The Smoking Gun?

A research team led by Dr. James D. Sargent, a pediatrician at Dartmouth-Hitchock Medical Center, reports that kids are easily influenced by smoking in movies. His team watched 601 movies and ranked them by the number of smoking scenes they featured. Then Sargent's group surveyed 5,000 middle school students. Nearly a third of the adolescents who had seen the movies with the most smoking scenes had tried cigarettes, compared to only 5 percent of those who had seen the movies with the least amount of smoking. The five smokiest films, according to Sargent:

Movie # of Smoking Scenes JFK 149 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 89 Summer of Sam 70 Donnie Brasco 68 Boogie Nights 58