Friday,
April 27, 2007
Obit: Jack Valenti, 85; Johnson Confidant,
MPAA Head; No Defender of Italian Americans
The
ANNOTICO Report
While
I honor Valenti as a Great Italian American, I bemoan the fact that he above ALL
was in the BEST position of ANYONE to be able to steer The
Movie and Television Industry away from the Flood of Negative
Italian Portrayals. For this I weep!
While
the NIAF takes great pride in Valenti as a founding member, and his work to
preserve the heritage of Italian Americans, it cites NO Specifics, and makes NO
MENTION of ANY efforts of Valenti to protect the Italian American image
from the bigotry running rampant on the big and small screens.
For
Four DECADES he was HEAD of the Organization of All
Major Motion Picture and TV Producers!!!!! It is incalculable what his
persuasive style could have done for the Italian Community. Instead,
he ran the Machine that ran us down!!!! For him, I shed no Tears!
Jack
Valenti, the grandson of Sicilian immigrants and son of a tax clerk, was born
Sept. 5, 1921 in
Lacking
the money to attend college, Valenti worked as an $11-a-week movie theater
usher his only entertainment
experience before going to work for the MPAA. While employed by an oil company,
he attended night classes at the
At age 20, Valenti enlisted in the Army Air Forces after being turned down by
the Navy because of a heart murmur. Flying 51 missions, he won the
Distinguished Flying Cross. He received his MBA from
Valenti
was one of just a few promising Texans recruited to become a member of a
close cadre of Lyndon Johnson, then the U.S. Senate's majority leader, and
later became President Johnson's companion, troubleshooter and trusted
confidant.
Valenti
by then, had caught the eye of the leaders of the Motion Picture Assn. of
America (MPPAA) who recognized in him a acute adroitness that allowed him to
not only move effortlessly between Hollywood and
Washington while trying to bridge two cultures that were often at odds, but
despite being a loyal Democrat, he skillfully worked both sides of the aisles.
Valenti,
is best known as
Valenti's death comes on the eve of
the anticipated release of his memoirs Titled "This Time, This Place: My
Life in War, the White House, and
By
James Bates
Times Staff Writer
April 27, 2007
Jack Valenti, the urbane Washington lobbyist who served as Hollywood's public
face for nearly four decades and was best known for creating the film ratings
system, died Thursday afternoon, according to Warren Cowan, his longtime
friend. He was 85.
Valenti had been in ill health since suffering a stroke in March. He was
treated for several weeks at
For 38 years until retiring in 2004, Valenti headed the Motion Picture Assn. of
America, guiding the trade organization from a clubby group of movie studios
led by autocratic moguls into a collection of global media conglomerates
involved in television, the Internet and an array of other media businesses.
To the moviegoing public, however, Valenti's legacy will always be the ratings system he
fathered in 1968, which now labels movie s G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17. Valenti
defended it for years against attacks by critics. Today, it remains largely
intact as the self-policing vehicle he envisioned.
"It's the end of an era," said industry veteran Sherry Lansing,
former Paramount Pictures chairwoman. "He was one of the greatest leaders
our industry ever had. He was one of those unique individuals who could build
consensus."
Former Warner Bros. Chairman Bob Daly said Valenti's
passing represented "a sad day."
"He was friends with everybody in the industry, and even though he might
not agree with you, you could talk to Jack and he understood your point,"
Daly said.
Valenti's death comes on the eve of the anticipated
release of his memoirs chronicling a life that included piloting a B-25 in
World War II, serving as one of President Lyndon Johnson's closest confidants
and shaping nearly every issue faced by today's entertainment industry. Titled
"This Time, This Place: My Life in War, t he White House, and
In his role as entertainment industry lobbyist, Valenti moved effortlessly
between
With his silver mane, custom-tailored shirts and suits, and polished cowboy
boots, Valenti was one of the most recognizable figures in the nation's
capital. Despite being a loyal Democrat, he skillfully worked both sides of the
aisles, possessing one of the town's best Rolodexes. Along the way, he became
nearly as much a celebrity as the stars he befriended, addressing the worldwide
Academy Awards TV audience each year.
In public, his Texas-accented eloquence was reminiscent of a Southern preacher.
In fretting over the rising costs of making and marketing
films, Valenti once said: "As the American movie rides an ascending curve
throughout the known world, it is being pursued with malignant fidelity by
total costs. It is a terrible confluence of hope and terror which
confronts every studio, every producer, every
production company."
The grandson of Sicilian immigrants and son of a tax clerk, Valenti was born Sept. 5, 1921 in
Lacking the money to attend college, Valenti worked as an $11-a-week movie
theater usher his only
entertainment experience before going to work for the MPAA. While employed by
an oil company, he attended night classes at the
At age 20, Valenti enlisted in the Army Air Forces after being turned down by
the Navy because of a heart murmur. Flying 51 missions, he won the
Distinguished Flying Cross. He received his MBA from
He was among a dozen young men and women invited to a recep
tion at a
Valenti was in awe the moment he met his future mentor. Recalling that day
during a Caltech appearance in 2003, Valenti said: "I was fascinated the
way I'm fascinated by a hooded cobra or a silken panther on a hillside ready to
spring. It was an animal magnetism I never got over."
After Johnson was selected as John F. Kennedy's running mate in 1960, Valenti
worked on the ticket's media campaign in
Valenti was also smitten by Johnson secretary Mary Margaret Wiley. After
spotting her coming off an airplane with Johnson in
When the couple married in 1962, Wiley's father was ill, so J ohnson gave the bride away. The couple had three children.
