Hollywood set to filter on-screen smoking

Now films could earn a tougher rating if their characters light up.

Under a policy announced Thursday, the Motion Picture Assn. of America said its movie raters would take into account "depictions that glamorize smoking or movies that feature pervasive smoking outside of a historic or other mitigating context."

That makes smoking a major factor to be considered alongside violence, profanity, nudity and drug use by the MPAA's rating board, the Classification and Rating Administration, when deciding the warning parents will get. For filmmakers and studios, the new policy complicates the creative process because a stricter rating can hurt ticket sales.

"There is broad awareness of smoking as a unique public health concern due to nicotine's highly addictive nature, and no parent wants their child to take up the habit," MPAA Chief Executive Dan Glickman said. "The appropriate response of the rating system is to give more information to parents on this issue."

The change in policy is a partial victory for anti-smoking advocates and researchers, who have pressured the MPAA for years to take a tougher stance on the issue. The trade group, however, resisted calls for an even more radical proposal to give films with smoking a mandatory R rating, meaning children under 17 would not be allowed to see them without a parent or guardian.

Pressure had been building lately on Hollywood to finally do something about smoking in movies. This month, 32 state attorneys general publicly called for the MPAA to give films containing smoking an R rating unless they reflected the dangers of the habit or portrayed a historical figure.

The attorneys general based their call on recommendations from the Harvard School of Public Health. Glickman, whose parents died from lung-related illnesses, had asked the school last fall to summarize the scientific evidence about the effect of on-screen smoking on children. Its findings, presented to the MPAA in February, found that urgent action was needed because of the strong influence of the films.

The association's move marks a change from when the late Jack Valenti led the organization. At a 2004 Senate hearing, Valenti said that although smoking was "a nasty, smelly, vicious kind of habit," he opposed adding it as a factor in the movie rating system he created in 1968. Doing so would open the door to advocacy groups for the environment, obesity, alcoholism and other causes to demand similar treatment, he said.