About 80 young people from across Ontario will be heading to the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, not to watch movies or hunt for celebrities, but to inform festival-goers about the impact of smoking in films rated for teens and kids.
Representing the Ontario Tobacco-Free Network, the teens will be approaching movie-goers to pass out pamphlets and share information at festival venues on Saturday.
Andrew Noble of the Ontario Tobacco-Free Network told CTV.ca that the group is targeting films at young audiences. "They take offence and exception to the fact that there's smoking going on in movies, especially youth-rated movies," he said.
Noble says studies have found that watching movies that show actors lighting up triples the odds that a teen will try smoking. "Recently, in fact as early as last week, there was a study that came out that indicated not only do teens try smoking, but because of movies, they will become established smokers."
The study, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, presented data to show that teens who occasionally smoked may have been influenced by movies. Researchers followed more than 6,000 U.S. teens for two years and learned that movie choices were more predictive of heavier smoking than other factors such as age, peer smoking, parental smoking and risk-taking behaviour.
Taniya Nagpal, one of the teens attending the film festival with the Ontario Tobacco-Free Network, says she's noticed the effect. "I have friends that say 'oh, I saw this actor smoking (in a movie), and you know, it looked pretty cool,' and its like, well obviously they look up to that person," she said.
"It's portrayed as something good in movies and it attracts (teens)"
While the Ontario Tobacco-Free Network isn't taking aim at specific films or the festival it self, it wants to increase awareness about the issue among people who work in or follow the film industry.
"It's important to help stop (smoking in movies) because children are our future and watching their idol on screen smoking could cause them to start," says Nagpal.
According to a University of California study, between 1999 and 2006, thousands of films had smoking scenes:
- 75 per cent of Hollywood films rated PG 13
- 36 per cent of films rated G/PG
"Parents ... should know that smoking in youth and children rated movies does have a serious impact," says Noble.
He adds that product placement in films can be very effective, something that was memorably demonstrated by the use of Reese's Pieces in the 1982 film, "E.T."
"Unlike some other products, cigarettes are very dangerous and smoking kills. It's a little bit different than the sunglasses worn in Risky Business."
But getting studios to stub out on-screen smoking has been a slow process. Noble says Disney's recent pledge to cut smoking from its family-oriented films is encouraging, but doesn't go far enough. "It's just that it doesn't affect their other brands like Miramax and Touchstone."
