No, he just cashed their check.
A movie set in certain eras that did not show people smoking would lack an air of reality.
Unlike urinating or taking a crap, smoking was an activity people did in public: its complete absence would be jarring.
My fear for the future, when everything is in The Cloud, that THEY will digitally erase all the smoking in old movies, like Winston (heh heh, Winston) Smith’s job in 1984. There won’t be any unaltered copies, except those that us old timers will have in our personal DVD collections. And without those old hard copies, no one will be able to prove it was ever there. And they’ll justify it as being for our own good.
And my biggest fear? That no one will care!
Cite?
There is actually a PSA out now that is a montage of a bunch of celebrities photographed smoking with the mocking tag line “Thanks for the free marketing - signed Big Tobacco”
Well, that scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still wouldn’t be nearly as hilarious without the smoking. Though I’m not sure that that was quite exactly the intention there…
I was watching part of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” the other day. I was impressed that Liz Taylor not only suppressed her own attractiveness, but didn’t even try and make her smoking sexy or glamorous. (See the scene where she’s having a conversation with Segal while a cig just hangs from her mouth)
That would be Craven A? 
Not movies, but something similar happened to French comic book character Lucky Luke (“the gunman who’s faster than his own shadow”). In the more recent books he chews on a blade of grass because the authors were told they had to remove the cigarettes and “his mouth just doesn’t look right without something in it” (their paraphrased from memory words). The character had been designed at a time when the majority of the adult population smoked and lives in a time and place in which smoking or chewing tobacco was normal.
I cannot imagine Humphrey Bogart not smoking!
Somehow, I don’t think X-Files would’ve worked as well with the “Gum-chewing Man”.
I find it interesting that Clint would say that. The spaghetti westerns that made him a star required that he constantly smoke those little cigars. Eli Wallach, his co-star in TGTBTU said that they made Clint sick. I guess Clint felt that they were necessary for his character.
The inevitable reboot will feature “Vaping Indoors Even Though It’s Technically Illegal Man.”
Good Night and Good Luck really had to show Edward Murrow as the chain smoker he was. If it hadn’t, I think a lot would have been lost. He died of lung cancer at age 57.
I remember reading his interview in Playboy back in the '70s or '80s, where he told about how he gradually acquired all his trademark characteristics—the cigarillos, the poncho, the whole schmeer. IIRC, the process was pretty much serendipitous, with him just happening upon things that seemed to work.
Having Walter White’s wife and Jesse Pinkman smoke on “Breaking Bad” may not have been strictly essential, but it would seem kind of odd to show rampant drug abuse and then be too squeamish to show smoking.
Supposedly they smoke herbal cigarettes on Mad Men.
But if digital alteration of movies worries you, it may already be here. Not to remove smoking from old films, but to add smoke to unlit, prop cigarettes, in situations where a character’s supposed to be smoking but the actor can’t or won’t, or because local ordinances ban smoking in the workplace. Even if it’s necessary for the plot.
And since Walter has lung cancer, no one can accuse the show of ignoring the negative results of smoking, or of “glamorizing” it.
Rick Blaine in Casablanca is not chewing bubble gum. He’s not spitting sunflower seeds. He’s not grabbing handfuls of granola with craisins. He’s freaking smoking.
They actually did this with one of Amy’s experimental monkeys on Big Bang Theory. It was really, really obvious!