No Fade-Out in Sight for Hollywood’s No. 1 Defender

Jack Valenti, the 79-year-old president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, is firmly rooted in another age.

Stately in his custom-made French cuffs, he bolsters his staunch defense of the movie industry by quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the 19th century British statesman Benjamin Disraeli.

His “most loving friend in the business” is Kirk Douglas, whose photo (a still from the 1960 movie “Spartacus”) hangs on the wall of Valenti’s Washington office. And he proudly asserts that, other than his wife of 38 years, Mary Margaret, the person who had the biggest effect on his life was his former boss, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Valenti uses language you don’t hear much anymore. Ask him about the struggles of recent weeks, when the movie industry has been under attack for marketing R-rated movies to young people, and he says, “You gird your loins. You get out on the battlefield, your broadsword flashing.” Ask him about parental responsibility, and he says kids need a moral shield to help them “resist the blandishments of their peers and walk among the mean streets without being caught up in its rancor.”

“I see my job as being the voice and conscience of this industry,” he declares often.

But that voice, which has represented Hollywood in Washington for 34 years, was notably silent during last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearing on the marketing of violent entertainment to young people. As eight movie executives were grilled by Sen. John McCain, Valenti--who had lobbied unsuccessfully to appear with the executives on the panel--watched from the audience.

Valenti had spent 10 days on a round-the-clock campaign to hammer out a 12-point industry response to a Federal Trade Commission report, which said the studios marketed R-rated violent fare to children as young as 9. It had been a tough road.

Gone are the days when Valenti and former MCA chief Lew Wasserman could rally the movie moguls behind them in one bloc. Today, each studio has a corporate parent with its own priorities, though many said it was testament to Valenti’s time-tested diplomatic skills that he had managed to get the members of his increasingly divided industry to stop bickering long enough to agree on anything.

But Valenti’s seat on the sidelines, as well as his unbending resistance to changing the language in the movie ratings system he devised 32 years ago, have combined to make some people wonder:

Does Jack Valenti still matter? Does his trademark blend of personal diplomacy and behind-the-scenes negotiation still work in a climate of increasing public scrutiny of entertainment? And will the movie ratings system Valenti built--the rock upon which he feels his legacy rests--survive unchanged?

In Washington, Valenti’s reputation seems solid. He is lauded as one of the last old-school politicians whose word really is his bond. His phone calls are returned, and promptly, by ranking legislators on both sides of the aisle. He understands how to marshal an issue, and that has yielded victories for his industry on everything from copyright protections to international trade.

A highly decorated fighter pilot in World War II, Valenti is a survivor who everyone agrees garners more respect than any other trade lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

After a week that would have flattened someone half his age, he sounded anything but dejected. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said in a spirited interview the day after the Senate hearing. “I am bored with serenity.”

Tony Podesta, a prominent entertainment industry lobbyist, said Valenti deserved praise for forging a relatively united front among the movie executives--even if that front showed cracks during the testimony. Louisiana Sen. John Breaux compared pulling the studios together for the hearing to “trying to get a herd of cats to march in the same direction.”

“I think the 30-something suits [from Hollywood] who come to Washington only to go to premieres may not appreciate his skill and the trust that he has from everyone from [Sens.] Jesse Helms to Ted Kennedy,” Podesta said. “That’s not something that’s earned easily.”

Preston Padden, Disney’s chief lobbyist in Washington, suggests giving a raise to Valenti, who earns just over $1 million a year from the studio-funded MPAA.

“Jack Valenti is a national treasure, and I don’t think he gets paid enough for putting up with all of the challenging dynamics of his member companies,” said Padden, who took part in the scores of recent conference calls that Valenti organized to build industry consensus after the FTC report came out. “What he went through to forge that 12-point agenda was above and beyond the call. We’re out there banging on Time Warner’s merger [with America Online], so they’re eager to bang back on us. Some of us own networks and some of us don’t. It isn’t an easy family to set the table for.”

But the very seniority that enables Valenti to artfully set that table also prompts concerns about his effectiveness.

As the debate over the impact of popular culture on America’s youth continues in the nation’s living rooms and hearing rooms, some in Hollywood believe that the industry needs a spokesman who can better address the concerns of families and of modern filmmakers.

When Valenti reaches for a cultural example to drive a point home, he lights on Lucille Ball’s 1960s sitcom “The Lucy Show” or Steven Spielberg’s 1982 classic “E.T.” Some worry that, in the edgy age of “The Matrix” and the Internet, Valenti sometimes makes the industry appear out of touch with both the movies’ main audience--teenagers--and their parents.

“This dude is old,” said filmmaker Trey Parker, who has tangled with Valenti over the ratings of his movies “South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut” and “Orgazmo.” “He uses terms like ‘hairballs’ to refer to Matt [Stone, Parker’s collaborator] and I. He’s not the hippest guy in the world.”

His Ratings System Comes Under Attack

In recent months, the charming Texan has watched his beloved ratings system--which labels movies G, PG, PG-13, R or NC-17--come under attack, not just from conservative legislators but from the very filmmakers whose artistic freedom he designed it to protect.

With two-thirds of movies currently receiving R ratings some of Hollywood’s top directors have called for a new adults-only rating that would help parents distinguish among different types of explicit material. Even some of Valenti’s fans say his determination not to consider such modifications may bespeak an inability to grapple with the modern cultural landscape.

“When he designed the ratings system, it worked, because there was an adult rating: X. Unfortunately, that rating became tarnished,” said film critic Roger Ebert, who has long called for an A-rating between R and NC-17 that would set non-pornographic adult movies apart.

