on portraying real life. how can people relate to movies if they are all screened from everything that is 'bad'? Kids should be aware of all the dangers around them, not shunted into some false world of security. That's how people get the idea that they are immune to harm. People learn from bad things, mistakes, experiences.
nothing is black and white.
you can't have anything good without having anything bad along with it. I think we all can agree that smoking has its benefits and it;s downfalls. Let kids make the decision for themselves what is right or wrong for them! everyone is different, therefore everyone has their own opinion on what is right and what is wrong. what is right to one person may seem completly wrong to another!
on top of that, we all know that movies are not real. what is real is all the people that smoke on the streets. in the real world, non-smokers will always be exposed to smokers. therefore i again stress the idea that peopel must decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong.
fuck movie ratings man.
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5-12-2007 @ 9:33PM
Robert said...
Oh yeah, lets take smoking out of young films and put it into higher, even more adult films. That will make it look infinitely less cool.
Brilliant, *&@#tards.
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5-12-2007 @ 10:24PM
Nina said...
The stamping of an R rating is in a sense censorship. You can go to the movies and see it on the big screen or rent it at a store but when you see it on TV theyll censor it for its inappropriate material.
This whole article is full of ignorane. Smoking isnt always unneccessary in a movie. Some character development is based on smoking. The MPAA is degrating a writers good work in character anaylisis. Some Disney cartoons depicted people smoking, but not in a good sense. A majority of films directed towards children show these sleezy dirty people lighting up and smoking a cigarette. You dont see the heros and crime fighters ever smoking. Writers have censored this so to not infulence kids to smoke but the MPAA is taking it a step to far; the entire country is. If you cant be around smoke, dont hang around smokers.
They make smoking look bad but what about drinking. Its become a socially acceptable outlet for todays youth. Smoking is bad but drinking is ok? Smoking = cancer, drinking = car accidents, rape, abuse, wet brain, ect. Why not put a stronger rating on drinking too? Why not just bad alcohol in general for its intoxicating ways. The worst a cigarette has ever done is a tiny comparison to drinking.
About now I feel like steping out into the warm night's air, pulling a pack of camels from my pocket. Ill pack just right to get the flavor I desire, put it on my puckered lips and light it up.
F-you guys, who wants a cigarette?
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5-13-2007 @ 12:10AM
Packer4 said...
i agree that the rating system is messed up but will not agree that we should stop "attacking" smokers. my mother is a smoker and because of her both my brother and i now have asthma. this condition has been derectly linked to the seconed hand smoke that we experienced. i will never forgive my mom for that. she had the coice to smoke I did not as far as im conserned noone should have the cohice to do something that very easaly efects the health of someone else who has no choice.
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5-15-2007 @ 4:34PM
dop said...
This is ridiculous.
Everybody knows that smoking kills, unless you live on planet Mars.
Everybody must take his responsibility.
And people are stupid enough to do everything they watch on tv, I pity them.
People are turning into slaves more and more, they let the government, the tv, the ads decide for them.
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5-15-2007 @ 8:04PM
Mr.B.C. said...
All I gotta say is this:
Even though we're only as free as They allow us to be ... They will never be able to keep the blindfold on our kids ... and neither will we!
That's my F$@&ing Opinion...
Mr. B.C.
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5-18-2007 @ 2:46PM
Abi8502 said...
Actually people have died from seeing smoking in movies. There's now a big movie about a woman who saw Grease when she was 10 and started smoking then, because the leads smoked and they became cooler when they smoked, and she died when she was 30. Do you really want that happening to other people? They might not be as strong against those sort of things as you are.
And I am definetly no fan of smoking, I cant be around anyone who smokes and I can't even breathe if someone is smoking anywhere near me. So I for one am VERY glad they're doing this...the older you are the stonger you are against that kind of pressure, and you have to be older to get into those films.
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5-24-2007 @ 9:51PM
Stephen said...
Cigarette companies have paid their way into Sylvester Stallone's movies -- he got half a million dollars for it, into Disney's Roger Rabbit cartoon, into Superman (where Lois Lane started smoking unlike in the comics). Personally, I'd love to see the ratings system get more blunt: "gratuitous" use of cigarettes should always include when the movie I'm paying to watch is also getting paid to advertise to me. Some of this is being reduced because of the spotlight on the tobacco companies: yelping about censorship because the movies have a different letter seems a bit overblown.... this seems like a well balanced and mild effort, not the drug war jail sentences or serious media censorship http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm#2
Some exampls of cigarette companies buying their way into kid-oriented movies:
http://www.quit.org.au/quit/fandi/fandi/c15s7.htm
Follow the money,
Stephen
http://stephencataldo.livejournal.com/
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