The Motion Picture Association of America is under new leadership. The new head asked experts at Harvard to recommend how to handle smoking in movies. The Harvard panel came back with strict guidelines that would ban smoking except in real historial context, from all but R-rated movies. If a character smokes, unless they are playing an actual person who smoked, the film would get an R rating under the Harvard proposal:

Last October, Glickman sent a letter to 40 attorneys general addressing the MPAA’s concerns about smoking in movies. He said that the MPAA was turning to the Harvard School of Public Health for guidance. “My objective is to gain consensus among the member companies of MPAA on Harvard’s pending recommendations, and then begin implementation,” he said.

Harvard didn’t mention specific ratings, but the dean of the school offers this statement to us: “We’re suggesting that they take smoking out of youth accessible films: G, PG and PG-13, which make up 85% of all movies.” (From where we sit, Harvard could just as well throw in the R movies because so many parents bring their kids to them as if they were Sunday-school picnics.)

According to Glantz, Glickman’s letter to the attorneys general now looms large: “We think the MPAA is in some state of disarray because this commitment has been made.” The MPAA has not acted, but apparently it is pressing the studios to take a position. Warner is said to be among the most sympathetic, but it’s doubtful even that studio will go with an automatic R for smoking.

As things stand now, studios have individual policies on smoking in their films. But one top executive acknowledges that at her studio that policy is “very, very vague” and generally has been applied to family movies (presumably G and PG) only.

So it sounds like it won’t be a strict ban as the MPAA is reluctant to set smoking rules for the studios. It could be that social pressure is applied so that smoking is omitted in practice, kind of like the way smoking gets started in the first place.

Part of me thinks this is a good idea as it will ensure that smoking isn’t glamorized. Smoking is a social phenomenon and films influence opinion. It’s something that seems acceptable if public figures and/or your friends are doing it. I know I used to think smoking was taboo until I moved to Switzerland. Here it’s disappointingly common, and there’s little social stigma associated with it. Now I’m not so quick to judge people for smoking, because it’s not off limits anywhere. It also makes it hard for my husband and me to go out to dinner, and we’ve just had to accept it.

Back when I was in college, though, I smoked because it was something all my friends did.

In a way, I think it’s a bit extreme to give a film an R rating just because characters are smoking. How can they justify slapping an R rating on a film when a character’s profile makes them likely to smoke?

On the other hand, if no one else smokes, you’re not likely to do it, either. Maybe it’s better to make it seem out of the norm in order to protect public health.

In celebrity smoking news, Salma Hayek recently said that she quit smoking after learning she was pregnant, while Jeremy Irons hit back at a British ban on smoking in public by says he’s not sure it’s as deadly as all those scientific studies show.