While at one time mainstream studio movies such as “Midnight Cowboy” received X ratings, Ebert noted that today’s NC-17 movies are barred from advertising in many media outlets, being shown in many theaters and stocked in some video stores. So movie studios usually require directors to whittle films down to R ratings, at least.

“Today, R has become bloated with material that is not appropriate for teenagers to see, even though we all know they can get in anyway,” Ebert said. “But we’re looking at a moment when the ratings system is going to be revised or reformed or improved. Previously the studio heads were all behind Valenti 100%. Now, the ranks are breaking.”

Indeed, Warner Bros. last week pledged to expand upon the rating system of the studio’s films by adding letter designations--L for objectionable language, S for sex and V for violence--to help parents better evaluate films. And Disney President Robert Iger called for a universal ratings system for all entertainment--a move Valenti opposes, in part, because V-chip technology (which allows parents to limit children’s access to TV programming) would probably require the adoption of the television ratings system, not the MPAA’s.

Valenti was not happy.

“I told Bob Iger: You can’t have ‘one size fits all’ with these very creative arenas,” said Valenti. “Unless you duplicated the TV ratings system down to its tiniest detail, you would obliterate and demolish 30 [million] to 40 million TV sets that have the V-chip in them. But I say this to people, and it goes in one ear and blows out the other.”

No one questions Valenti’s command of international trade agreements, licensing and copyright issues, and nearly everyone agrees with his own boast that he works harder than anyone else.

A physical fitness buff, he requires just four or five hours of sleep a night and is known to go straight to the office from the airport when he returns from his frequent trips to China, Russia and Europe. “The guy is almost a Katzenberg,” said one executive, naming one of the industry’s most famed workhorses, 49-year-old DreamWorks SKG co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Moreover, no one doubts Valenti’s commitment to uphold the 1st Amendment.

“I do not consider myself anointed by God to have these immaculate visions of how a movie ought to be made or how a story ought to be told,” he said.

Credibility as Cultural Spokesman Questioned

Still, some question Valenti’s continued credibility as a cultural spokesman.

“You’re talking about what is or isn’t appropriate for a 14-year-old in our modern media culture. And the face of the movie industry is 79 years old,” said one Valenti critic in Hollywood who requested anonymity. “This is not just about lobbying behind the scenes, like it was in Lyndon Johnson’s day. This is a real flash point in the public policy debate, and you need a spokesperson who can adequately communicate that.”

Such thinking led some studio executives in recent weeks to strongly consider seeking help outside the MPAA, several sources confirmed. Particularly after Hollywood took a beating in the press for sending no one but Valenti to McCain’s first hearing last month, there was talk of hiring another strategist to help defend the industry.

“After we got our butts kicked, we needed somebody to point out a few unassailable things. Like: This is not contraband. It’s not illegal for a 15-year-old to go to an R-rated movie. Or: Why has there never been a committee formed on gun marketing?” said one executive, who confirmed that former White House press secretary Mike McCurry was among the names under consideration.

But the move was abandoned--at least for the time being--both because it was hard to reach consensus about who would be best and because some worried that the hiring of a public relations expert between the first hearing (at which Valenti testified alone) and second would prompt more unflattering coverage.

Some chalk the idea of hiring a non-MPAA strategist up to Hollywood hubris.

“There were some people in Hollywood who couldn’t believe that the press wasn’t portraying the story they wanted to give,” said a Washington insider who also heard that McCurry’s name had been bandied about. “Those same executives refused to accept that Hollywood had given social critics a lot of ammunition. You can’t ‘spin’ marketing [of violent movies] to 10- and 12-year-olds.”

There are those who argue that Valenti’s frequent failure to offer up-to-the-minute cultural observations about current movie content may, oddly, make him even more effective because some films coming out of Hollywood are downright difficult to defend.

“I could make a case that somebody who doesn’t have to defend content is in a stronger position,” said Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Norman Lear Center, which studies the impact of entertainment on all aspects of modern life.

“It may be that Valenti’s ‘liabilities’ are really assets. Because, after all, if you’re not saying ‘1st Amendment’ or ‘artistic freedom,’ then what are you left with? Saying [about a movie] ‘It’s fabulous! It makes a lot of money!’? Sure, he’s not the guy you would buy a [movie] pitch from. But you don’t want to send that 24-year-old to Washington to represent your financial interests.”

But Dale Pollock, a former journalist and movie producer who is dean of the school of filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, believes that the industry won’t be able to dodge the issue of content indefinitely.

“The stance has been, ‘Well, if we just give the parents more information, it’ll absolve us.’ The better approach to be taking is to say, ‘Who’s going to take responsibility for the images we create? If you create it, it’s not just somebody else’s problem,’ ” said Pollock, making a plea, not for censorship, but for self-examination.

Valenti doesn’t sound like a man afraid of becoming irrelevant--in fact he sounds almost jubilant. He repeated his frequent assertion that the proposed A-rating would prompt lawsuits from filmmakers, and said his rejection of it was an attempt to protect the “delicately balanced mechanism” of the current system. To address parents’ needs, he said, the industry has pledged to begin printing the MPAA’s explanations for why a film received its rating in all advertising.

“We’re going to put the reasons everywhere: on the ads, on three or four different Web sites, everywhere,” he said, with a flourish. “I’m going to tattoo them on my forehead and walk around like a moving billboard.”

He said retirement is so far from his mind that he hasn’t even begun to ponder who might replace him.

“You quit when you’re tired, when your vision is blurred, when you no longer have the passion to fight, when all your old urgings that you had at a younger age are depleted,” he said. “I love this movie business. God, I love it. . . . And as long as you’re able to work as hard as the younger guys around you, or maybe a little harder, then I think you’re OK.”

*

Times staff writers James Bates and Greg Miller contributed to this story.