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Puffing Away That PG Rating
Friday, May 11, 2007
By MICHAEL CIEPLY LOS ANGELES, May 10 — WARNING: Smoking may be hazardous to your movie rating. In a significant change to its movie ratings system, the Motion Picture Association of America on Thursday said portrayals of smoking would be considered alongside sex and violence in assessing the suitability of movies for young viewers. Films that appear to glamorize smoking will risk a more restrictive rating, and descriptions of tobacco use will be added to the increasingly detailed advisories that accompany each rated film. Antismoking groups, already successful in much of the country in banning smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places, have ratcheted up the pressure on Hollywood in recent years to purge movies of images that might promote tobacco use. Some have even demanded that virtually any film with smoking be rated R, shutting out those under 17 unless they are accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. Under the new policy, a film’s rating will consider all tobacco use, rather than just teenage smoking, as in the past. But the board stopped short of guaranteeing that tobacco use would be considered as heavily as sex, violence or drug use in assigning a rating. (Film ratings are assigned by a panel of about a dozen parents through an apparatus called the Classification and Ratings Administration, and overseen by the Motion Picture Association and the National Association of Theater Owners.) “It’s an art, not a science,” said Joan Graves, chairman of the ratings board, of the actual weight that would be placed on smoking in assigning a rating. “It all depends on how impactful the smoking is.” In deciding whether a tougher rating is appropriate, board members will be expected to consider whether smoking is pervasive, whether it tends to be glamorized and whether the context or historical fact mitigates the portrayal. David Strathairn’s portrayal of a chain-smoking Edward R. Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” said Ms. Graves, would probably still get the PG rating it received in 2005, because it was historically accurate. The rating would now be likely to include an advisory about pervasive smoking. Some critics were quick to assail the new policy as inadequate. “It’s an anemic response,” said Dr. Cheryl Healton, president of the American Legacy Foundation, which in recent years has led a drive to minimize exposure of young people to films that depict the habit without clearly showing its dangers. Financed with money from state lawsuits against tobacco companies, the foundation has joined with dozens of state attorneys general and health organizations like the American Lung Association and the Harvard School of Public Health to push for changes on the screen. They have asked the film industry to confront smoking with tighter ratings, more antismoking messages attached to films and broad prohibitions against tobacco product placement or brand depictions in films. In tandem with the shift in its ratings policy, the Motion Picture Association and an allied producers group, the Alliance of Motion Pictures and Television Producers, said on Thursday that they would join “Hollywood Unfiltered,” an initiative by the Entertainment Industry Foundation to reduce smoking among film industry workers and to spread information about the health effects of tobacco. But the industry groups did not meet the various demands to eliminate recognizable tobacco brands in films, or to cut smoking altogether from films in the G, PG, and PG-13 ratings categories, to which children and teenagers are freely admitted. In announcing their revision of the ratings system, Motion Picture Association officials said a comprehensive internal review showed that smoking had declined in movies recently. Between July 2004 and July 2006, any glimpse of the habit dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent. In the same period, the officials said, 75 percent of all films to depict smoking had already been rated R. Some of the most appealing images of smokers — say, Scarlett Johansson with her seductive cigarette in “The Black Dahlia” — occur in movies that have already been restricted for violence and sexual content. But Dr. Healton said her own group’s research showed that teenagers were not receiving fewer impressions of onscreen smoking, thanks in part to a tendency by film raters to assign PG-13 ratings to films that might have received an R in past years. Dr. Healton said her group advocated an R rating for all smoking references unless they were historically accurate or “unambiguously demonstrate the health issues.” Lindsay Doran, a veteran Hollywood producer known within the film community for her opposition to onscreen smoking, applauded the ratings revision. “It would be nice if we could leave this to the filmmakers,” said Ms. Doran, producer of last year’s PG-13 rated “Stranger Than Fiction,” in which Emma Thompson played something of a human ashtray, and quite deliberately deglamorized her tobacco addiction. But, Ms. Doran added, even socially conscious Hollywood types could use a nudge. “This makes people say, ‘Wait a minute, what are doing here, and why are we doing it?’ ” she said. 
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