The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced last year that it was seeking advice on smoking from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and now the Harvard recommendations are in: remove all smoking from films that are accessible to children and youth.

Slate reported April 6 that MPAA head Dan Glickman turned to HSPH last October when the industry was under fire for portrayals of smoking in PG-13 movies, with advocates said contributed to youth smoking. The group Smoke Free Movies called for an automatic "R" rating for films that show characters smoking unless the negative consequences also are detailed or the movie portrays a historic figure known for smoking.

"We're suggesting that they take smoking out of youth accessible films: G, PG and PG-13, which make up 85 percent of all movies," said Barry Bloom, dean of HSPH.

Now, the challenge is for MPAA to get the movie studios to go along with some sort of policy change; most reportedly oppose an automatic R rating for smoking. "We either have to come up with a policy or a policy is going to be shoved down our throats," one studio executive said, referring to pressure from state attorneys general around the issue.

"There's nothing you could do that would have so big an effect on public health so fast" as an automatic R for smoking, said Stanford Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. Glantz, a critic of the tobacco industry, noted that MPAA already slaps an automatic R on movies that include even a single utterance of the "F" word in a sexual context.