November 20, 2013

Stanton A. Glantz, PhD

Fox readies PG-rated film with smoking

BELLE (Fox, May 2014) has been rated “PG for thematic elements, some language and brief smoking images.” Watch the smokefree trailer.
 
BELLE is the dramatized biography of Dido Elizabeth Belle, daughter of an enslaved, biracial mother and a British admiral, raised as a ward in the household of the admiral’s uncle, William Murray, Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of England. Ruling in a 1772 legal case, Mansfield put England on the path to outlawing slavery.
 

Note: Films that depict actual people who actually smoked (as in biographical dramas or documentaries) would be exempt from Smoke Free Movies' proposed R-rating for smoking. (Details at http://www.smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/solution/r_rating.html).
 
In context: Among the major studios, Fox had the second-highest level of smoking in its youth-rated films in 2012.
 
BELLE premiered at the Toronto Int’l Film Festival in September and will open in the US on May 2, 2014. 
 
UPDATE | MPAA’s “smoking” descriptors
 
From spring 2007, when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced it might tag some films with smoking, to mid-October 2013, Hollywood released 249 top-grossing, youth-rated films with smoking. 
 
Of these, only 30 films (12%) have carried “smoking” descriptors in their rating blocks.
 
32% (12/38) of G/PG films with smoking carried a smoking descriptor. Only 9% (18/211) of PG-13 films with smoking have done so.
 
On average, films with descriptors featured more than twice as many tobacco incidents as films without descriptors. PG films with descriptors averaged 25 tobacco incidents, compared to 11 incidents for all PG films with smoking. PG-13 films with descriptors averaged 68 incidents, compared to 27 incidents per film across all PG-13 films with smoking. 
 
At the same time, the MPAA left smoking descriptors off of the large majority of PG-13 films with heavy smoking. Of PG-13 films with 50+ tobacco incidents, 78% (31/40) did not carry a smoking descriptor. Of those films with 100+ incidents, 79% (11/14) went unlabeled.
 
Youth-rated films with smoking from Comcast (2/27, 7%) and Time Warner (3/39, 8%) were least likely to carry tobacco descriptors, followed by Sony (5/48, 10%). Disney, Fox, Viacom and independent films were more likely to be labeled (14-17%).
 
Altogether, films from the major studios that compose the MPAA itself were somewhat less likely to receive smoking descriptors (20/181, 11%) than were films from independent distributors (10/68, 15%). 
 
Indies like Lionsgate and Weinstein released 27% of youth-rated films with smoking 2007-2013, but 33% (10/30) of all descriptors were applied to indie films. MPAA-member films, which were 73% of all youth-rated films with smoking, accounted for 67% (20/30) of smoking descriptors. 
 
Among the independents, Lionsgate accounted for 33 youth-rated films with smoking, nearly half the non-MPAA total, and 15% (5/33) of those films carried smoking descriptors. Weinstein, known for publicly appealing its MPAA ratings, had 33% (3/9) of its youth-rated films with smoking assigned a smoking descriptor. Other indies, including Liberty (Overture), MGM, Miramax and Relativity, which together accounted for 15 top-grossing, youth-rated films with smoking during the period surveyed, were assigned no descriptors at all; four of their films included 50 or more tobacco incidents. 
 
There is no evidence that MPAA’s smoking descriptors reduce adolescent exposure to on-screen smoking. 
 
It is possible that, by labeling only a fraction of nationally-released, youth-rated films with smoking, the major film studios’ trade group, the MPAA, may be misleading parents and policymakers into believing that hundreds of PG-13 films with smoking are smokefree. 
 
From 2007 until mid-October 2013, youth-rated films WITHOUT smoking descriptors have delivered an estimated 81% (52.8 billion / 64.8 billion) of all youth-rated tobacco impressions to domestic theater audiences.
 
Find out more: Film-Flam: How MPAA/NATO movie labels hide the biggest media risk to kids (http://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8hn866tt)
 
(Jonathan Polansky helped prepare this post.)

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