Activities Ideas

Smoke-free Movies Click-in

Objective: To convince the movie industry to stop letting Big Tobacco use movies to market cigarettes.

Materials: Just you and your computer!

Instructions: Disturbed by how much smoking you see in popular movies? It's no accident.

Long used by Big Tobacco to sell its products, Hollywood movies allow the tobacco industry to skirt TV advertising bans and restrictions on marketing to kids.

YOU can help convince movie executives to stop marketing cigarettes to young people. There are four top media bosses whose studios have promoted tobacco on screen that are being targeted as part of the Smoke-Free Movies campaign: Steve Case at AOL TimeWarner (Warner Bros.), Sumner Redstone at Viacom (Paramount Pictures), Michael Eisner at Disney (Touchstone, Buena Vista) and Rupert Murdoch at News Corp (20th Century Fox). Two of these four media giants even have former or current Philip Morris CEOs on their boards!

Tobacco companies came under Congressional pressure to stop paying Hollywood studios cash to feature their deadly products in 1989. Yet published studies show that tobacco presence in top-grossing films – both PG-13 and R-rated - actually increased throughout the 1990s.

Send a message to Hollywood so they'll stop sending the wrong message to young people. Take action today! Visit http://SmokeFreeMovies.ucsf.edu to join the Smoke Free Movies "Click-In." Click on “Act Now!” for things you can do right now to take action! You can contact studios, theater chains, actors, even the Motion Picture Association of America (who decides how movies are rated) to encourage them to do something about smoking in movies. Check it out!