Cigarettes At The Cinema: The Forgotten Moviegoing Ritual
Exploring cinephilia history, 1920s arthouse theatres, silent films, talkies, tobacco, and modern smoking-allowed screenings
Do you or a loved one have memories of smoking inside a movie theater?
Smoking at the cinema is often misremembered as a free-for-all, unregulated experience. A quick Google Search yields Quora and Reddit users crying such lamentations as, “you could smoke in theaters until the 90's!” or “people smoked in theaters regularly. Live free or die!”
Recently, I stumbled across a journal article that paints a different picture. As film professor and author Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece shares in her piece “Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater,” while smoking inside a theater’s walls may have been accepted, there have always been regulations surrounding when and where one can smoke at the movies.
In 2025, as our collective memories of smoking in public are getting hazy, it might be worth examining why many believe smoking to be such an integral part to the moviegoing experience — the cinephile’s in particular.
Today, I’ve rounded up some fresh trivia on all things smoking at the cinema: We’ll be chatting about how the so-called intelligentsia (read: last century’s version of Letterboxd users) were arguably duped by profit-hungry theaters handing out free cigarettes. We’ll also take a look at the history of smoking at the cinema, Szczepaniak-Gillece’s singular research, and where our culture’s complex relationship with smoking substances at film screenings is headed next. Shall we?
Puffing at the Pictures: The Haze of Early Cinema Construction
In the early days of cinema, as moviegoing and exhibition became a flourishing enterprise, American exhibitors struggled to identify their target audience — in part because their audience was, well, everyone.
In some ways, film was associated with circus and vaudeville audiences —anecdotally, leaning more working class — with moving images first appearing in the form of mutoscopes and kinetoscopes at penny arcades, parlors, stores, traveling shows and fairs of the early 20th century.
Yet the 1910s and 1920s brought stylish nickelodeons, then grandiose movie palaces into metropolitan areas the United States, with architectural constructions mimicking those of opera houses, live theaters, and royal palaces, utilizing what author Maggie Valentine categorizes as “iconography of wealth,” including chandeliers, lounges, ornate fountains, and — you guessed it — smoking lounges.
At the center of this marketing quandary was the cigarette. Cinema’s infancy coincided almost directly with the rise of cigarettes’ popularity, with smoking amongst women becoming more culturally acceptable, and cigarettes becoming far more accessible for all walks of (American) life. As the years went on, smoking became less and less associated with any particular class or gender. Just like cinema, cigarettes were meant for a broad audience, anyone and everyone of age.
The cinephile portion of this broad audience believed — in this author’s view — that a film is meant to be relished, ravished, reverized, just as the bohemian believed a cigarette is meant to be indulged. Conversely, the uncurious consumer believes both a film and a cigarette are simple vehicles for a quick act of escapism, release and relief, nothing more. Amidst this tension and the rise of moving pictures, the question arose: Should smoking be permitted inside the cinema?
Accounts of Smoking at Early 20th Century Movie Theaters
According to Dr. Alan Blum in an interview with Marquee, “the early photoplay houses permitted smoking in some sections. Larger theaters permitted smoking in the balcony only.”
More strikingly, Blum notes the most impressive early cinemas offered opulent smoking lounges with upholstered furniture and fireplaces. “Lobby concession stands sold cigarettes,” Blum continues, “as did tobacco shops built into the arcades leading into some movie palaces such as the Strand in New York.”
In Portland Oregon’s Bob White Theatre, accounts in Exhibitor’s Trade Review circa 1924 describe an innovative “plate glass men’s smoking room to the left of the projecting room,” allowing the main theater to stay smoke-free whilst smokers could still view the action on screen.
Dr. Blum and the University of Alabama Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society even uncovered a page from the United States Tobacco Journal circa 1915, summarizing the relationship between tobacco and cinema in this era, noting the then-popular theater chain Loew permitted smoking inside the theater, while other chains provided smoking rooms in the lobby.
Before tobacco's health detriments were known, cigarette smoking in the cinema was limited chiefly as a safety precaution: Buildings catch on fire, especially buildings with rooms full of flammable 35mm nitrate film.
To combat fire risks, the smoking lounges of early movie theaters featured metal materials used in tables, ashtrays, and even chairs.
Szczepaniak-Gillece notes in the article “Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater,” “theater smoking lounges were often outfitted with asbestos cement mixtures” or fire-resistant paneling. The metal tables? They were often made with chromium tops treated to “resist burns.”
The chrome look may have fit the art deco and later mid-century modern styles of the day, adding the glamour of the cinema going experience, but it also served to ensure that 35mm film stock didn’t catch any stray cigarette embers.
Tobacco & “The Talkies”: A Recipe for Coughing
At the cinema, the silent film era was far from silent. In addition to live pianos, the occasional narration and the sporadic sound effects accompanying pre-talkie screenings, the audience was what Jared Gardner calls “boisterous.” Spectators would vocally react to the on-screen action and even chat with one another — perhaps passing a cigarette to their friends.
