Hollywood Trade Mags Censor Anti-Smoking Ads

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"If there's anywhere anyone can advertise about anything, it's Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. ... But there's one ad neither of the Hollywood trades will run--the latest broadside from Smoke Free Movies, a health advocacy group that's been at the forefront of a no-holds-barred campaign against the proliferation of cigarette smoking in movies," writes Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times. The Smoke Free Movies campaign, led by UC San Francisco School of Medicine professor Stanton Glantz, places advertisements decrying Hollywood's glamorization of smoking and asks that movies with smoking be rated R. Their latest ad attacks Miramax's "In the Bedroom" for "gratuitously promoting Marlboro brand cigarettes." Glantz told the LA Times that Variety didn't have a problem with the ad until an ABC reporter called Miramax for comment. "'The next day Variety called and said they wouldn't run the ad,' says Glantz. 'It's so obvious--I have no doubt Miramax demanded that they pull the ads. People say that when we criticize smoking in movies that we're interfering with free speech, but then Miramax turns around and uses its economic muscle to basically shut me up,'" Goldstein writes.