Smoking On Screen

Powers that be in the film industry do not take kindly to
Washington pols who lecture them on morals for moviemaking. But
resistance to past, often politically motivated tirades against its
"depravity" in exploiting violence and sex need not be reflexively
repeated in the unfolding debate over onscreen srnoking. The Clinton
administration has begun meeting privately with Hollywood executives
to express concerns about a stepup in the number of images of such
film megaheroes as John Travolta, Julia Roberts and Winona Ryder
seeking to lend nuance to their characters by lighting up cigarettes.

Fully half of major movies from 1990 to t995 featured a
central character puffing on some type of tobacco, according to one
study, as do five of this summer's box of fice leaders.

To health advocates and many familiar with the glamorous
rituals built around cigarettes in countless films before the 1964
surgeon general's report bon smoking, this seems an odd instance of
retrograde motion.

Since the days when Humphrey Bogart andBette Davis ruled
the fan magazines, smoking has been used to convey sex appeal,
nonchalance, villainy and anxiety, as well as to give actors the all
important something to do with their hands. Directors would
understandably resent any limits on their options in the realms of
dramatic technique or content. And of course any government fiat that
presumed to prescribe what are suitable props on a privately owned
Hollywood set would be objectionable and an offense against the First
Amendment.

But the issue of smoking and whether Hollywood role models
have an impact on American behavior is, in a key respect, far more
manageable than the issues of violence and sex. Those last two are the
main attractions of much of Hollywood's fare; withdrawing them
suddenly might require drastic alterations in a movie's plot and target
market. An actor or actress's lightingup ritual, by contrast, is often
peripheral, and one of many alternative actions available to imaginative
actors.

Jay Winstenthe media specialist at the Harvard School of
Public Health, who had tremendous success with his 1980s campaign
to persuade film and television producers to inject "designated drivers"
in their scenes involving alcoholsays he has heard producers say they
would have a difficult time walking away from such meat and potatoes
as sex and violence, but that giving up celluloid cigarettes would have
virtually no impact on an entertainment conglomerate's bottom line.
And given the proven lethality of tobacco, it hardly strikes us as just
one more initiative by the Ministry of Correctness.

The government officials concerned with youth smoking are
confining their film industry approaches to jawboning. We hope that
this will be enough.

THE WASHINCTON POST.