Anti-smoking message to be included in some movie DVDs

Several Hollywood studios will place a warning of the dangers of smoking on DVDs of movies with smoking scenes. But will those messages be undone by the sexy images of smoking within the movie?

Many people have said Hollywood studios glamorize smoking. Sometimes, even Hollywood jokes about how it glamorizes smoking.

In the movie "Thank You For Smoking", Aaron Eckhart and Rob Lowe tried to invent a new sexy smoker. "What we need is a smoking role model, a real winner." "Indiana Jones meets Jerry Maguire?" "On two packs a day."

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has been trying to convince major studios to put an anti-tobacco warning on movies which show characters smoking, and now some companies will start doing that.

"I was one of the original founders, about seven years ago, of an attorney general task force dealing with smoking in the movies, particularly with relation to youth smoking," Shurtleff said.

Shurtleff says some members of the groups wanted an automatic R rating for films depicting smoking.

"We instead thought, ‘Let's work with Hollywood. They seem to get it, or a lot of them (studios) do, and encourage certain things and make things available like the anti-smoking message or the harmful dangers of smoking that they're going to put in front of the DVDs,'" he said.

Yahoo Entertainment says six studios; Paramount, Sony, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney and Warner Brothers will put public service announcements on films with smoking scenes. But is that enough to keep teens from smoking? State officials point to an Australian study that says it might be.

Tobacco Prevention and Control Media Coordinator David Neville said, "The Australian study showed that, amongst non-smokers, that showing a message before hand tends to immunize them against what they see inside of the movie."

But Neville says it doesn't change the viewpoints of people who already smoke. Locally, Neville says they're facing another problem.

"The question that we ask in surveys throughout the state each year, ‘If a good friend, or a close friend, or your best friend offered you a cigarette, would you accept it?' That question, the rates of that have gone up slightly in the last year," he said.

Boys seem to be more prone to answer "yes" to that question, but Neville says a study out of San Francisco shows girls tend to emulate what they see on screen more often.

David Neville: "They tend to look at their favorite movie star and think, ‘I want to be like that."

Utah has the lowest rate of smokers in the nation.

E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com

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