Legacy Matters

Jack Valenti, R.I.P.

Jack Valenti died at 85, an unforgettable man.

From an Appreciation by Paul Farhi in the Washington Post.

Hollywood would never have cast Jack Valenti in the role he played in real life, which was as the film industry's man in Washington. Valenti was too florid in speech, too grandiose in manner, too much of a wit to fit the cinematic archetype of the conniving Washington fixer and shadowy string-puller.
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Hollywood will sorely miss Valenti's battlefield smarts and insider skills. His most famous creation was the industry's movie-rating system -- a marketing masterstroke that substituted "self-regulation" for the threatened legislative kind
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But Valenti's single greatest professional coup was an obscure one.

It's worth reading the entire thing to appreciate how wired Valenti was and how cleverly he used his juice.

His obituary, A Hollywood Promoter on Both Coasts by Adam Bernstein

With an instinctive showman's flair -- notably his grandiloquent speaking style and access to movie stars -- Valenti became the dominant power broker connecting Capitol Hill and the film colony. Besides his work on the ratings system in the late 1960s, he helped open up world markets for American-made films and secured passage of copyright legislation to protect movies into the digital age, which led to the proliferation of DVDs.

I knew he worked for President Johnson, but I never knew he married Johnson's personal secretary.  His grandiloquent prose was often over the top, as when he declaimed before a congressional panel in 1982,  "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." 

But I'm charmed by his description of a movie audience as "unknown but enthusiastic companions of a single night."