Los Angeles – Jack Valenti, the former White House aide and film-industry lobbyist who instituted the modern movie-ratings system and guided Hollywood from the censorship era to the digital age, died Thursday. He was 85.
Valenti had a stroke in March and was hospitalized for several weeks at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center in Baltimore.
He died of complications from the stroke at his Washington, D.C., home, said Seth Oster of the Motion Picture Association of America.
Valenti was a special assistant and confidant to President Lyndon Johnson when he was lured to Hollywood in 1966 by movie moguls Lew Wasserman and Arthur Krim.
A lifelong film lover, he once cited the 1966 film “A Man for All Seasons” as his all-time favorite.
When he took over as president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Valenti was caught between Hollywood’s outdated system of self-censorship and America’s liberal cultural explosion. He abolished the industry’s restrictive Hays code, which prohibited explicit violence and frank treatment of sex and, in 1968, oversaw creation of today’s letter-based ratings system.
“While I believe that every director, studio has the right to make the movies they want to make, everybody else has a right not to watch it,” Valenti told The Associated Press shortly before his retirement in 2004. “All we do is give advance cautionary warnings and say this is what we think is in this movie.”
Dan Glickman, his successor at the MPAA, said Thursday that Valenti embodied the “theatricality” of the industry.
“Jack was a showman, a gentleman, an orator, and a passionate champion of this country, its movies, and the enduring freedoms that made both so important to this world,” Glickman said in a statement.
The white-haired Valenti was familiar to movie fans through his many appearances at the Academy Awards, when frequent Oscar host Johnny Carson would poke fun at his speeches. Valenti was equally animated whether testifying at a congressional hearing, hobnobbing with celebrities at the Cannes Film Festival, or previewing films for Washington’s elite in his office’s private theater.
His friends ranged from actors Kirk Douglas and Sidney Poitier to, more improbably, Sen. Jesse Helms, a conservative often at odds with Hollywood.
In Valenti’s later years, he handled tricky challenges from the Internet and technologies that allow movies to be illegally reproduced and distributed in an instant. Valenti also traveled worldwide seeking to thwart movie piracy and boost film exports to reluctant countries such as China.
As a Texas-based political consultant working for then-Vice President Johnson, Valenti was riding in the motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
In a 2003 Associated Press interview, he said the assassination “is so seared in my memory, I literally, sometimes at night – not often, but once or twice a year – I relive that day.”
