Adolescent girls are almost twice as likely to take up smoking if their favourite movie star lights up on screen.
The persistent portrayal of actors and actresses smoking in films is undermining efforts aimed at preventing children and teens from picking up cigarettes, contend the authors of a study appearing in the July issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
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"At that age, everyone is trying on new images, trying to define who they are, and movies have a powerful impact. They model themselves on these stars," said study co-author John Pierce, director of cancer prevention at the University of California at San Diego. "There'd be nothing wrong with them starting to smoke if it was the same as changing a hairstyle, but they get addicted for life."
An established marketing opportunity
According to the article, adolescents watch an average of three movies each week, and cigarette smoking among screen actors has increased during the past decade. The movies are a recognised, established marketing opportunity for companies, including tobacco companies.
There was a 65 percent surge in sales of Reese's Pieces after they became a centrepiece in E.T., and sizeable increases in the demand for the BMW Z3 were noticed after it was used in the James Bond movie Goldeneye. According to this study, in the 1980s, a Phillip Morris executive articulated a need to find more ways to portray cigarettes on-screen.
How the study was conducted
The researchers interviewed about 3 000 non-smoking California adolescents aged 12 to 15. During the initial interview, which took place in 1996, both boys and girls were asked to name their two favourite male and female movie stars.
The researchers compiled a list of the most popular names and looked at movies released between 1994 and 1996 to see which had smoked on screen in at least two movies. The interviewees were then revisited three years later to see how many had started smoking.
One-third of the participants named stars who had smoked on-screen. Girls in this group were about 80 percent more likely to start than girls who had identified non-smoking stars. Boys who selected smoking stars were not more likely to have started smoking.
Difference in movie genre preferences
The authors attribute this gender difference to differences in movie genre preferences: Boys tend to prefer action flicks, which have less smoking, while girls prefer romances, which have more smoking.
Only about 10 percent of black adolescents named a star who smoked on-screen, vs. 35 percent to 40 percent in other groups. None of the favourite stars who smoked was black.
"The study points out with statistical evaluations something that we have known for years," said Dr Elliot Wineburg, a smoking cessation expert and assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.
This phenomenon has been around for years. After Paul Henreid fired up two cigarettes and handed one to Bette Davis in the 1942 classic Now, Voyager, people all over the world started doing the same thing, Wineburg said.
List of favourites
More than 50 years later, here are girls' favourite stars, and the movies they smoked in:
Brad Pitt (Legends of the Fall, Sleepers)
Sandra Bullock (In Love and War, The Net, Speed, A Time to Kill)
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Basketball Diaries, Marvin's Room, Romeo and Juliet)
Winona Ryder (How to Make an American Quilt, Reality Bites)
Demi Moore (The Juror, Now and Then)
Drew Barrymore (Bad Girls, Batman Forever, Boys on the Side, Mad Love)
And here are the favourite stars among boys, and the movies in which they smoked:
Pamela Anderson (Barb Wire, Best of Pamela Anderson)
Sandra Bullock (same movies as above)
Demi Moore (same as above)
Sharon Stone (Casino, Diabolique, Intersection, The Quick and the Dead, The Specialist)
The list of favourite stars who did not smoke in movies released in that time period included Julia Roberts, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger (although he apparently is smoking cigars in his role as California governor), Jim Carrey and Mel Gibson. Roberts, however, has created a stir among antismoking activists by lighting up in several other movies.
Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told a US Senate panel in May that smoking sometimes "is essential to the time and place of the story," and shouldn't be prevented. He cited movies like Saving Private Ryan, where depicting soldiers smoking was unavoidable. (HealthDayNews)
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