Smoking On Screen: FCC wants to regulate TV violence

Huffing and Puffing

By KYLE SMITH
March 16, 2007

On Monday, a coalition of clean-lung groups confidently announced that the next day Hollywood would agree to get tougher on smoking in movies, notably by slapping an R rating on any film that showed anyone using tobacco in any form. Unlike most movies, though, this story delivered a third-act twist: The MPAA stood fast on the issue, causing the smokeless-screens crowd to mutter of perfidy and vow to redouble its efforts, acting much like Lex Luthor being led off to prison. Expect a sequel.

As a film critic, I’d be happier if the studios banned comedians in fat suits. Is smoking the most dangerous activity on display at the manyplex? In the past few months, major studio movies about teens and young adults have demonstrated such pastimes as racing sports cars down a winding mountain road by “drifting” with tires perpendicular to the direction of the car (“The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”); holding up convenience stores at gunpoint (“Freedom Writers”): and being locked upside down in glass tanks full of water (“The Prestige”). None of these films was rated R.

[Huffing and Puffing]
Bob and his second-hand smokers: On the road to an R rating?

Other recent PG-13 films have shown us children drinking wine (“A Good Year”); sleeping in the bathroom of a mass-transit station (“The Pursuit of Happyness”); and marrying into a strange family of doomed Frenchmen (“Marie Antoinette”). Shouldn’t teens be fenced off from the temptations posed by these horrors, too?

That’s only the tip of the Marlboro, though. If every piece of filmed entertainment featuring tobacco usage is to be slapped with an R, the ratings board might want to borrow a trick from the kids and call in a few pizzas and some kegs of Red Bull. They’ll have to either airbrush or give the scarlet R letter to the entire Marx Brothers oeuvre and the Bob Hope and Bing Crosby pictures. Also out will be “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Lady and the Tramp,” “E.T.,” Bugs Bunny cartoons, “The Parent Trap,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Superman,” “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “Elf” and the World Series (which should be banned for its tediousness, not its players’ incessant tobacco chewing).

Christmas won’t be the same without you, Frosty — unless you replace your corn-cob pipe with a stick of Dentyne. And some Grinch had better get to work ridding every children’s library of its copy of “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth/And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.”)

Do films about real people count? If so, I guess we’ll all benefit by seeing less documentary footage of puffers Fidel Castro, Josef Stalin and Sean Penn; but it looks like our kids will soon be learning even less about good nicotine lovers like MacArthur, Churchill and FDR.

What about movies where smoking is given negative associations? Cruella De Vil is despicable in “101 Dalmatians,” so should we prevent kids from witnessing her cigarette-holder-wielding deviltry, or instead applaud the film as useful propaganda for our clean-lunged crusade? What should we do about “The Aviator,” a PG-13 movie in which Alec Baldwin, who played the quiet but dastardly rival to hero Howard Hughes, tormented the anguished tycoon while puffing away contentedly on a pipe?

Besides, what is the point of banning smoking from kids’ movies when it’s all over kids’ TV? In “The Simpsons,” the most prominent smokers are Krusty, the self-hating clown, and the scheming harridans Patty and Selma Bouvier. Does showing smoking for satiric purposes count for anything?

On the other hand, if they were starved of moving pictures, kids might be forced to do something drastic, such as read. Yet so much smoking goes on in “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Catcher in the Rye” that there should be ample reason to ban them all over again. You can go ahead and pulp every high-school copy of “Great Expectations,” “War and Peace” and “A Separate Peace,” too. Oh, and cancel that field trip to see “The Iceman Cometh,” with all of its talk about “pipe dreams.”

Unless kids have changed a great deal since I was 14 — when my friends and I used the HBO guide as a road map to the films that promised maximum gore and gonads — an R rating is not actually going to stop many kids from seeing a film. It’s just going to make it that much more delectably forbidden.

Anyway, don’t we want our teens to start absorbing some life lessons more complex than the ones offered by “Shrek?” Should we stop a 16-year-old from learning about the importance of tolerance toward gays in the R-rated “Brokeback Mountain” just because — according to scenesmoking.org, a site which obsessively logs tobacco usage in movies — the movie’s characters turn to tobacco more than 50 times? And isn’t Brokeback’s unsafe sex a more dangerous example than the smoking?

