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Advert criticising tobacco product placement is censored

Annabel Ferriman BMJ

An advertisement, attacking the film In the Bedroom, for indirectly promoting Marlboro cigarettes, has been banned by Variety, one of Hollywood’s most influential magazines.

The advertisement from the campaigning group, Smoke Free Movies, based in San Francisco, points out that Sissy Spacek, who plays the lead role in the film, not only chain smokes, but broods over a Marlboro pack and specifically asks a grocer for "Marlboro Lights." Another character in the film demands a pack of "Marlboro Reds."

"Is this sloppy writing, sophomoric symbolism, corruption or cluelessness?" the advertisement asks. Further on, it says: "Tobacco company files show they’ve offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to place their brands in movies." Although the industry told Congress in 1989 that it had halted the practice, on-screen smoking by screen actors, has kept climbing, it adds.

Variety magazine, which has previously carried advertisements from Smoke Free Movies, has refused this particular advertisement, saying that its content "can be construed as specifically detrimental to a single entertainment property." The Californian edition of the New York Times carried the advertisement, however.

Miramax, distributors of In the Bedroom, and other studios advertise heavily in publications like Variety at this time of year while campaigning for Oscar nominations. The magazine is owned by Cahners Business Information, which is part of Reed Elsevier, UK.

Stanton Glantz, an anti-tobacco researcher at the University of California San Francisco, who runs Smoke Free Movies, said: "It is ironic that Hollywood, which hides behind claims of creative freedom to justify its promotion of tobacco, used its muscle in an effort to censor this ad."

Glantz points out that smoking promotion in films has skyrocketed over the last decade, because the industry sees it as a way of circumventing the ban on advertising cigarettes on television.

Research published in the BMJ last year showed that there was a strong, direct, and independent association between adolescents seeing tobacco use in films and trying cigarettes (15 December, p 1394).
 
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Related Article

Effect of seeing tobacco use in films on trying smoking among adolescents: cross sectional study

James D Sargent, Michael L Beach, Madeline A Dalton, Leila A Mott, Jennifer J Tickle, M Bridget Ahrens, and Todd F Heatherton
BMJ 2001 323: 1394. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]