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by Mac VerStandig
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Within an hour of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Jack Valenti was appointed to President Lyndon Johnson’s new administration. There was a certain irony to the moment: Mr. Valenti, a Texas native, rose to power only when Kennedy was stripped of power in that very same southern state.
Three years later, Mr. Valenti departed the White House and took over as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the major seven Hollywood studios’ lobbying group, a post the Los Angeles Times is reporting Mr. Valenti will resign from at the end of this year.
Should the California paper prove correct, a bizarre and tumultuous reign that has spanned the terms of eight United States presidents would finally draw to a close. And Mr. Valenti is one Texan who this conservative entertainment writer wouldn’t mind seeing leave Washington.
The truth is that Mr.Valenti’s most notable achievement, the movie ratings system (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17), is also his greatest failure.
When the Texan assumed the helm of the MPAA, censorship was a major issue in American cinema. A “production code” ripe with restrictive language was being imposed upon the film industry and something did need to be done to avoid the sort of government-imposed bowdlerization that could sound Hollywood’s artistic death-nail.
So the MPAA, under Mr. Valenti’s then-deft guidance, created a self-imposed ratings system. The thinking was that Congress would have no good reason to restrict Hollywood if Hollywood was restricting itself.
The original four ratings — G, M, R and X — have evolved over time into the aforementioned cluster of five with which we are all rather familiar. But the government has evolved too, and the evils that the letters were meant to combat, quite simply, no longer exist.
In an era where Uncle Sam is no longer peering over directors’ shoulders, it is still proper that some form of parental guidance be offered. But under Mr. Valenti’s reign, the R and NC-17 ratings have become a blurry mess of political alphabet soup.
Here’s the problem: if a film is rated NC-17, numerous movie theaters will refuse to show it, countless newspapers won’t carry its advertisements and Blockbuster won’t stock it. And the desire to keep such a distance from a rating that is meant to denote “mature” cinema is understandable: American businesses are wise to steer clear of smut.
But, alas, Mr. Valenti has allowed the rating to cast its ugly shadow over legitimate works of artistic cinema. And it didn’t even take that long. Just three years after the Texan assumed the lobbying post, “Midnight Cowboy,” a Dustin Hoffman film which would go on to win Best Picture (hardly an award synonymous with adult entertainment), was given the then-highest rating, an X. Ditto “A Clockwork Orange.”
More recently, studios have not been so willing to allow their films to hold the restrictive adult title. The NC-17 label has been applied to “Eyes Wide Shut,” Stanley Kubrick’s final work, forcing Warner Bros. to alter the legendary director’s cut just so that moviegoers could rent the flick once it was out of theaters.
“South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” an ode against Mr. Valenti and the MPAA, was also slapped with an NC-17 rating and then de facto censored by Paramount so that the film could instead parade through theaters with the less-restrictive R label.
The issues surrounding the NC-17 rating are too numerous to exhaust here, as are the many problems with the oh-so-blurry line between R and PG-13. But suffice it to say that the rating system has, under Mr. Valenti’s reign, become as much a threat to the artistic integrity of cinema as the censorship that it was originally created to avoid.
The MPAA’s other major crusade under Mr. Valenti has also evolved from a well-meaning program of necessity to a destructive force that operates at cinema’s detriment. Indeed, the anti-piracy fight commenced as a much-needed battle against bootlegging in the United States and abroad. But most recently in this “war,” Mr. Valenti announced the cessation of video copies of Oscar-eligible films for award voters, a move that could potentially destroy film’s kudos season.
It appears as though this latest errant move of Mr. Valenti’s — which has been extensively criticized in a previous commentary by this writer — will end in much-needed compromise, but it is nonetheless a sad final note in the Texan’s career.
Forty years have now passed since that fateful day when John F. Kennedy rode through Texas in a convertible. It is sometimes proffered that America lost its innocence that day, and such is entirely possible — the country has certainly evolved politically, artistically and culturally. But Mr. Valenti’s grasp of the motion picture industry has not evolved over these four decades, and now the time has come for cinema to reclaim the innocence it lost.
Mac VerStandig (Mac@Badgerherald.com) has screened numerous films as a guest of the MPAA and is a sophomore majoring in rhetoric.
