This chart tracks the amount of smoking and other tobacco appearances, including advertising, in movies over the last fifty-two years. Each dot on the graph shows how often something that glamorizes smoking - smoking by an actor, or a Marlboro, Camel or other brand's billboard, for example -- occurred each hour in a random sample drawn from the twenty top-grossing top films each year.

Each dot represents one movie. The pattern of dots (and the yellow trend line) shows that smoking in the movies fell through the 1950's, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but shot up in the 1990s -- after the tobacco industry said that it was no longer placing cigarettes in movies.