Q & A with the film industry's champion
PETER BART: Let's start by going back to the birth of the ratings.
JACK VALENTI: When I first came in, in the fog of the Hayes Office code, it was full of do's and don't's, and very precise: no open-mouth kissing. If two people are in bed, even though they are married, they each have to keep a leg on the floor -- which means that if you're going to engage in any affectionate embraces, you've got to be Nadia Comaneci for goodness sakes, an Olympic gymnast.
BART: I don't know -- I always keep a leg on the floor.
VALENTI: I keep a leg up, as we say. And so I experimented with a thing called SMA -- Suggested for Mature Audiences -- in late '66 and it went into '67 and it was working alright, but I had never felt comfortable with it.
But three things happened in 1968:
First, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on the Dallas censorship case. Dallas had a board, there were about 44 of these censorship boards all over the country. And the Supreme Court said, 'The Dallas Censorship Board as it is now constituted is unconstitutional.' And they suggested how they might make it constitutional.
But it also said something that had a seminal ring to it, and it rang like a twanging wire through the whole fabric of viewing movies: They said children could be barred from seeing movies without trudging the First Amendment, but no one could bar adults from seeing movies.
And MGM put out a picture done by Michelangelo Antonioni called "Blow-Up." It was the first time that you saw nudity on the screen.
And right on its heels came "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and you heard language you had never heard on the screen.
So I flew out to California with attorney Louis Nizer to visit Jack Warner and his sales manager.
Louis and I spent about an hour in that meeting, maybe two hours, and we finally convinced Jack Warner he would delete phrases like "hump the hostess" (there were two of those in there -- he left one in). There were five "screws"-- he took three of them out and left two in.
And when I left his office and got on a plane and flew back, I said to Louis, "Louis, here you are, probably the most famous courtroom lawyer in America, and maybe the highest-priced lawyer ... and we had just engaged in the most puerile conversation. Here I am supposed to be the movie czar ... and what are we doing? I'm not even sure I want to stay in this job."
PAUL F. YOUNG: What were your first steps after you decided to take action?
VALENTI: I met with the Actors Guild and the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild. I met with religious organizations ... I met with film critics.
Then I met with exhibitors and of course, I met with the major studios and with independents. Most of the majors at that time -- the Warners and the Zanucks -- were very, very skeptical. And I always had to threaten Warner and Zanuck that I would resign and make a public denunciation of what I thought was callous and casual regard for parents in this country.
Now, Lew Wasserman, who was probably the sanest and the wisest of all the guys, saw instantly that something had to be done. He gave me great support in this thing and I'm not sure that I could have pulled it off without him.
BART: When you took the job, you were making $28,000 a year in the White House. Did you know any movie people?
VALENTI: When I got out of business school I found a partner and we started our own advertising agency. So I had been involved in television.
And then when I was in the White House, everybody wants to be your friend when you're in power. And when you have access to the president you become a very attractive fellow -- you become very intelligent and very charming.
And I got to know Arthur Krim, who was very close to Kennedy and then to Johnson. I got to know Wasserman ... I got to know Joe Levine very well.
BART: So you knew some of the power players, obviously you didn't know the stars.
VALENTI: Oh, I did! I got to know, during the election, Gregory Peck, and I got to know those who did commercials for the president. I met Charlton Heston and formed a lifelong relationship with Kirk Douglas at that time, going back thirty years.
YOUNG: In terms of stars being involved in politics, it seems to me that today's Washington establishment doesn't take them seriously.
VALENTI: I think that most politicians and most newspaper people think that actors are a bunch of children and they're just posturing and don't know. But I would tell you this: Kirk Douglas, Heston, Streisand, Newman, Peck -- these are very knowledgeable people. Its just that nobody believes that an actor ought to have the intellectual equipment to deal with some of these complex issues.
BART: You've had some big fights in this job. Can you talk about one or two of the most explosive controversies or one-on-one personal conflagrations you've experienced?
VALENTI: Well, there's the recent mess with Oliver Stone and "JFK." I was so outraged by what I thought was the ultimate falsity and finally by what I thought was the most heinous accusation one human being could hurl against another when he has Kevin Costner playing the role of (Jim) Garrison, who said that Lyndon Johnson and Chief Justice Warren were responsible for the coverup for the murder of the president.
And so I really lost the reins and the harness I put on my passions, and I decided I was going to take him on in public.
BART: There was never a public debate between you and Oliver,was there? I mean face-to-face?
VALENTI: No, there wasn't. He issued a statement saying that he understood my loyalty to Johnson and so he wasn't going to raise hell about it. I've seen Oliver several times now and I have now vented my spleen. I've made my case and I never harbor grudges as far as I'm concerned. I think he's a brilliant filmmaker.
YOUNG: With more studios becoming parts of media conglomerates, is it harder to rally the troops on single issues besides the obvious ones, like copyright laws, for example, or video piracy? And the MPAA is Jack Valenti to an extent and Jack Valenti is the MPAA. A lot of people want to know what happens when you decide to leave.
VALENTI: I try to make the association, in a small, minor way, like the Constitution, to be flexible, never to be rigid and never to have an unbreakable stance, because with an immovable force meeting an irresistible object, you've got a problem. But, I will say that I have absolute total unanimity of support for all the things we're trying to do abroad, which now comprises 41% of all of our revenues.
The companies can't do, singly or even doubly, what they can do with eight companies now that Turner's in.
The second thing is, I was in Dallas in the motorcade when President Kennedy was murdered, and I learned on that day that everyone is replaceable. The 35th president of the United States is murdered and in seconds the 36th president takes over and the country goes on. Different style, different way of handling things, but the country survives and it goes on. No one is irreplaceable and the only people that think they are are inhaling flattery.
BART: But as a cultured man, as words go, are you impatient knowing that this is obviously not Hollywood's golden era?
VALENTI: Yes, I'm dissappointed in how poverty-stricken some of the language is that passes for scripts, but I've never made a movie, so I don't want to be critical.
YOUNG: Both with GATT and also the recent trade negotiations in China, audiovisual has been the sticking point.
VALENTI: I was trying to write down before you came, about the things I'm most proud of. We've talked about the ratings system. I wrote down Korea, China, keeping foreign markets open and I'm gonna tell you something: We're in good shape around the world. I'm really proud that I've been able to keep foreign markets open by not just working with Democrats but with Republicans as well.
One achievement that I would like to put on a granite plaque would be the trade agreement that I did with Korea about seven or eight years ago, which collapsed all the walls around that country. China has a $25 billion trade surplus with us. They need us a lot more than we need them.
Another worthy achievement is holding the association together and keeping this cohesiveness of widely disparate objectives and hard-driving, successful, ego-driven leaders. Yeah, that's been taxing but that's what I do. I'm just trying to do my job.
