You don’t know his name, but for better or worse, he kept the U.S. government out of Hollywood’s business. However, that put him at odds with viewers who found his way of keeping order puritanical and often out-of-touch.Jack Valenti’s best efforts to save Hollywood was doomed from the start. But don’t expect anything to change. Valenti’s rating system ain’t going anywhere.
Always busy shaking hands with Washington, his history in international politics allowed him to keep censors at arm’s length unlike so many other nations' film industries at the time. Growing up poor in the Depression, serving on a bomber inWorld War II, working in the Segregation-Era South, and later attending the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One after JFK’s assassination,Valenti witnessed first-handsome of the most pivotal and ugly moments of the 20th Century. He wasn’t the type of guy to intimidate easily.
But through a circuitous turn of fate, he would dedicate his life to ensuring people would not have to see the same unpleasant things he did as the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, or the MPAA. Valenti achieved his primary goal, that being protecting the movie studios from public backlash, while allowing risqué films the freedom to still be made. That said, his suspect impartiality and judgment as the MPAA chief taints his legacy to this day.
Keep Hollywood Weird
At various times, the MPAA (founded as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) represented 20th Century Fox, RKO Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, United Artists, Columbia Pictures, anda few others. Hollywood, at the time in the 30s and 40s, took orders from self-appointed censors, but never politicians.
From the very beginning of his reign at the MPAA in the mid-60s, Valenti made it clear he would not be a lackey to Washington DC. No one’s ever going to confuse southern California with an artists' colony, but the former LBJ staffer immediately sensed the industry’s paranoia toward outside interference both at the top of the food chain and among writers and directors. Valenti would cunningly use his connections to his advantage as Hollywood’s primary lobbyist. After the communist witch hunt in the 40s and 50s, Hollywood was trying with all its might to change the subject and appear as bland and apolitical as possible. Valenti was their guy.
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Tasked with heading the MPAA (currentlyknown simply as the MPA), Valenti’s objective was simple: keep the U.S. government out of the affairs of the major American studios. On the surface, his job duties were mundane, representing the Hollywood studios’ interests abroad, ensuring copyrights, keeping up good relations with the heads of state in major foreign markets. Guiding the MPAA through the rocky 60s through to the boom of the mid-70s and 80s, Valenti ratings scheme seemed to have solved the film industry’s stickiest problem.
It was a system that was built to placate everyone on the political spectrum, left or right. And at the onset, it worked as intended. Yet, it was hard to avoid politics, such as when the MPAA boycotted Chile after it elected a socialist president, but not so during the rule of the right-leaning president. During his almost four-decade run as MPAA boss, the stubborn Texan would find himself in the limelight even when desperately trying to avoid it.
Brilliant or Blundering?
To sidestep the pesky feds demanding edits to movies, the MPAA beganincluding a checklist of no-nosin the 30s. For three decades, it went unquestioned. Valenti dreamed up the modern rating system that Americans know today, albeit without the NC-17 or PG-13 rating, which were added in later years. PG was also then known as “M,” otherwise the system was up and running as we know it all the way back in 1968. That signature font and warning of “appropriate audiences”? That’s all Valenti.
Why 1968? The late-60s marked the release of two particular films, both debuting in 1966,Blow-UpandWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which featured supposedly shocking levels of nudity and obscenities, albeit tame by today’s standards. With the old self-censorship model,the Hays Code, biting the dust, films were now being released in open rebellion of traditional good taste. Valenti knew the MPAA had to step in before the government stuck their nose in and solved the problem first.
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Through some negotiating, he convinced theater operators to go along with the rating system, only exhibiting those that were MPAA-rated. ”We don’t really have any authority over exhibitors,” he said of the compromise, “but we got their voluntary cooperation. It was the only thing that could work.”
Refusing to return to the old days, Valenti explained he ”also emphasized that freedom demanded responsibility.” As he tells it, Valenti honestly thought he was on a holy crusade to preserve the film industry.
A Murky Legacy
Lest anyone hold up the Texan as pseudo-censor or oversensitive old man, he famously defended the MPAA’s judgment to classifyThe Exorcistwith an R-rating in place of the much harsher X as some were lobbying for. Rather than slap Oliver Stone’s borderline-libelous filmJFKwith an NC-17, he refused to abuse his possession. It received an R, despite his disgust of its baseless insinuation that LBJ (Valenti’s former boss and friend) had knowledge of the assassination.
However, the acumen of the MPAA board’s ratings were never viewed as consistent nor entirely fair. Independent filmmakers frequently complained that smaller films — those not produced nor distributed by the major studios — faced the full wrath of the MPAA, whereas major studio films dodged debilitating Rs and NC-17s. In later years, directors would share stories of being forced to cut out a few seconds of their film for negligible sexual content, arguing the rating system was never applied coherently, targeting LGBT movies especially harshly.
Those unwilling to reshoot or edit their movie and adapt to the rules of the MPAA, risked having a rating that made their films impossible to ever make a profit. Those films that refused to submit to a rating would never be shown in a major national movie-theater chain. The MPAA imposed financial consequences for artistic choices, enforcing it through what can only be called an extrajudicial cartel. Through Valenti, the MPAA became much stronger than ever, a quietly ubiquitous element of pop culture that indirectly dictated what audiences were allowed to consume and what was relegated to the chopping block. Those deleted footage sections in every DVD release? Now you know why that exists.
Now deceased, Valenti’s once untouchable tenure has come under fire as some question whether the MPAA should exist at all. Critics and legal advocates call out the MPAA as a misleading and “unconstitutional industry agreement” by a collective of the biggest media companies who only want to quash competition.
