The Wall Street Journal [paid sub. req'd] reports that a great celluloid romance is breaking up.
Facing unprecedented pressure to reduce the allure of cigarettes to youth, major cigarette marketers are making an unexpected new plea to Hollywood: remove references to cigarette brands from films and scripts.
Sure, we'll always have Paris. European art house films are still smoking. And the cinematographers who shot classic Hollywood fare now available on DVD made swirls of smoke on black and white film stock a separate character in the narrative. But today it seems that even period pieces are not immune from pressure from state attorneys-general to put out their smokes, however historically accurate.
Earlier this year, at the urging of California's attorney general, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings Inc. asked Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment to edit its products out of the movie "Mona Lisa Smile." The film prominently showed a Camel ad and a college-age character smoking Winston cigarettes. "You do not have permission to mention or depict our brands in your films," warned RJR lawyer Guy M. Blynn in a Jan. 16 letter to the studio.So far, both studios have refused to alter their films. A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures noted that editing "Twisted" would require a lot of work and the studio refused. Sony said that it supports the creative vision of its filmmakers. " 'Mona Lisa Smile' is an accurate depiction of the 1950s, a time when it was common for both men and women to smoke," says Steve Elzer, a Sony spokesman. "We will not alter the film in any way."
The cinetrix was a smoker, and as a cinephile she knows the allure of smoking on screen, especially when the Hays Code pretty much ensured that filmmakers would use photogenic smoking as a stand-in for foreplay and postcoital bliss. But to insist that movies set in historically smoky times pretend that smoking wasn't widespread is disingenuous.
Maybe the solution is to require movies that show its characters smoking to run that terrifying anti-smoking PSA with Yul Brynner. Or finance and produce a PSA of its own. Or give Joe Eszterhas a screen credit. Ooo, that'd teach 'em.
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