Thank You For Smoking (2006)

When asked to view Thank You For Smoking, the idea was one of looking toward legal jargon and the way in which the court cases from decades past had led to the developments in the movie. The movie starts off with the main character being the representative for big tobacco on a talk show where he is confronted with a sick child who had lost his hair to cancer due to smoking. There were no legal ramifications to this segment of the movie, though the main issue presented was that there was a senator from Vermont that was doing his best to add warning labels to cigarette boxes which would be the primary method of keeping people uninterested from cigarettes and act as a deterrent. This would be a large setback for big tobacco so the main character is tasked with challenging this new law. The law primarily uses the reasoning of preventing teen smoking which was illegal due to the age to smoke at the time being set at 18 years old before the 2020 increase to 21 years old. This was the main reasoning and thus had to be challenged. However, the lobbyist main character has to find a way in which this would look like an infraction of the freedom of choice.

While the First Amendment protects speech it does not necessarily pertain to freedom of choices so the main character has to be patient and use the freedoms he does have under the First Amendment to prevent this measure from happening. Now there are several ways in which this would be legal for him, representing a company, to speak out against such legal action. Corporate Personhood, established in 1886, allows for this main character to have all the freedoms and rights of the First Amendment while representing the company as corporate entities are seen as people in the eyes of the First Amendment. He uses this to speak about the issues with this measure and also uses his First Amendment right to criticize the government to state that such a measure was foolish.

Since his right to speech protects this measure the senator cannot shut him down, nor prevent him from making roundabout statements about his own motives. This allows him to bring the individual senator into question and thus he is able to turn the situation around by presenting the situation as government overreach and thus would be illegal. He is also tasked with getting cigarettes into the hands of the media by implementing them into movies and used by heroes and not shady people with bad reputations. This goes well enough until a reporter uses her own body and seduces him into telling her his whole plan while he was assuming it was off the record.

When something is "off the record" it is confidential and cannot be revealed by the journalist unless given permission. Since this was not clarified he was able to reveal this and thus she was no longer trusted and lost her position as a journalist. The damage this caused was severe enough to cause him to be distanced by the company until he decides to attend the press conference over the labels that were to be added to cigarette boxes. He had also been tasked to bribe a former cigarette advertiser into not speaking out, though his dealings with the journalist had already compromised any secrecy he may have had. When all of this comes to light he is forced to embrace it and legally can do so since he does have a right to the freedom of speech.

He does attend the press conference and ends up getting a win for his company as he is able to use the idea of freedom of choice to defend the cigarette industry and thus is able to gain prestige for turning around a problematic situation. The movie situation also fell through, though he opts out of the tobacco industry just in time to avoid the subsequent fall of it a few months after this event.