Whether they work inside studios, have multi-picture deals with studios or shop their projects around, producers put together the package to make a film — often with financing from investors whose names are not public. Then they keep an eye on the bottom line.

If producers think that tobacco images will make a film cost more or earn less, they will discourage them. Sex, menace, spectacle, a strong story, and stars all sell tickets. Smoking does not.

The 49 producers listed below in Table 1 — about 4 percent of all producers active since 2004 — are responsible for fully one-third of all recent movies with smoking. More than half of their smoking films were youth-rated.

Ask these successful producers to keep smoking out of their future youth-rated films…to stop displaying brands…and to certify that nobody connected to their future productions accepts any consideration to put smoking on screen.

Only one out of a hundred producers of multiple films since 2004 (listed in Table 2) has a 100% smokefree record. One-third of recent films have been smokefree (230 out of 680), but most producers involved in these films also packaged films with smoklng. Here are the dozen producers with more than one film released since 2004 whose films are all smokefree.

A note on the 0-5 tobacco content scale

Notice that Table 1 shows the amount of smoking in each movie, on a 0-5 scale. For example, an R-rated movie scoring 5 on this scale has an average 37.5 tobacco incidents, about one incident every three minutes. Movies with less smoking — scored 1-2 — may seem less important. But consider:

• Exposure is cumulative; every dose raises a teen’s risk of smoking.

• Movies scoring 1-2 on the scale of tobacco content account for 40 percent of all estimated tobacco impressions delivered to theater audiences (8.7 billion of 21.5 billion impressions, 2004-7). A few tobacco incidents in a youth-rated film shown on two thousand screens do more harm than a smoke-fllled R-rated movie reaching a small, niche audience.

• And think about it: if smoking is so fleeting in a film, why is it there at all? If the two-thirds of recent U.S. films that featured relatively little smoking instead had included none, hundreds of thousands of adolescents worldwide would be better off. Producers make decisions. They can make this one.