Lawmakers to examine smoking in film

WASHINGTON (Hollywood Reporter) -- Hollywood lobbyists will be busy this week as lawmakers examine smoking on film and legislation that could undo some key portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The hearings, one in the Senate Commerce Committee on Tuesday and one in the House Commerce Committee on Wednesday, make nice legislative bookends for the entertainment industry's current troubles in Washington as one focuses on content and the other on copyright.

The entertainment industry has been under considerable pressure to rein in indecent broadcasts on TV and radio, and now may face the same criticism for depictions of smoking.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nevada, pushed for the hearing after several recent meetings between anti-smoking advocates and entertainment industry executives.

Hollywood's top lobbyist, Jack Valenti, is scheduled to testify along with LeVar Burton, co-chair of the Directors Guild of America's social responsibility task force, Madeline Dalton, associate professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Medical School, and Stan Glantz, professor of medicine at UC San Francisco School of Medicine.

Dalton wrote a recent study claiming that smoking in movies entices young people to pick up the habit. Glantz is one of Hollywood's leading social critics who pushes for R ratings for movies in which the actors light up.

While Motion Picture Assn. of America chief Valenti has worked to get the anti-smoking message out, his trade group says it's a filmmaker's right to have the characters smoke or not.

Flammable issue
After tackling that issue Tuesday, Hollywood takes on a potentially more flammable one as the House Commerce Committee's consumer protection panel examines legislation that could weaken the copyright protections the motion picture and recording industries won in 1998.

The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act would undo the current law's provision that makes it illegal to crack copyright-protection regimes.

The bill would allow people to bypass copyright-protection measures for "fair use" purposes.

The bill also amends the DMCA provisions that prohibit the manufacturing, distribution or sale of technology that enables circumvention of the protection measures and would direct the Federal Trade Commission to require that "copy-protected CDs" be properly labeled.

The motion picture studios contend that once a copyright-protection regime has been compromised, then it has no protection from pirates.

While the bill, written by Reps. Rick Boucher, D-Virginia, and John Doolittle, R-California, has little chance of passage this year, the interest in it shown by Commerce Committee chairman Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, is troubling to the industry.

"We'd rather not have a hearing," one Hollywood executive said. "But the potential of the Boucher bill is that it will gut the DMCA."

A Barton spokesperson said the chairman is interested in developing legislation along the lines put down by Boucher.

"While we haven't signed onto Mr. Boucher's bill, we're looking in that direction," Commerce Committee spokeswoman Samantha Jordan said. "I'm not saying we're going to re-open the DMCA, but it's going to be an issue the committee will be dealing with long term."