WASHINGTON -- Whether an actor lights up on the silver screen is a decision best left with the filmmaker, MPAA chief Jack Valenti told a Senate panel investigating the impact smoking has on minors Tuesday.

"If smoking by some actors is essential to the time and place of the story, and is indispensable to quickly identify the actor's demeanor and character to advance the narrative, [then] no one ought to intervene in a director's design for telling his story the way he chooses to tell it," Valenti told members of the Senate Commerce Committee, according to an advance copy of his testimony.

Cigarette smoking is sometimes integral to portraying real life on film in a particular period of history such as World War II, when cigarettes were distributed by the military in ration kits, he explained.

Smoking was necessary to accurately portray characters in such movies as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List."

"We ought not judge actions in one age by the standards of another age, which is also why it's difficult to restrain storytelling today when the movie is set in a different time," he said.

Valenti dismissed allegations that tobacco companies were paying movie makers for "product placement" shots of their brands of smokes, saying he was "unable to discover any evidence today of paid product placement of cigarette brands by the tobacco companies."

The Master Tobacco Settlement agreement the tobacco companies entered into with the State Attorneys General clearly prohibits such business arrangements, he said. In addition, Valenti pointed out that the big tobacco companies also wrote to the Chief Executive Officers of the MPAA member companies to urge the motion picture industry to "voluntarily refrain from portraying or referring to cigarette brands or brand imagery in any movies."