When it comes to live theater, as Alva Noë writes in NPR, “the audience too is performing, and that the audience too is on display,” noting the audience is uncomfortable and under pressure not to cough, making coughing all the more likely.
This feeling of being “on display” may well have translated to the talkies. After all, early cinema audiences were said to have run from on screen trains or waves. It would stand to reason that audiences’ instinctual reactions to moving pictures with sound and dialogue would be, at least subconsciously, to act as if the on-screen performers were truly in the room, subsequently triggering a scratchy throat.
While there isn’t much hard evidence to support this hypothesis, we do have one 1928 column, albeit one with a comedic slant, which notes:
“[T]he spoken words [of the talkies] start a sympathetic tingle in the throats of all those in the audience with a yen for the footlights.
As the pill-purveyor has it, they like to think of themselves as being in the place of the stars, and they cough to relieve the itch on the epiglottis…
If the coughers increase, the smart houses will have a keg of cough-drops at the door instead of coffee and cigarettes.”
That’s right — coffee and cigarettes were offered, often gratis, in cinema lobbies across the US. Well, at least, a certain kind of cinema…
The Smoky Scene of the “Little Theatre” Movement
As moviegoing became a popular pastime permeating every subculture, the cultural pendulum began to swing, and the late 1920s saw the rise of what was dubbed “little theatres” — a group of early cinemas that would be classified as “arthouse” today.
These little theatres, I’ve learned through the examples herein, were independent cinemas exhibiting mostly foreign films, or “revivals” of older films, often targeting intellectual and bohemian subcultures in their marketing efforts.
In the late 1920s, one of these said theaters was the Little Carnegie Playhouse (later dubbed the Little Carnegie Theatre), located in midtown, New York City. Paper programs accompanying the theatre’s American premiere of the 1928 film The Constant Nymph advertise “Yuban Coffee and Marlboro Cigarettes served gratis in the lounge,” along with credits to artworks exhibited in the lobby.
Another advertisement for the theater in The New Yorker poses an attractive offer: “Ping-pong tables, a bridge room, a dance floor and free coffee and cigarettes without having to see or hear a movie.”
In 1930, Douglas Fox and George Schutz explored the Cinema Art Guild theatre in Chicago, noting at an interlude, an on-screen trailer invites those present to “a stroll through the lounges, to read a bit or have a cigarette and a cup of coffee,” perhaps stopping to enjoy the lobby art exhibitions over a tobacco-filled inhale before the second half of the film begins.
Avant-Garde & Ashtrays: Early Criticism of Arthouse Cinema
Those who keep up with modern-day industry trades may be interested to learn Variety pegged these “little theatres” as nothing more than cheap imitators looking for an easy buck.
“Making a direct play for intellectual patronage,” Variety writes in October of 1927, “the theatres play foreign pictures and outstanding revivals, in other words, cheap rentals.”
“Customers seeking something better than the average American film patronized the art theatres and found the foreign producers also guilty of pictures not so smart.” - “‘Art’ Little Theatres,” Variety, October 19, 1927, pg 27.
The Exhibitors Herald-World, too, noted, these foreign pictures could be “bought cheaply” in order to “cater to the so-called intelligentsia who will see anything if you tell them it’s highbrow.” (When I tell you my jaw hit the floor…)
Little theatre exhibitor Michael Mindlin appears to have fired back at these critics in a July, 1928 issue of Theatre Magazine, arguing European films were more artistic, intellectual, and exciting, pointing to little theatres’ role in bringing exports like Germany’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) — as well as its championing of boundary-pushing American works like Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924.)
In the end, while some exhibitors may have pulled in profits, even the manager of the Little Picture House, a small New York theater that was supposedly America’s first “cooperative cinema” admitted to Exhibitors Herald-World in 1930, “There’s no money in It, People are getting too wise to fall for the stuff we give them.” (LOL)
Whether the arthouse “little theatres” of the late 1920s were pulling the wool over the eyes of hipsters, bohemians, and intelligentsia at large, or whether their intentions were pure of heart, we may never deduce with finality.
Something we can say with relative confidence: After the country muddled through the Great Depression then World War II, the art of cinematic exhibition hit a midlife, mid-century crisis.
A commercial for Lucky Strike cigarettes, allegedly circa 1955, shows a couple coming out of a movie theater and promptly lighting up a cigarette — indicating that, as of 1955, smoking was becoming a post-cinema, after-you-step-outside activity . “Man that’s smoking enjoyment,” the man in the commercial says, “to come out of a good movie and light up a Lucky.”
No Smoking, Please: The Slow Death of Cigarettes in Cinemas
Of course, we all know the story of tobacco’s downfall: From the 1960s to through the 2000s, more states, cities, municipalities, and workplaces implemented strict non-smoking sections, then smoking bans in public and commercial spaces — including cinemas. Today, the practice of smoking (vaping included) at the movies is largely banned.