Unofficially, of course, the anti-smokers have already won. Despite their warnings that cigarettes are everywhere in the movies, smoking on screen today is largely the habit of jerks, losers and fringe characters. The James Bond franchise went smoke-free last fall with “Casino Royale.” The film version of Christopher Buckley’s satire of tobacco lobbyists, “Thank You For Smoking,” might as well have arrived wrapped in one of those motel sashes that reads: “Sanitized for your protection.” Although the film was praised for its supposedly devilish political incorrectness, no one in it is ever seen smoking.

The problem with those who like to ban things is that their mission of human improvement can never be complete. Take Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner in “The Mikado,” whose “little list” starts out with “society offenders” but hurries on to include “the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face,” “the lady from the provinces who dresses like a guy” and even “all funny fellows, comic men and clowns of private life.” They’d none of ’em be missed!

New Yorkers have a Ko-Ko for our time in Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose comprehensive smoking ban was just the overture for more bans, starting with the forthcoming one on trans fats. Which, come to think of it, could easily be picked up by the movies. So long, “Nacho Libre.”

Mr. Smith is a film critic for The New York Post. He has never smoked a cigarette.

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FCC wants to regulate TV violence

Feb 16, 2007
Brooks Boliek

The Federal Communications Commission is considering a report to Congress claiming that the agency can regulate TV violence the same way it regulates indecency if lawmakers give it the authority, sources said Thursday.

A draft of the report is being circulated among commissioners as FCC chairman Kevin Martin attempts to muster the three votes necessary to win its approval, commission sources said. Martin and senior Democratic commissioner Michael Copps are pushing for approval of the report.

Broadcasters are restricted from airing “indecent” material from 6 a.m.-10 p.m. The report contends that the agency could use a similar regulatory regime to regulate violent content.

While the commission might regulate only broadcast television for indecent programming, the report suggests that Congress could allow it to go further and bring cable into the mix. Lawmakers could approve a measure that would mandate an a la carte program system that would allow customers to buy only the programming they desire and eliminate channels with a lot of violence, or the new law could mandate a family tier like the ones offered by many cable and satellite TV providers, sources said.

The report also draws a link between TV violence and “short-term aggressive behavior” in children, sources said.

A bipartisan group of 39 House members nearly three years ago requested a report by January 1, 2005, on whether the FCC could define “exceedingly violent programming that is harmful to children.” It also asked whether the agency could regulate such programming “in a constitutional manner.”

Any new legislation would face a string of First Amendment problems, including defining violence.

“What this is is government control of creative content, and we have a real problem with that,” said Jonathan Rintels, executive director of the Center for Creative Voices in Media. “Will it count on news or reality programming? What about sports? In hockey, will it count when the gloves come off? How about documentaries? Or will it only count on scripted TV?”

Broadcasters are expected to object strenuously to any anti-violence regulatory regime but have been skittish about going on the record. The National Association of Broadcasters declined comment, as did CBS Inc. Scott Grogin, senior vp corporate communications at Fox Broadcasting, also declined comment because the report has not yet been released.

Generally, broadcasters and cable companies say parents should take responsibility for what their children watch and take advantage of blocking technology like the V-chip, for which they are sponsoring a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to teach parents how to use it.

As for a la carte, Brian Dietz, spokesman for the National Cable and Telecommunications Assn., said it is an “unnecessary government intrusion in a vibrant marketplace that would result in higher prices, fewer choices and less diversity in programming.”

Broadcasters also claim that their shows are becoming edgier to keep up with increasingly violent fare on cable networks.

If the report gets approved by the commission, it could face a receptive audience in Congress. Several lawmakers from both parties, such as Sens. John Rockefeller (news, bio, voting record), D-W.Va., and Sam Brownback (news, bio, voting record), R-Kan., have expressed concern about violent content.

Approval of some version of the report by the commission is likely. Martin and Copps are expected to be joined by commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate, who has been an active critic of TV content.

Republican commissioner Robert McDowell and Democratic commissioner Jonathan Adelstein are less predictable. While Adelstein has backed some commission content initiatives, he has moderated his view somewhat as the FCC rulings have become more radical.

McDowell, a father of young children, issued a statement Thursday to the Associated Press saying he is “deeply concerned about the effects of television violence” but added that the “first line of defense rests with parents.”

“I look forward to examining the legal and constitutional implications of potential additional regulation in this arena as my colleagues and I consider the recommendations we should make to Congress,” he added.