Faculty

Faculty of Information and Media Studies

Supervisor Name

Dr. Daniel Robinson

Keywords

Smoking Cessation, Anti-Smoking, Norman Lear, Cold Turkey, Tobacco Industry, Cigarettes, Film Analysis, Dick Van Dyke

Description

Popular culture can influence how people act in real life. The film Cold Turkey, directed by Norman Lear, provides an example of how people can take inspiration from a film's plot and recreate it to an extent. The people of Greenfield, Iowa, where Cold Turkey was filmed, decided to quit smoking for 30 days, similar to the movie's events. As a result, tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris International, became interested in how and why these people quit smoking for a prolonged period.

My project aimed to compile documents, interviews, and other content about Cold Turkey, Norman Lear, and the film's actors. I was also responsible for finding and organizing relevant documents from the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive hosted by the University of California, San Francisco Library.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dr. Daniel Robinson, Western's USRI program, and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Document Type

Poster

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Cold Turkey: A Mass Smoking Cessation Event Induced by a Film

Popular culture can influence how people act in real life. The film Cold Turkey, directed by Norman Lear, provides an example of how people can take inspiration from a film's plot and recreate it to an extent. The people of Greenfield, Iowa, where Cold Turkey was filmed, decided to quit smoking for 30 days, similar to the movie's events. As a result, tobacco companies, such as Philip Morris International, became interested in how and why these people quit smoking for a prolonged period.

My project aimed to compile documents, interviews, and other content about Cold Turkey, Norman Lear, and the film's actors. I was also responsible for finding and organizing relevant documents from the Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive hosted by the University of California, San Francisco Library.

 

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