Pushing Accountability on Hollywood

SAN FRANCISCO — Why are Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts stonewalling thousands of middle and high school students writing to ask them to stop glamorizing smoking in their films?

Probably because that's how the entertainment industry almost always reacts when challenged on the social effect of its products, especially on children. As a group, the big entertainment interests -- movie studios, record companies, television networks -- have pushed away parents demanding greater accountability as if they were so many stalkers trying to crash the red carpet at a premiere.

As control of the media concentrates into ever fewer hands -- a trend the Federal Communications Commission accelerated last week by relaxing restrictions on television station ownership -- the need grows greater to develop means for parents and other consumers to register their concern about the messages the entertainment industry delivers to kids.

Two promising efforts on that front are now germinating here. One, just developing, hopes to provide parents greater information on the movies, games, television shows, books and music their children are exposed to -- and then to organize those families into a political force lobbying for change. The second is targeting smoking in the movies.

The smoking project, known as the Smoke Free Movies campaign, is the brainchild of Stanton A. Glantz, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at UC San Francisco.

Glantz, a rumpled, voluble activist, has been involved in anti-smoking efforts since the late 1970s. He first seriously focused on Hollywood's role a decade ago, when he directed a series of studies that found smoking in films was rising through the 1990s, after generally falling during the quarter-century following publication of the landmark 1964 surgeon general report on tobacco's health hazards.

Just as importantly, Glantz found that the on-screen references to tobacco were almost all positive: sexy, rebellious, cool, defiant. Characters were almost never shown hacking, much less recovering from lung surgery, or burying loved ones dead from cancer. "The images associated with smoking in the movies," he says, "were the images of cigarette advertising."

Since then, a steady stream of studies has documented the remarkable prevalence of smoking in movies aimed not only at adults but also teenagers and even younger children.