When the makers of the Ghostbusters reboot (due out in about July) were working out which parts of the original film to reuse, you can bet chain-smoking wasn’t among them.
In Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman and John Travolta’s characters light up Red Apples at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, encircled by the jetsam of pop culture’s past.
By 1979, smoking’s association with sex was clichéd enough that in Manhattan, a rarely more-nebbishy Woody Allen was able to joke: “I don’t inhale, because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can’t not hold one.”
But thus far, Disney is the only studio to have formally kicked the habit.
In 2007, the company’s CEO, Bob Iger, said that unless there was strong historical justification to the contrary, no smoking would appear in a new Disney film.
The rule held for Saving Mr Banks, their 2013 film about the making of Mary Poppins – which co-starred Tom Hanks as the committed smoker (and eventual lung cancer victim) Walt Disney.
Here we enter an ash-grey area where cinema’s health kick may itself become something of a smokescreen.
By not creating glamorous images of smoking, was Disney simultaneously able to Febreze its own history? Let’s not forget the same is responsible for some of the finest anti-smoking imagery in cinema: as a five-year-old, Pinocchio’s green-faced drag on a Pleasure Island cigar made me gag on my Ribena.
That’s one reason the threat of blanket bans and mandatory 18 ratings should be cause for concern.
Cigarettes don’t become harmful until tar and nicotine enter our airways – and since smoking in cinemas themselves was phased out during the ’70s and ’80s, that can no longer happen to us if we simply watch a film.
After a complaint to Ofcom in 2006 over smoking scenes in two vintage episodes of Tom and Jerry, Turner Broadcasting voluntarily cut tobacco-related imagery from more than 1700 Hanna-Barbera cartoons in its library. Scenes in which Tom is fed through a lawnmower, has his tail scorched by a waffle iron, and has his hands and feet smashed with hammers, however, remained intact. Sometimes we have to trust ourselves to know when something’s only a movie. — The Daily Telegraph
l In South Africa, tobacco product advertising in the print and electronic media was banned in 1999. Although never practised in South Africa, “product placement” of tobacco products in films was specifically banned in 2009.
How cigarettes became film industry’s last taboo
In Pulp Fiction, Uma Thurman and John Travolta’s characters light up Red Apples at Jack Rabbit Slim’s, encircled by the jetsam of pop culture’s past.
By 1979, smoking’s association with sex was clichéd enough that in Manhattan, a rarely more-nebbishy Woody Allen was able to joke: “I don’t inhale, because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can’t not hold one.”
But thus far, Disney is the only studio to have formally kicked the habit.
In 2007, the company’s CEO, Bob Iger, said that unless there was strong historical justification to the contrary, no smoking would appear in a new Disney film.
The rule held for Saving Mr Banks, their 2013 film about the making of Mary Poppins – which co-starred Tom Hanks as the committed smoker (and eventual lung cancer victim) Walt Disney.
Here we enter an ash-grey area where cinema’s health kick may itself become something of a smokescreen.
By not creating glamorous images of smoking, was Disney simultaneously able to Febreze its own history? Let’s not forget the same is responsible for some of the finest anti-smoking imagery in cinema: as a five-year-old, Pinocchio’s green-faced drag on a Pleasure Island cigar made me gag on my Ribena.
That’s one reason the threat of blanket bans and mandatory 18 ratings should be cause for concern.
Cigarettes don’t become harmful until tar and nicotine enter our airways – and since smoking in cinemas themselves was phased out during the ’70s and ’80s, that can no longer happen to us if we simply watch a film.
After a complaint to Ofcom in 2006 over smoking scenes in two vintage episodes of Tom and Jerry, Turner Broadcasting voluntarily cut tobacco-related imagery from more than 1700 Hanna-Barbera cartoons in its library. Scenes in which Tom is fed through a lawnmower, has his tail scorched by a waffle iron, and has his hands and feet smashed with hammers, however, remained intact. Sometimes we have to trust ourselves to know when something’s only a movie. — The Daily Telegraph
l In South Africa, tobacco product advertising in the print and electronic media was banned in 1999. Although never practised in South Africa, “product placement” of tobacco products in films was specifically banned in 2009.
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