While many believe that movie stars make it up as they go along, everyone on a motion picture is working from a script. It may be adapted from a novel or play, but the screenplay is often original.

Producers almost always demand extensive revisions before accepting a script. In fact, the script may be reworked for years by a succession of writers. If particular stars sign on, the script may be rewritten again to accommodate them.

The original idea may be unrecognizable by the time the movie is financed, shot and edited, so it might be unfair to hold screenwriters accountable for details like smoking. What control do they have over product placement? On the other hand, Joe Eszterhas, once the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, publicly concedes that his own “militant” smoking filled a dozen movies:

"A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star on screen is a gun aimed at a 12 or 14-year-old…We in Hollywood know the gun will go off, yet we hide behind a smokescreen of phrases like creative freedom and artistic freedom. Those lofty words are lies designed at best to obscure laziness. I know, I have told those lies." [Full CNN interview]

Except for Matchstick Men and Chicago, the ten works listed here are original screenplays, not adaptations. On six of the films, directors also received writing credit. More than most Hollywood products, then, these films reflect the writers’ ideas — or unquestioned clichés. Want original? Narc (2002), an R-rated, naturalistic underworld film starring Ray Liotta, written and directed by Joe Carnahan, had the gun but lost the smoking. Not a single reviewer missed what wasn’t there.

Learn how the tobacco industry has worked with the Writers' Guild on political issues.