Why the Touchstone loophole in Disney's new movie smoking policy is important

The one Disney film label unnamed in Disney’s policy update is Touchstone, which it uses to release PG-13 films from DreamWorks under a seven-year distribution agreement. Along with that agreement, Disney also maintains a $250 million loan facility for DreamWorks. In effect, then, Disney and DreamWorks enjoy a deal structure very common among the major studios: the distributor-studio finances, markets and distributes a film made by a second-party producer.
 
Other major studios’ tobacco depiction policies also do not cover these sorts of arrangements either, giving the studios the flexibility they need to allow smoking in films by producers with which the studios have continuing, profitable relationships. All the studios have often given such producers a pass.
 
This loophole echoes the claim put forward by the studios early in the movie smoking controversy, claiming that as mere distributors of another’s product, the studios had no control or accountability for that product. A former studio attorney with whom we consulted told us that claim was absurd, because the major studios in fact exercise ultimate contractual authority over every aspect of the films they develop and market. Meanwhile, the studios benefit and profit from these productions. Any covert subsidy to the production company from a tobacco agent, as from any third-party source of financing, would reduce the studio’s own financial exposure and speed its break-even on the film.
 
If for no other reason, then, Disney’s updated policy — with its disingenuous exemption for the only Disney film label that has released youth-rated films with smoking for the past five years — would be difficult to hold up as an exemplary policy for other companies.
 
(Jonathan Polansky prepared this blog post.)

 
This post is also on the Smokefree Movies blog at http://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/blog/why-touchstone-loophole-disneys-new....