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2018
Top 5 reasons why people smoke, according to a psychiatrist
A young patient of mine once said to me, “If famous actors can chain smoke every day and be successful, live so long and also be physically fit, then why can’t my parents let me smoke once a week with friends?” The psychology that a role model is doing something wrong, hence it’s okay for us to do it too, exists amongst many.
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A report says shows on streaming services depict lots of smoking, but what can be done?
Obviously, the industry is aware of the problem, so what’s left but for them to do something about it?
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Deadpool 2 is tedious and predictable
...Deadpool, a 20th Century Fox release, opens with Reynolds exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke into the camera, probably meant to tweak his superhero cousins at Disney, which doesn’t permit smoking in its movies. Disney, of course, is on the brink of acquiring Fox’s entertainment division, which will make it even more of a franchise-oriented juggernaut than it already is. Although that’s an alarming prospect, I’m all for purging cigarettes from movies and TV, which statistics show have an undue influence in getting kids to start smoking.
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Anybody got a match?
Cigarettes have been such an integral part of movies for so long that one big concern in the lead up to Disney and Fox's planned merger is — seriously — all the smoking in Fox movies. This hour: a look at the cultural history of smoking.
Participants include film critic David Edelstein.
[Includes 49:30 audio]
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Hollywood and Big Tobacco
Fox was the studio closest to Big Tobacco...Last year, Fox Searchlight Pictures released a biopic of Billie Jean King, who served on Philip Morris’ board for five years. Philip Morris used women’s tennis to push Virginia Slims to young women.
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Advocates call on Disney to end smoking in future Fox films
Studios also face pressure overseas from the World Health Organization, which has called for governments to implement more aggressive regulation of movies that contain tobacco imagery. India, France and Britain are among the countries where action has been taken or is being discussed.
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Trinity Health and other investors caution smokefree Disney on purchase of "tobacco-contaminated" Fox movies
Top executives of Philip Morris (later Altria) and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (later Fox) served on each other’s boards of directors for twenty-five years, from 1989 to 2013. A 1985 memorandum from the tobacco company’s CEO, discovered in the course of lawsuits against the tobacco company, named Mr. Murdoch as a media proprietor “sympathetic with our position … an ally that we can and should exploit.”
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There’s no smoking in Disney films. What about when it owns Fox?
…[A]ntismoking advocates want Mr. Iger to extend [Disney's tobacco depictions] rule to all future youth-rated films (G, PG, PG-13) made by Fox and its Fox Searchlight specialty label, which are among the assets that Disney is buying from Rupert Murdoch for $54.2 billion. Among other things, activists want “graphic health warnings” added to youth-rated films in the Fox library that depict smoking — like “Avatar” and “X-Men: Days of Future Past” — before selling them on DVD or via video-on-demand services.
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Commons Committee warned that smoking on TV and in films is encouraging child take-up
In a strongly worded submission to the Select Committee on Science and Technology ASH and the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol studies warn that smoking on TV and in films encourages children to take up smoking. They point out that children in the UK are still exposed to significant amounts of smoking on screen and that it is the amount of smoking that is important, not whether it is glamourised or not.
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UK's Love Island and other shows "encourage teenagers to smoke"
The campaigners want the communications regulator, Ofcom, and the British Board of Film Classification to monitor youth exposure to depictions of tobacco use on screen, to discourage any depictions of tobacco use and require broadcasters or cinemas to run anti-smoking adverts during presentations that feature smoking.
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