Jack Valenti (1921 - 2007)

For five decades, he was the man at the center of the movie industry's most polarizing, subjective, and explosive arguments, yet was the absolute gentleman - gracious, amiable, polished. For Jack Valenti, who died this morning from complications from a stroke, presentation was everything.

Latecomers to the business of digital media know Jack Valenti as the man who championed the principles of vigorous copyright protection and combating piracy. So a great many in this business have never had an opportunity to witness one of the most persuasive speakers in Washington never to become a politician, as the president and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America.

Among a wider segment of Americans, he is known for having instituted the modern motion picture ratings system, the ultimate by-product of a subjective argument. What isn't widely known is how he came to do so, and what it was he truly accomplished. Washington is where the fine art of compromise is practiced, and Hollywood is where its results are more seldom appreciated.

The story actually begins in 1930, during a period of time when it appeared the federal government would get involved in the business of filmmaking, specifically to regulate its content. If government could stipulate what movies could not include, it could also offer little suggestions about what it should include. So in an effort to stave off the government by demonstrating it could regulate itself well enough on its own, the major movie studios of the day (which also owned their own theaters at that time) agreed upon a code of regulation for what movies could and could not include.

This was the Motion Picture Production Code, adopted by the forerunner to the MPAA. It came to be known as the "Hays Code" after the organization's first president, himself a consummate showman, though with a staggering lack of understanding of the issues he was dealing with. Mortimer J. Adler called Hays "a fascinating mixture of political astuteness and naivety about the arts, the sciences, and philosophy."

Hence the Hays Code set forth, with all haste and optimism, to reinforce the moral fiber of American society. Its "General Principles" included were as follows: "1) No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. 2) Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. 3) Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation."

As incredible as it may sound, this code restricting all movies to showing "correct standards of life" remained voluntarily enforced by the then-renamed MPAA at the time John F. Kennedy was president. On November 22, 1963, Jack Valenti, along with several other aides to Vice President Johnson, had a front-row seat to a turning point in history, riding in the President's motorcade in Dallas.

Valenti helped Johnson in the business of healing the country as a key White House aide until 1966, when Johnson's own knack for persuasiveness led to his friend's appointment as President of the MPAA. From that day forth, Valenti would represent the interests of the MPAA's two key constituencies: movie studios and theater owners. At this stage in history, the latter group was much more powerful. Theaters were the display devices for Hollywood-produced content in the 1960s. They ran the projectors, they seated the guests, they pressed the buttons. It was from this vantage point that Valenti would later rally against ceding those responsibilities to just anyone.

But job one for Valenti was the eradication of what he always believed to be a ridiculous code, a relic of a bygone age. "I junked the Hays Code -- and good riddance," Valenti wrote last December, "replacing it with the warning line 'For Mature Audiences.' I soon found out that wasn't going to cut it. It was too little and very late."

Flagging a film with the word "mature" was like sticking a red light on the front of it, Valenti realized. For some, it was a warning sign; for others, it was merely an enticement.

In 1968, Valenti found himself examining something that was billing itself as "a new kind of American film." It was the screen adaptation of the Edward Albee play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. In it was a word that was the subject of a series of meetings, just on its own. For the record, it was the word "screw."

After meeting with MPAA lawyers and Warner Bros. boss Jack Warner, the decision was made to excise "screw." "It seemed wrong that grown men should be sitting around discussing such matters," Valenti later wrote. "Moreover, I was uncomfortable with the thought that this was just the beginning of an unsettling new era in film, in which we would lurch from crisis to crisis, without any suitable solution in sight."

After having tackled a case of MGM deciding to release a film under a subsidiary brand that wasn't an MPAA member, after the MPAA declined to provide it with a Code seal - the film contained a few frames of nudity - Valenti sensed the onset of an ominous trend. To stave it off, he sought the advise of his counterpart who represented the Theater Owners of America: one Sumner Redstone, now chairman of both Viacom and CBS Corporation.

"When I presented my plan to Sumner, his quick, lawyerly mind got it fast," Valenti wrote. "He agreed with me that unless we took preemptive action, we would be overrun by a babel of voices, all of them unsuitable to our future. The plan was to set up a voluntary movie rating system, giving advance cautionary information to parents so they could make their own decisions about the movies they wanted their children to see - or not to see."

The way Valenti saw it, it wasn't up to any one person to decree the moral values of Americans. But if a certain underlying structure for classifying content as opposed to regulating it were put in place, he believed, it would give Americans the freedom to make up their own minds. The motion picture ratings system he and Redstone devised, and which he later refined, was the opposite of censorship. It was a way for films to be forthcoming about their content.

"When I designed the rating system in 1968," he wrote last October, "I retained two social scientists from different universities. I asked them to put to paper the precise demarcations between rating categories so we would have specific guidelines. For example, what is too much violence for each of the categories? Much as the Supreme Court to this hour cannot define 'pornography,' these professors were unable to mark precisely where the lines should be drawn. Like Justice Potter Stewart's musing about pornography, the raters can say, 'I can't define it but I know what it is when I see it."'

Next: The VCR: "A very troubling assault on our fiscal security"