May 22, 2015
Mad Men’s Betty Hofstadt may be one of only four screen characters in more than a decade to suffer serious harm from smoking. The others were on the big screen: Constantine (Keanu Reeves) in Constantine, Tim Donohue (Donald Sumpter) in The Constant Gardener, and Otis Blake (Jeff Bridges) in Crazy Heart.
Four thousand different characters have smoked in 1,100 top-grossing movies since 2002. If only three of these film characters were diagnosed with lung cancer or heart failure, that’s a (potential) on-screen mortality rate of 0.07 percent (less than one-tenth of one percent). This starkly contrasts with the 50 percent tobacco death rate for adult smokers sitting in the audience.
Still, were those occasional, tobacco-induced diagnoses an object-lesson for adolescents, the group most prone to start smoking? No, for a simple reason — all three movies we mentioned were R-rated. Kids were actually restricted from seeing them.
In fact, in 600-plus youth-rated smoking films released since 2002 (55% of all smoking films) — with more than 1,900 smoking characters (48% of all smoking characters) — the catastrophic health consequences of tobacco use were invisible.
May 21, 2015
Japan Tobacco Plans to Acquire Logic Technology – April 30, 2015
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/30/us-japan-tobacco-m-a-logic-idUSKBN0NL0GV20150430
Japan Tobacco Acquires Logic Technology – April 30, 2015
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/jt-acquires-logic-the-leading-independent-us-e-cigarette-company-501787281.html
May 21, 2015
Are the studios in the movie or the tobacco advertising business?
The ad is also at http://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/sfm-ads/ad-105
It appears in The Hollywood Reporter on May 26 and Variety on May 27, 2015.
May 21, 2015
The CDC just released its annual update of its fact sheet on studio performance on smoking in movies; you can read it at http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth_data/movies....
Here is their overview:
May 20, 2015
Opening this week in the US, When Marnie Was There (PG rated for "thematic elements and smoking") is an animated feature financed by Japan advertising giant Dentsu, the agency for Japan Tobacco.
The film is distributed in the US by Gkids, an independent that releases films from Studio Ghibli, a renowned animation company in Tokyo. Gkids founded and produces New York’s annual International Children’s Film Festival. 2015 festival sponsors include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The New York Times, Variety and Whole Foods.
Another PG-rated animated feature film with smoking released in the US by Gkids, with Dentsu financing, is From Up on Poppy Hill (2012, rated PG for "mild thematic elements and some incidental smoking images”). That movie was co-produced by The Walt Disney Company, which has since ended its cooperation with Ghibli Studio films.
Dentsu is also credited as a producer on Universal's Fast & Furious film series, beginning with Fast & Furious (2009), whose smoking went unmentioned in its MPAA rating descriptor. The next three F&F films, also with Dentsu’s participation, were smokefree.
Smoking:
2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)