A reminder (or a first notice, for those of you who have been enjoying the summer and not paying close attention to upcoming TV shows ) — on Thursday night, AMC (American Movie Classics) debuts its first original series, about the New York ad agency business in the 1960s. And what makes this interesting, is that the creator of the show (one of the men behind the Sopranos) insisted that everything be accurate – including the permanent haze of smoke that hangs over every one of the preview scenes and the cigarette that seems to be between the fingers or lips of just about every character.
We can’t promise that this will be one of the best smoking shows in recent history – but everything sure points to it

As we’ve reported before, there has been immense pressure on Hollywood to automatically assign “R” ratings to movies if they contain any smoking in them at all. (Guess they’d have to slap “R” ratings on bus stops and benches outside shopping malls too – with cops enforcing a perimeter to make sure that no one under 17 passed by without their parents.)
At any rate, Hollywood has apparently given in, but not ALL the way.
What we find more offensive than the action itself, is the declaration by the MPAA chairman that “Clearly, smoking is increasingly an unacceptable behavior in our society” – as if it’s his, or any other individual’s role to decide what is an unacceptable behavior in society (hello there, Stanton Glantz, Henry Waxman and Rob Reiner).
But we did take a little solace in one statement that the MPAA chairman made – which flies directly in the face of the anti-smoking zealots who just spew the falsehood that there’s more smoking in film than ever before – propaganda that those of us who look for smoking in movies know to be untrue.
“From July 2004-July 2006, the percentage of films that included “even a fleeting glimpse of smoking” dropped from 60% to 52%.”
Needless to say, the zealots are happy to take the increased censorship and run (at least for now), with no compulsion to correct their claims of increased smoking in film.
What a shock.