In 1957, after one theater in the UK banned smoking just two days a week, the BBC captured some street interviews (below) with potential patrons. Some enjoyed the ban, saying they’d like to enjoy a picture without the coughing cigarettes bring into the theater, while self-proclaimed “heavy smokers” objected to attending the nights when smoking was banned altogether.
The movie theater featured in this BBC clip aptly exemplifies how cinemas were navigating the inevitable tension involved in catering to an entire population — filled with smokers and non-smokers, alike. (At least by this point in history, society appears to have rejected the idea of corralling all of the smokers to hotbox in a glass room.)
In the following Big lighter advertisement, allegedly circa 1980, movie theater patrons are asked to refrain from “flicking their Bic” in the auditorium, and to take their smoking to the “outer lobby.”
Those of us who attend modern independent cinemas (such as Brooklyn’s Nitehawk) are likely to have seen this pre-show no-smoking public service announcement from director John Waters, originally made for the Landmark premiere of his film Pink Flamingos. Though Waters’s duty is to inform audiences smoking is not permitted inside the theater, his actions suggest otherwise.
“How can anyone sit through the length of a film, especially a European film, and not have a cigarette?,” Waters’s asks, smiling, while indulging in a cigarette himself.
Between the twinkle in his eye and the smirk on his face, one wonders if John Waters was familiar with the history of cigarettes and European film exhibition at the “little theatres” of yesteryear.
Smoke-Friendly Theaters: Do They Still Exist?
Those jonesing to inhale some form of smoke may be interested to learn there have been reports of occasional, alleged 420-friendly screenings in states like California and Massachusetts, although many of these screenings appear to happen in outdoor or otherwise limited-scope, well-ventilated settings. (Additionally, with marijuana remaining illegal in the United States federally, one can imagine each of these screenings are a lawyer’s nightmare.)
Comedic actor Danny McBride, a staunch in-cinema dining hater, argues “Weed and movies… go together f***ing perfectly.” McBride, along with his friend and business partner, told GQ they’ve “kicked around” the idea of opening a theater with a dispensary (dubbed “Green Screen,” naturally.)
In a piece credited to an anonymous writer for Harvard Independent, one young, THC-toking movie theater patron writes, “Weed won’t fundamentally change anything about a film or show, it will just allow you to enter its world more thoroughly,” noting weed “is not well-suited for movies that require work on the audience’s part to piece things together.” By this measure, one could foresee a world in which self-proclaimed cinephiles and independent cinema lovers rebel against any 420-friendly screenings, arguing instead for the benefits of a focused, studious audience.
Even so, these rumblings raise questions: The late 1920s brought arthouse theaters playing allegedly cheaply-licensed foreign films with free cigarettes and coffee. Could the late 2020’s bring us 420-friendly theaters on-par with the Alamo Drathouses and Nitehawks of today?
Film Flavor’s Suggestion? If you have even a passing interest in living long enough to see an inevitable film made by the grandchild of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, leave the smoking to history’s footnotes.
Do you have any recollection of smoking in a movie theater — or its lobby? Let Film Flavor readers know, below!
A note: Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece research in her article “Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater” contains the best academic research could find on the subject of cigarettes and smoking inside movie theaters, and consequently served as a guidepost for much of today’s newsletter. Our goal is to introduce interesting trivia to Film Flavor readers and provide accompanying commentary, and we are not at all experts in the history of cigarettes at the cinema. If you are at all interested in this subject, please immediately leave this page and go give Szczepaniak- Gillece’s expert piece a read! (A word to the wise, check your local libraries, you may just have access to JSTOR, free of charge.)
Further Reading Recs + Reference Material:
“Smoke and Mirrors: Cigarettes, Cinephilia, and Reverie in the American Movie Theater” by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, Film History, Vol. 28, No. 3
“Smoking in the Balcony Only: When Movie Stars Sold Cigarettes: A pictorial by Alan Blum, MD” by Holly Berecz, Marquee Magazine, First Quarter 2018, Vol. 50, No. 1
Movies Under the Influence by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
How 1920s Movies Were Advertised by The1920sChannel on Youtube
“Coughing in the Silent Cinema” by Jay Weissberg
“Is Your Favorite Movie Theater Contaminated With Thirdhand Smoke?”, Thirdhand Smoke Resource Center
Media History Digital Library: A free online resource
Film Flavor’s Deep Dish Series, feature our explorations into the history of consumption at the movies
Film Flavor has previously covered the history of movie theater concessions, candy, pizza, drive-in movie theater snacks, cinema pickles, and even answered the question: Why do we eat popcorn at movie theaters? Today, we shared a little bit about the history of smoking at the movies. Next up in this series, you can expect:
Alcohol, Beer, Booze, and Soda at the Movies
Cinema Cafes
Dine-In Movie Theaters
+ More
Until then, stay in your seats! (and stay subscribed!)
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With Gratitude,
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Love this. Super interesting! I was at a cinema in Sarajevo recently where smoke filled the lobby but thankfully not the screening room..