Does the tobacco industry pay Netflix (and other streaming creators) to have the actors smoke in their movies and series’? It seems that I see a lot of characters smoking when it isn’t necessary or add to their role. Smoking is not nearly as “cool” or “sophisticated” as it once was so why have the activity as part of the script?
Personally, seeing an otherwise attractive or compelling character smoke is a turn-off and I don’t think, based on current trends, that I’m the only one
It can help date the movie. I just watched The Bikeriders, a movie about motorcycle clubs, set in the 70s. Everyone smokes cigarettes, because at the time everyone smoked cigarettes.
I think having a character use tobacco can tell you something about the character.
Meanwhile Michael Bay makes Pearl Harbor and nobody is smoking. I did have a good laugh when watching the Netflix series Sandman. There an episode where the content warning included both self-harm and tobacco use which left me a bit perplexed. You don’t typically see someone self-harming on the side of the street, but if you walk in downtown Little Rock during your lunch break odds are good you’ll see people smoking. I just can’t help wondering if there’s a parent who said, “I don’t mind my kid seeing the self-harm, but no way in hell will I let them see someone abuse tobacco!”
While not seeing people smoking in a 1940s war movie is certainly anachronistic, so is not commonly using now-disproved racial slurs as part of normal speech, cars of the era going on a trip of more than a few hundred miles without experiencing a flat tire or mechanical problem, and most of the music used in soundtracks. (“Johnny B. Good” wasn’t written or performed until 1958 but it is a stable in ‘Fifties films even though they are clearly set much earlier in the decade.) In some period shows and movies, smoking is part of the social commentary and underlies the themes of the story, i.e. Mad Men or Manhattan, as well as being period-appropriate (yes, people did choke down unfiltered Luckys just like Don Draper and Roger Sterling, although I doubt many drank quite as hard as they did in the office while still remaining functional), and in others it doesn’t really matter. If you notice, there is very little smoking in L.A. Confidential (Spacey’s character smokes briefly and there is a scene where Edmund Exley plucks a cigarette out of an officer’s mouth who is standing next to the gang rape victim he just rescued just to show what an upright asshole he is) but it isn’t particularly noticeable in the context of that movie, but a show like the recent Perry Mason has copious smoking by all of the characters which gives a subtext to the notion that everybody is kind of dirty and corrupt, even the ‘good guys’.
I kind of doubt that the tobacco industry is paying under the table to get smoking into Netflix productions just because they’ve essentially given up on promoting burnable tobacco products in the United States (and have invested heavily in both vaping and marijuana, as well as other food and ‘wellness’ products), and instead focus their tobacco business elsewhere in the developing world where they can shill to children without restraint. This is similar to claims that the oil and gas industry is still trying to undermine climate change research when in reality they have discovered that it just doesn’t matter and that people and politicians are going to keep buying gas and promoting drilling new resources until it runs out regardless of what a bunch of eggheads are saying about global warming and ocean acidification and the irreversible melting of ice sheets because who has time for all that jibber jabber when you could be rolling coal and watching NASCAR, amirite?
Stranger
Paid placement for tobacco products was banned in 1998.
The industry has found a few loopholes to evade the terms of the Master Settlement Agreement, but straight up paid product placement is no longer permitted.
I had a minor windfall years ago and bought 50 shares of MO (Phillip Morris/RJ Reynolds). It split, turned into Kraft foods, etc…
The most lucrative stock I ever bought. Checking now, it pays 7.7%!
Dealing addictive substances is quite lucrative. Just ask the British!
Stranger
When I think about it, a lot of the Netflix movies and series where people smoke frequently are foreign produced.
I realize that smoking can help date a movie but many of these are modern day scenarios. During the war, tobacco companies were practically giving away cigarettes to soldiers in order to get them hooked. It worked.
Unless you are getting a product placement fee why have young, attractive people smoking when you know it only acts as an incentive to get people to smoke.
If you’re talking about non-US productions, then you may simply be seeing the cultural reflection of the higher rates of smoking, in some cases much higher, in many countries. France, for example, has a smoking rate about ten percent higher than the US. And not only that, it’s culturally more acceptable. I live in Europe and people think nothing of a smoker having their pack sitting on their desk in the office, whereas in the US it gets tucked discreetly away between smoke breaks. (And this is why I can’t enjoy Parisian sidewalk dining; everyone is smoking and there’s no negative judgment about it, alas.) Paid placement, again, simply doesn’t enter into it in the current media landscape.
The chain-smoking ship’s doctor on Battlestar Galactica, for instance.
They weren’t practically giving away cigarettes, they were literally giving them away. Each meal in a K Ration contained a packet of four cigarettes, so everyone got twelve cigarettes a day with their meals, whether they were a smoker or not.
CIGARETTES and MATCHES | K RATION | K-RATION
Soon after the adoption of the K Ration suggestions came that there should be more included then just food. One of the first things included were cigarettes. Each unit held a small package of four cigarettes. This was done in August 1942.
This wasn’t unique to the US or WWII, tobacco in some form or the other as part of daily rations in militaries predates WWII and was ubiquitous. For example, daily German rations in 1914 included
two cigars and two cigarettes or 1 oz. pipe tobacco, or 9/10 oz. plug tobacco, or 1/5 oz. snuff
Not just in K-Rats; from Golden Holocaust: Origins Of The Cigarette Catastrophe And The Case For Abolition by Robert N. Proctor:
In World War II American cigarette manufactueres were required to turn 18 percent of their total output over to the military — by order of the War Production Board. And advertisers capitalized on the opportunity by linking smoking with patriotism, hygiene, and homspun virtues.
Tobacco companies used to send ‘care packages’ of cigarettes that were doled out by the carton, as indicated in the opening scene in the Mad Men pilot episode:
They did this all the way through at least the early years of the Vietnam War.
Stranger
Cigarettes in wartime go way back. The Wild Woodbine was apparently issued to British servicemen as early as 1888. During WW1 the chaplain Geoffrey Kennedy would buy large numbers of Woodbines from his own salary and take them out to troops in need of comfort. Earning himself the nickname Woodbine Willy, and a Military Cross. Being given a cigarette with which to draw one’s last breath was apparently considered a comfort.
Both my grandfathers served in WW1. Both smoked for the rest of their lives.
The Woodbine was always marketed as a working man’s cigarette. When life was tough it provided comfort, and that was the advertising motif.
My father studied at Bristol University and was a resident in Wills Hall. Wills, they of WD and HO, paid for the building. They also made the Woodbine. Since my father was studying medicine my father always felt slightly uneasy about this. Smoking was rife. He would get challenged by other students about why he wasn’t smoking*. This was just prior to the early results from Richard Doll’s groundbreaking British Doctors Study that really brought the dangers to the fore.
Daily cigarette consumption per UK adult was one, two, four, and six a day in 1905, 1915, 1933, and 1941 respectively—mostly consumed by men.
WW1 consumption of cigarettes in the trenches was probably a huge contributor to this. But not all of it. Smoking became firmly entrenched and grew more in WW2.
* students my father knew included a number of physics PhD candidates. He related how they were all communists, smoked, and how one day there was huge excitement about a discovery they had made in photographic plates flown by balloon into the upper atmosphere. This was the discovery of the pi-meson. Smoking left wingers seemed to be something of a constant stereotype for ages.