Hollywood Movies have always sizzled from smoking scenes. Be it Kate Winslet in ‘Titanic’, Aliens in ‘Men in black2’ or Cruella Vil in children’s movie ‘101 Dalmations’ there have been smoking scenes in almost all the flicks be it PG-13 ratings or G rated films.
Ironically there has been no objection to such scenes but lately two very prominent doctors have stood against smoking in movies.
Stanton Glantz who is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and founder of Smoke Free Movies, and James Sargent of the pediatric department at Dartmouth say movies that depict smoking are the single greatest media threat to children.
According to Sargent,
‘The average kid watches three or four movies a week, and gets exposed to literally thousands of glamorized depictions of smoking in those movies’.
The doctor duo decided to start campaigning for anti-smoking when they found that almost 75 percent of G, PG and PG-13 movies released in 2004 showed their characters smoking. Thus they are of the view that all the films which have tobacco usage to get an R rating.
Studies have revealed that 390,000 kids start to smoke and almost 400,000 people die from smoking related illness every year.
That’s a generous thought I think but I doubt whether Hollywood would stand for this noble thought.
