Tobacco-movie Industry Ties Traced To Hollywood's Early Years

This shouldn't really be surprising to anybody. Product placement in TV and movies is well-known.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080924192435.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2008) — Remember the glamour days of smoking when such stars as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall puffed their way into Hollywood legend? When images of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, cigarette in hand, symbolized virility? And Joan Crawford lighting a cigarette was the epitome of elegance?

Today's movie industry still draws on those images to justify smoking in movies - even as public health experts call for smoking to be eliminated from youth-rated films. Last month the National Cancer Institute concluded that on-screen smoking causes youth to start smoking.

"We're told smoking is part of Hollywood's history and a necessary artistic device," said Stanton Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco and an author of a new study that "debunks the myth" that smoking in movies purely reflected American tastes at the time. "Our work further strengthens the case for getting smoking out of youth-rated films by rating new smoking movies 'R.'"

Glantz and Robert Jackler, MD, professor and chair of otolaryngology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, along with other researchers, used once-secret tobacco industry documents to trace Hollywood-tobacco marketing deals to the early days of movie making, including Al Jolson in the silent film era.

"Commercial arrangements between the movie industry and tobacco companies were there from the very beginning," said Glantz, director of UCSF's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

In the school's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Kristen Lum a UCSF medical student and lead author of the study, uncovered financial contracts between tobacco companies and Hollywood stars to endorse specific cigarette brands. (Today such deals would be worth millions of dollars.) The resulting cigarette ads feature stars under contract to major film studios, usually plugging their latest films and the studios that released them. Studios controlled their stars' agreements and timed the ads to appear as films opened across the country. Cross-promotion benefited both industries, researchers observed.

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But the key to uncovering the commercial link between the movie and tobacco industries was the discovery of the contracts, said Lum. "The contracts were the documents that really drove this research," Lum said. "The actual advertisements were the end product of a very well-thought-out commercial/PR endeavor for the tobacco industry. Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, all the big names were there."

The study was supported in part by a grant from the National Cancer Institute.