Secret collaborations between major tobacco companies and Hollywood in the late 1920s led to a massive promotion of smoking whose powerful impact is still lingering today, researchers have recently revealed.

Film legends such as Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Bob Hope and Henry Fonda made thousands of dollars by striking covert deals to appear on-screen smoking a certain brand of cigarretes. Although serious money was invested in actors alone, the analysis shows that major studios and tobacco companies gained far greater profit.

"The links between Hollywood and tobacco go back to the beginning of talking pictures,” Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco has stated. "It was a way to thoroughly embed tobacco use in the social fabric,” he added.

Glantz and colleague Kristin Lum came into the possession of 246 documents including cigarette endorsement contracts (made public as part of the tobacco industry legal settlement with state governments) and contemporary news reports, which unveiled the secret deals between Hollywood golden age stars and tobacco companies.

Famous brands such as Lucky Strike offered to promote movies in adverts worth millions of dollars if the stars agreed to smoke on the big screen. For example, between 1937-1938 alone, American Tobacco paid stars $3.2millions in today’s values to promote a single brand, the aforementioned brand.

The study sheds light on the fact that classic films like „Casablanca” and „Now, Voyager,” feature persistent smoking scenes, thus contributing to the perpetuation of public tolerance of on-screen smoking, the researchers said.

”The studio system used tobacco advertising to sell its movies (while) the tobacco industry used Hollywood to sell its brands and reassure a worried public that smoking was not harmful,” professor Robert Jackler concluded, leaving no room for interpretation of the fact that on-screen smoking was a huge and highly profitable ad campaign for major tobacco companies.