I mean I watched “Get Carter” the other night(not worth renting btw I get free movies). I mean in every scene it seemed like they were lighting up another one. Or in every shot everybody was smoking. So it got me thinking because alot of other movies got tons of smoking in them.
Since tobacco companies can’t advertise, why not just pay screen writers to put smoking in their screen plays. That way you have famous people glamorizing smoking to get more people to smoke.
Well what do you think?
People have speculated about this, but there’s no evidence that anyone is paying anyone. A nice article in a recent American Heritage probably got it right – you see cigarettes in movies because they are “business.”
You see, an actor usually has to do something when he reads his lines, and cigarettes are the perfect prop for this. He can light them, fumble for matches, blow smoke, stub one out, etc., and it all seems perfectly natural. Other actions are more difficult to justify.
So it’s very convenient for an actor to have a cigarette in his hand. Unless something replaces this, you’ll continue to see actors smoking in films.
A mini-hijack, Chuck: What about novels? In the Stephen King novel THE DARK HALF, one of the characters uses the Berol Black Beauty pencil exclusively to write. The mention of this pencil permeates the whole book and leaves the reader (me) wondering: “Why Berol? Why not Eberhardt-Faber or any other brand?” So is there evidence that novelists have a financial incentive to use brand-names?
Thanks
Quasi