A movie may be rated R for sex, violence, language and … smoking?
That might be the case now that the Motion Picture Association of America has announced that the depiction of smoking will be among the factors weighed when a rating is handed down. Previously, only underage smoking was considered.
“Three questions will have particular weight for our rating board when considering smoking in a film,” MPAA chairman/CEO Dan Glickman said in a statement. “Is the smoking pervasive? Does the film glamorize smoking? And is there an historic or other mitigating context?
“Additionally, when a film’s rating is affected by the depiction of smoking, that rating will now include phrases such as ‘glamorized smoking’ or ‘pervasive smoking.’
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Glickman justified the new policy by noting, “Clearly, smoking is increasingly an unacceptable behavior in our society.” (Mayor Richard M. Daley would probably agree, saying last week that the city’s anti-smoking ordinance applies to actors onstage.) But Glickman also said smoking won’t mean an automatic R, though an MPAA review of recent movies shows that those that depict smoking tend to carry that rating anyway:
“From July 2004 to July 2006, the percentage of films that included even a fleeting glimpse of smoking dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent. Of those films, 75 percent received an R rating for other factors. So, three out of every four films that contained any smoking at all over the past few years are already rated ‘R.’
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The Directors Guild of America is backing the move, as are the various anti-smoking lobbying groups that draw attention to movies with egregious smoking.
Meanwhile, Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart fans can take solace that the MPAA can’t rerate the classics.
The next logical step is for the ratings board to look at the way movies depict drinking and fast driving, whether in tandem or not.
Fortunately, few movies glamorize the eating of foie gras.
In an online Pop Machine poll asking whether smoking should be a factor in movie ratings, 27 percent voted “Yes” and 73 percent voted “No” (of about 1,300).
