Hollywood & Big Tobacco Have a More Twisted Connection Than You’d Think

Hollywood and tobacco have had a relationship throughout film history.

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"Bond," he says, eyes focused on the beautiful woman across the table, freshly lit cigarette precariously balanced on his bottom lip as he speaks. "James Bond." Intrigue swirls around his face like the smoke wafting from the cherry between his lips.

Cigarettes and smoking have been fundamental to the Hollywood mythos since the earliest "talkies." Hollywood stars have long glamorized smoking both on screen and off. Stars from Bette Davis to Cary Grant, Marilyn Monroe to Humphrey Bogart, Natasha Lyonne to Ben Affleck, cigarettes are part of the movie star uniform. The allure of celebrity and the glitz of the silver screen, paired with the powerful rush and addictive nature of nicotine, are irresistible.

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Unsurprisingly, the relationship between show business and Big Tobacco is more complicated than it seems. Neither industry is known for their scruples, and Big Tobacco has gotten caught in more lies than even the fiction of Hollywood.

Much of what we know about the relationship between Hollywood and Big Tobacco comes from a trove of internal documents released as part of a lawsuit. The University of California at San Francisco published the documents online. Several academic articles parsing through findings in the documents have been published.were used in the writing of this piece and are linked

The ongoing litigation seeks to change film rating criteria to include smoking as "adult content" allowed only with an R rating. The National Cancer Institute claims that seeing smoking in the movies and on TV causes youth to smoke. Most times, on screen is a young person's only direct exposure to cigarettes. Seeing smoking on screen accounts for up to 350,000 new smokers every year. It doesn't matter if the smoker in a particular piece is the good guy or the bad guy, both influence youngsters to smoke.

This phenomenon is no accident. Big Tobacco has woven Hollywood into an intricate web of influence, omissions, and power.

Like all fields within the performing arts, the public did not regard the nascent film industry in high esteem in its beginning. The stigma that had attached itself to stage actors carried over to film actors, and the public regarded the industry with suspicion. Groups led by parents and religious leaders advocated for governmental regulation of the industry.

To avoid government interference, Hollywood chose instead to regulate itself, adopting what would become known as the Hays Code. These guidelines "prohibited a picture from lowering the moral standards of those who see it," and forbade it from "creating sympathy for the violation of law." In practical terms, the Code forbade nudity, violence, depictions of "sexual perversion" (including homosexuality), certain curse words, illicit drug use, representation of crime without punishment, and blasphemy against religion or religious figures.

Freud may have said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but it's never been that simple for cigarettes on-screen. Smokes were used as innuendo for a variety of forbidden themes and activities — sex chief among them. Since films could not directly refer to sex, the implication fell to the post-coital cigarette. Beautiful people on-screen smoking cigarettes after making love can only make cigarettes more glamorous.

The greedy tobacco industry gained a reputation for stretching the truth in their marketing early. A 1928 ad campaign implored consumers to reach for a Lucky Strike as a healthy alternative to candy. The candy industry sued, bringing the first scrutiny to the truthfulness of claims in tobacco marketing.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, two-thirds of major movie stars had endorsement deals with cigarette companies. Many of these campaigns featured fabricated testimonials with celebrity names attached. This practice faded after increased scrutiny revealed the dishonesty. Lucky for them, it turned out that the face of celebrity associated with a product — even without a glowing testimonial — was enough to sell.

The early Hollywood Studio System, in which film industry workers were contractually bound to their studio, allowed the first tendrils of the industries to intertwine. Actors were "owned" by their home studios and studios were involved in all of their endorsement contracts. As testimonials fell out of favor, tie-in advertising replaced it. It wasn't long before the film industry found a mutually beneficial quid pro quo: tobacco company endorsements fund films that feature cigarettes which result in increased sales of cigarettes. Everyone wins (except lungs).

The marriage between Big Tobacco and Hollywood was a peaceful one for over 20 years. By the 1950s, however, the cigarette industry had shifted its attention from the big screen to the small. The number of American households with televisions grew each year, and commercials delivered into the home were powerful. This strategy was effective, furthering characters such as the Marlboro Man to sell cigarettes.

