Tobacco-movie Industry Ties Traced To Hollywood's Early Years

Today's movie industry still draws on those images to justify smoking in movies - even as public health experts call for smoking to be eliminated from youth-rated films. Last month the National Cancer Institute concluded that on-screen smoking causes youth to start smoking.

"We're told smoking is part of Hollywood's history and a necessary artistic device," said Stanton Glantz, PhD, professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco and an author of a new study that "debunks the myth" that smoking in movies purely reflected American tastes at the time. "Our work further strengthens the case for getting smoking out of youth-rated films by rating new smoking movies 'R.'"

Glantz and Robert Jackler, MD, professor and chair of otolaryngology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, along with other researchers, used once-secret tobacco industry documents to trace Hollywood-tobacco marketing deals to the early days of movie making, including Al Jolson in the silent film era. 

"Commercial arrangements between the movie industry and tobacco companies were there from the very beginning," said Glantz, director of UCSF's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

In the school's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Kristen Lum a UCSF medical student and lead author of the study, uncovered financial contracts between tobacco companies and Hollywood stars to endorse specific cigarette brands. (Today such deals would be worth millions of dollars.) The resulting cigarette ads feature stars under contract to major film studios, usually plugging their latest films and the studios that released them. Studios controlled their stars' agreements and timed the ads to appear as films opened across the country. Cross-promotion benefited both industries, researchers observed.

"The (Hollywood) studio system used tobacco advertising to sell its movies," said Jackler, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor in Otorhinolaryngology at Stanford. "The tobacco industry used Hollywood to sell its brands and reassure a worried public that smoking was not harmful."

The idea for the study was sparked in part by Jackler's collection of thousands of historical cigarette ads from 1927 to 1954 that appeared in such magazines as Life and The Saturday Evening Post. "The collection is a unique resource for scholars who seek to explore the history of an industry which, perhaps more than any other, places pursuit of profit above any consideration for the well-being of its customers," Jackler said.

The ads, which are exhibited online at tobacco.stanford.edu, are a collection of images from the campaign by the tobacco industry to hide the hazards of smoking, Jackler said. Titled "Not a Cough in a Carload," a traveling collection of the exhibit will be on display at the New York Public Library at 188 Madison Ave. in Manhattan from Oct. 6 until Jan. 2.

In addition to presenting doctors, nurses, athletes and even Santa Claus promoting the health benefits of smoking, a number of the ads show Hollywood stars both as enthusiastic partakers and eager endorsers of specific brands. Some stars, such as Claudette Colbert, endorsed as many as five different brands over their careers.

"Chesterfields are so mild they leave a clean fresh taste in my mouth," one ad states with an image of a smiling Kirk Douglas lighting a Chesterfield. "Claudette Colbert tells how the throat-strain of emotional acting led her to Luckies," announces another ad next to an image of a sultry, long-lashed Colbert, cigarette in hand. "Mrs. Humphrey Bogart says, 'I love to see a man smoke a Cigarillo,'" states a third with an image of Bogie and Bacall relaxing on a sailboat.

But the key to uncovering the commercial link between the movie and tobacco industries was the discovery of the contracts, said Lum. "The contracts were the documents that really drove this research," Lum said. "The actual advertisements were the end product of a very well-thought-out commercial/PR endeavor for the tobacco industry. Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, all the big names were there."

The study was supported in part by a grant from the National Cancer Institute.