Salem State student protests Hollywood smoking scenes

SALEM – Hollywood movie buffs can scarcely imagine a dramatic scene in which actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Marlene Dietrich aren’t puffing on a cigarette.Amanda Cannatelli, a 19-year-old third-year nursing student at Salem State College, would like to change the way movies are made, so that impressionable young viewers aren’t as likely to emulate their silver screen idols by smoking cigarettes.Cannatelli, of Salem, joined Hollywood producer Lindsay Doran and public health leaders at a hearing in Washington, D.C. last week, where she testified that her mother, Pam Laffin, died at age 31 from emphysema after picking up the habit from the character Sandy in the movie “Grease.”Cannatelli explained that her mother started smoking at age 10. “She thought smoking would make her more popular, like it did for Olivia Newton John’s character in ‘Grease’,” she said. “But the movie didn’t show what happens after years and years of addiction or disease.”Laffin quit when diagnosed with emphysema. She died eight years ago at age 31 from the disease, leaving behind two daughters, then ages 13 and 11.Coincidentally, the Swampscott High School Drama Club is performing “Grease” later this month.Music teacher James Pearse, the club director, said the decision whether to use prop cigarettes should be left to the artistic director.”We’re not using them every time they are used in a script,” he said. “But we do use prop cigarettes in ‘Grease’ because in this musical smoking is not portrayed as particularly sexy.”The Washington briefing, hosted by the American Legacy Foundation, addressed the presence of tobacco use in films and its proven influence on teen smoking.According to the foundation, research shows that images of actors and characters smoking in youth-rated movies influence at least 200,000 American youth to start smoking each year. In comparison, 400,000 smokers die each year due to tobacco-related diseases.Despite these sobering statistics, Hollywood movies in a single year delivered nearly 14 billion smoking images to young audiences.In an effort to remedy the situation, public health leaders are putting their support behind the Smoke Free Movies policy. If adopted, it would requiring strong anti-smoking ads to run before films with any tobacco presence regardless of its rating. It would also declare in the movie credits that none of the stars or members of the production team received payoffs in exchange for displaying tobacco products.The policy would also end the identification of tobacco brands in any movies scenes, and eliminate smoking from G, PG and PG-13 films by rating movies R if they contain smoking.