The first sign of trouble came in 1950 with the release of a study published by Doctors Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham that linked cases of lung cancer to moderate to heavy cigarette smoking. Two years later, the parent company of Chesterfield cigarettes published their own study showing no ill effects from smoking. Dr. Wynder published another study in 1953 linking cigarette tar to tumors in mice. The science is new and has little effect on the number of smokers. However, it emboldened those who understood the dangers of smoking. In 1954, Eva Cooper sued the tobacco industry over her husband's lung cancer death. She lost the case, but the foundation for more trouble had been laid.

In 1964, the U.S. government first acknowledged the dangers of cigarette smoking with a report issued by the Office of the Surgeon General. The following year, Congress passed a law requiring all packs of cigarettes sold in the United States to bear a label with the Surgeon General's warning. These warnings noted the risk of cancer, birth defects, and addiction.

Cigarette ads were banned from television and radio broadcasts in 1971, a direct result of growing awareness of the dangers of smoking. Unfazed by the negative press, the tobacco industry did whatever it could to grow sales. With the broadcast marketing avenue closed, the industry turned its attention back to film. The best way they could think of to fight the growing anti-smoking sentiment within the public was to make cigarettes sexy and cool again. They would do that through product placement in the movies. Showing beautiful people smoking cigarettes made people want to do it, even when they knew smoking was harmful.

Tobacco companies reinvigorated their entanglement with Hollywood with passion throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 1980, instances of smoking in the movies had dropped from 10.7 instances per hour in 1950 to only 4.9 instances per hour. Tobacco companies learned from their mistakes. The parent company for Camel cigarettes’ president said, "Film is better than any commercial… because the audience is totally unaware of sponsor involvement." Philip Morris's 1989 marketing plans affirm [a belief that] "that most of the strong, positive images for cigarettes and smoking are created by cinema and television."

Film market research firms in the early 1980s found that young people under the age of 18 could recall specific branding information of cigarettes present in films with perfect accuracy. But bad news kept coming. The second Surgeon General's report about smoking released in 1982 suggested that being in the presence of second-hand smoke may also be harmful.

Big Tobacco continued its practice of product placement. Sometimes tobacco companies paid huge amounts of money for films to feature their brand, funding whole publicity efforts. Most of the time, no money directly changed hands at all. Tobacco companies often supplied film sets with cigarettes, unlimited packs for members of the crew. These donations, worth thousands of dollars, were never disclosed to the FTC or anyone else. These agreements between tobacco companies and studios gave cigarette companies a lot of power. They could threaten to pull funding for particular projects if they deemed depictions of cigarette use in a negative light. In the years between 1978 and 1988, Philip Morris executed product placement on 191 films, mostly rated R but several with lower ratings. Film studios also continued to approach tobacco companies seeking additional funding.

In 1989, Congress got serious about investigating Big Tobacco's marketing practices with a series of hearings. The following year, smoking was banned on commercial airline flights and the American Medical Association released recommendations that smoking on TV and in the movies be banned entirely or reserved for automatic R rating.

With more external regulation looming, the industry policed itself with a series of marketing guidelines. They promised they would not receive any further financial benefit from product placement in films. They could still offer freebies in the hopes of their products showing up in the movies, but a quid pro quo boon was not guaranteed. The industry also promised not to advertise in any films made for children, but over 40% of all films with cigarette product placements have a rating below R.

By 2002, cigarette use in the movies was higher than it had been even in the 1950s, with 10.9 instances per hour. Although fewer Americans smoke now than ever before, cigarettes keep their mystique, rebellious, edginess an association with Hollywood has always provided. Youth health advocates will continue to fight against depictions of smoking on-screen, but neither Big Tobacco nor the film industry have much incentive to comply. Young people are the most susceptible to the allure of Hollywood's smoking habit and perpetuate the mutual benefit for both industries.

Big Tobacco has proven time and time again to be an adaptable industry. The released documents extend only through the mid-1990s, so what the intervening 30 years have hidden in this incestuous relationship is unclear. Big Tobacco swears they aren't actively trying to market in the movies, but they’ve been saying that all along. There does not seem to be the political will to change the MPA rating system to include cigarette smoking as a criterion for an R-rating.

The sordid love affair between Hollywood and cigarettes has withstood the test of time and is likely to endure into the foreseeable future as long as the terms of the agreement are beneficial to both sides.

Hollywood thanks you for (not) smoking.

Topher is a queer educator, writer, starship communications officer, and fountain pen aficionado based in Chicago. When he's not writing about TV and film for Collider.com, he's boldly going where no one has gone before, trying to do everything, everywhere all at once, and writing like he's running out of time.