The Atlantic Monthly | November 2004
Letters to the Editor

Eric Alterman's political star map (“The Hollywood Campaign, September Atlantic) missed a painful, long-enduring irony. Since 1990, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the motion-picture community has given $40.4 million to the Democrats in federal races, while the tobacco industry has delivered $39.4 million to the Republicans.

In other words, all the liberal largesse Alterman describes has been canceled out, almost dollar for dollar, by some of America's most detested and dangerous companies.

But is that any way for Big Tobacco to thank its most valuable marketing partner? Not only are Hollywood's PG-13 and R-rated movies blowing more tobacco smoke than films have at any other time since 1950, but smoking scenes are responsible for recruiting half of all new adolescent smokers in the United States each year—390,000 kids, worth $3.2 billion in lifetime revenue to the tobacco companies.

Solid scientific evidence of catastrophic harm has attracted the keen attention of more than half of America's state attorneys general and compelled America's major health associations to call for an R rating on movies with tobacco imagery.

Hollywood's high-powered donors should do more than write checks. They should make sure that the motion pictures they produce and distribute don't pump up a notorious industry that is targeting their favorite candidates for defeat.

Jonathan Polansky
Fairfax, Calif.