Smoke screen
Consign another item to the ashtray of history: Smoking in movies.
The Motion Picture Association of America announced yesterday that its ratings board will adjust its criteria to include cinematic depictions of smoking, hoping to protect young viewers from romanticized images of cigarettes.
Said MPAA chairman Dan Glickman, "Clearly, smoking is increasingly an unacceptable behavior in our society. . . . No parent wants their child to take up the habit. The appropriate response of the rating system is to give more information to parents on this issue."
This means the phrases "glamorized smoking" and "pervasive smoking" will appear in that little explanatory box next to a film's rating, joining such warnings as "sci-fi action/violence," "drug use," "extreme sexuality," and "Lindsay Lohan alert."
It's an awfully safe target. Glickman notes that movies showing "even a fleeting glimpse of smoking" dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent from 2004 to 2006, and most of them were rated R for other reasons. Under the new criteria, though, the PG-rated "Good Night , and Good Luck" (2005) -- a history lesson you might argue it would behoove teenagers to see -- might get an R for Edward R. Murrow's (David Strathairn) incessant puffing.
Anti-smoking activists were pushing for the MPAA to adopt a hardline policy of giving any movie with smoking an automatic R, but they obviously don't understand what the ratings board is for or why the MPAA exists. Under the recently deceased Jack Valenti -- a past master of media manipulation and a golden-tongued filibusterer of the first order -- the MPAA was always a lobbying arm meant to protect the studios' interests at all costs: the NRA with sprocket holes.
That included creating and defending a ratings system that gives as little hard information as possible while purporting to be a parent's best friend. (For non-MPAA websites that break movie content down into information you can actually use, Google "movie parents rating" and take your pick; there are plenty of them.)
Glickman has made some changes -- probably in reaction to Kirby Dick's 2005 "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," although he denies it. The anti-smoking fiat, though, offers a hint that this may not be your mother's ratings system, or Valenti's, for long.
Good thing the smoking ban isn't retroactive: Paul Henried and Bette Davis would have been rated R for the two-cigarette scene in the 1942 classic "Now, Voyager."
And Humphrey Bogart's entire filmography? An easy NC-17.
TY BURR
