Directors do not have total power over such things as product placement, a $1.25 billion-a-year part of Hollywood. And despite the “auteur” theory, which credits a film’s quality to the director alone, few U.S. directors even have the right to make the final edit of a project they may have worked on for years.

Recognizing directors’ frustrations, we also ask them to look beyond a single scene or film to consider the effect that tobacco imagery has on their audiences. The harm is cumulative and outside of any one director’s control. Hundreds of individual choices, no matter how conscientious, can still produce unintended, lethal results. That’s why we need a permanent, industry-wide standard for tobaco imagery.

Time to think outside the frame

The 40 directors listed in Table 1 represent just 6% of the 615 directors whose U.S. films made it to theaters from 2004 through 2007. But because of the amount of smoking in their films and the size of the box office, their movies delivered more than one-third of all tobacco impressions during those years.

The effect of these impressions on adolescents is directly dose-related, so we estimate that these directors’ films recruited some half a million teen smokers over the past four years, in the U.S. alone. Of those new young smokers, 170,000 will ultimately die from tobacco-related disease. Of the 86 films listed for these directors, only three are smokefree. Fourteen of these films display actual tobacco brands.

Good news? Table 2 lists 21 directors with more than one film released in the last four years — all smokefree. (From 1999 to 2003, no director with multiple releases was 100% smokefree.) In all, nearly a third of directors (201 of 615) have completed a smokefree production since 2004; one-quarter (169 of 615) directed no tobacco scenes in any film.

But 73 percent of all directors did feature tobacco in their films since 2004. And more than half of their films with smoking were rated for kids. Is that cigarette really necessary? Ask any director in care of the Director’s Guild of America.

How we selected directors in Table 1:

This analysis is based mainly on “tobacco impressions.” One tobacco impression is one member of the audience seeing tobacco use or other tobacco promotion, once, in a film in a theater. (Estimated impressions do not include seeing the movie on DVD or television. For more details on how we obtained these estimates, click here.)

To be listed, a director must have delivered:

• More than 100 million estimated tobacco impressions 2004-2007

And have at least one of the following characteristics:

• One or more youth-rated movies with smoking
• Brand display

If a director made at least two youth-rated films during the survey period and all included smoking, he or she was added to the list, even if tobacco impressions were fewer than 100 million.

List updated September 2008.