Look what today’s cancel culture got now! HBO Max is sanitizing movie posters of cigarette/cigar smoking which gets knocked by film fans on social media and makes for some bizarre-looking images.
“Angry movie fans took to Twitter to reveal the missing smokes on HBO Max’s feeds, which appeared to be scrubbed from iconic movie posters for Robert Altman’s ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ as well as ‘The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,’” writes Alexandra Steigrad in the New York Post newspaper. “In the photoshopped posters, stars Warren Beatty and Paul Newman no longer hold cigarettes between their fingers but instead appear to be posing — bizarrely — with digits raised, staring off into the distance.”
“A dive into HBO Max’s A–Z directory reveals that ‘McCabe’ and ‘Bean’ indeed aren’t puffing anymore,” writes Eric Vilas-Boas in Vulture. “Neither is Michelle Reis’s character in the promo still for Wong Kar-wai’s 1995 ‘Fallen Angels.’ Nor Kirk Douglas’s character in the poster for ‘There Was a Crooked Man.’”
No word on why, though anti-smoking groups have been pressuring Hollywood for decades to eliminate characters smoking in contemporary movies or editing out of older films. One pressure tactic employed by critics is demanding films with audience classifications for general audiences to get more restrictive classifications (like R-rating that is in-line with the legal age for smoking). More restrictive classifications would almost certainly reduce movie circulation and reduce a film’s income.
In 2010, the anti-smoking groups raised a ruckus about puffing in “Avatar,” which retained a PG-13 classification despite the call for more audience restriction. “In period films where use of tobacco products is authentic history, smoking does not necessarily trigger a restrictive rating,” says book “Marketing to Moviegoers: Third Edition” of audience classification, “but can in other instances where the smoking is deemed gratuitous.”
Regarding HBO Max sanitizing, “Although it is hard to say if the censored cigarettes are part of a larger health-related push, there are still a slew of posters on the service that do include smoking and have been untouched so far,” says the New York Post article. “They include ‘The Nitwits,’ ‘The Two Jakes,’ ‘The Last Detail,’ ‘The Man who Knew Too Much,’ and ‘The Many Saints of Newark,’ among others.”
“There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason for the edits apart from maybe the relative size or placement of the cigarette on the poster,” adds the Vulture story.
Says one Tweet from a movie fan, “They can’t leave anything alone. … STOP erasing history just because YOU don’t like it.”
What’s going on? Technology makes touching up history easy, and there’s cultural and regulatory pressure to erase elements of the past to conform to today’s morality.
HBO has struggled with presenting past filmed entertainment that is criticized today. In recent years, HBO yanked such chestnuts as “Gone With the Wind” and “Looney Tunes” cartoons, restoring them with text warnings of controversial content or with edits.
Warnings of racial stereotypes now accompany “Gone With the Wind,” and there were even calls to permanently shelve what is one of cinema’s greatest films of all time, though that didn’t happen.
Instead, HBO and corporate sibling restored the movie with a college professor providing recorded context saying, “Watching ‘Gone With the Wind’ can be uncomfortable, even painful. Still, it’s important that classic Hollywood films are available to us in their original form for viewing and discussion.”
Meanwhile, certain elements of “Looney Tunes” get tweaked or cut; scenes of klutzy character Elmer Fudd with a hunting rifle were reportedly erased amid the outcry of real-life shootings in modern society.
Hollywood is fraught with an array of taboos and pressure to self-censor. These include gun violence that is none-the-less pervasive in entertainment, sexualizing youth, religious depictions that offend, unflattering representation of certain demographic groups and glorifying anti-social behavior such as drug use. Overseas, the list of hazards is even longer such as authorities in China, which is a funder of Hollywood films, objecting to suggestions of Taiwan self-rule.
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