Valenti continued to handle assignments for Johnson, and, in November 1963, the
vice president asked him to help in a politically sensitive campaign visit that
President Kennedy planned to make to
On Nov. 22, Valenti was riding six cars behind the presidential limousine as it
snaked through the streets of
"Suddenly the slow-moving motorcade became the Indianapolis
Speedway," he recalled in a Times piece published on an anniversary of the
Kennedy assassination. "The car in front drag-raced from
10 mph to over 60. None of us had any idea of what happened."
After Kennedy died, Johnson asked Valenti to join him on Air Force One flying
back to
"That act of inscrutable fate changed my life," Valenti said.
Valenti helped write the words Johnson uttered when he addressed the American
people for the first time as president, and bunked at the White House until his
family arrived from
Valenti effectively became Johnson's companion, troubleshooter and trusted
confidant. Throughout his life Valenti was a loyal defender of Johnson, even as
his presidency was crumbling because of the Vietnam War. He compared Johnson to
the Greek mythological hero Achilles, seeing him as a talented leader whose
flaws brought him down.
In a 1965 speech to the Advertising Federation of America, Valenti uttered a
sentence that would hang around his neck like an albatross: "I sleep each
night a little better, a little more confidently, because Lyndon Johnson is my
president."
Later, when he complained to Johnson that he couldn't escape the quote, Johnson
replied: "I don't know what you're fretting about, Jack. Do you know how
few presidential
Valenti regarded his time with Johnson in Washington as the
"summertime" of his life the only period when he was doing
something that really "counted," he said in his 1976 book about
Johnson, "A Very Human President."
In 1966, two
Valenti left in April, saying he could not turn down the $175,000-a-year post.
The new position paid more than six times his $28,000 White House salary. By
the time he left the MPAA he was one of the highest paid lobbyists in
Two years after taking over the MPAA, Valenti and association counsel Louis Nizer devised the ratings system so they could scrap the
industry's Hays Code, which for decades placed tight restrictions on movie
language and sexual content. The code had such rules as no open-mouth kissing
and a requirement that a man and a woman in bed each have one foot on the
floor.
"If you wanted to be affectionate, you had to be Nadia Comaneci the
gymnast," Valenti later recalled.
One of his first dealings with the code after being hired by the MPAA was to
negotiate what language could be used in Mike Nichols' film version of Edward
Albee's play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Valenti would not
permit the use of some crude language to desc ribe sex, although he approved use
of the phrase "hump the hostess." But the almost comical exercise in
discretion made it more obvious that enforcement of the code had become
virtually impossible.
At the time,
Valenti became immersed in the industry's business issues as well. He
championed open markets for
He did misjudge the impact of home video on the business, initially seeing it
as such a threat that it was "to the American film producer and the
American public what the Boston Strangler is to the American woman at home
alone." Instead, home video became a gold mine for studios.
In the early 1990s, Valenti threatened to resign so he could publicly denounce
Oliver Stone's "JFK," which suggested that Johnson was involved in a
conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Daly, the head of Warner Bros., talked him
out of it. Valenti agreed to wait until after the Oscar ballots for 1991 were
in, then issued a blistering seven-page statement in which he called the film a
"propaganda masterpiece and equally a hoax."
Nonetheless, Valenti defended Stone's right to make the film.
"I do not consider myself anointed by God to have these immaculate visions
of how a movie ought to be made or how a movie ought to be told," he said.
With the energy of an executive decades younger,
Valenti traveled relentlessly until his retirement. He obtained his taekwondo black belt in 1999, at the age of 78.
To ward the end, some executives started to question whether Valenti's erudite,
But Valenti remained one of
Throughout, his infectious "Valenti-isms" endeared him to politicians
and reporters. In a single conversation he might quote Churchill, Benjamin
Disraeli and the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. After a trying week politically,
he once told a Times reporter: "You gird your loins. You get o ut on the battlefield, your broadsword flashing."
Valenti expressed some frustrations with the changing nature of the job. After
a series of mergers and takeovers, studios had become slices of diversified
entities that changed the landscape of
In addition, it was Valenti who often took the bullet when it came to
criticisms of
"I do get frustrated; in fact, I do get depressed from time to time. But
if I just hunker down as LBJ used
to say like a jackass in a
hailstorm and wait until the storm passes, it's going to be all right," he
said. "If this were an easy job, you could probably get someone fresh out
of
Industry veteran Sidney Sheinberg, former president of Universal Pictures'
longtime corporate parent, MCA Inc., marveled at how Valenti operated as head
of the MPAA.
"He had an impossible job. And the impossible part wasn't dealing with the
exhibitors [theater owners] or foreign countries, but people who were his
nominal bosses," said Sheinberg, referring to the heads of all the motion
picture studios. "He had to reconcile their opinions and conflicting
interests, and it requires the utmost statesmanship."
In 2004, Valenti finally gave up his post, succeeded by former Agriculture
Secretary Dan Glickman. Until the stroke, Valenti
remained active, working on world health issues and consulting the industry on
how to educate parents to block objectionable TV shows.
In addition to his wife of 45 years, he is survived by their three children,
Courtenay, John and Alexandra; his sister, Lorraine Valenti Dinerstein;
and two grandchildren .
Funeral services will be private.
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed and are Fully Archived
at:
Italia
The
ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed at
Italia
Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Blogspot: http://annoticoreport.blogspot.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net