Word: hollywooders
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...Today it is common, and commonly deplored, for administrations to hire champions of industry for jobs as watchdogs of those industries - the fox guarding the foxhole, essentially. But in 1968, Valenti went an audacious step further. Since his arrival in Hollywood, the liberalization of the screen had begun; American movies, long stuck in a bland adolescence, were suddenly and controversially open to "adult themes": nudity, four-letter words, explicit violence. Valenti headed off the puritan backlash. He persuaded Congress to eliminate the regulatory middle man and let Hollywood monitor its own content...
...know, I invented a ratings system," he told the Hollywood Reporter just before he retired in 2004, "which understood two things: One, the First Amendment reigns. Freedom of speech. Freedom of content. The director is free to make any movie he wants to make and not have to cut a millimeter of it. But freedom without responsibility is anarchy. The director will know he can do that, but some of his films may be restricted from viewing by children. Now I thought that was a balancing of the moral compact. It'll be 36 years old in November. Very...
...Action films and fantasy franchises weren't Valenti's personal faves. To him "the greatest movie ever made" was A Man for All Seasons, that tug of wills and ethics between Thomas More and Henry VIII, which was released the year Valenti came to Hollywood. "It's about a man who has a conflict between his conscience and his king," he told the Reporter, "between what he believes and what his government wants him to do. Because he had such strong convictions, he was willing to die rather than stain his convictions." Valenti insisted the film "has relevance today...
...then figures, not pictures, were what mattered to this Conquistador of Hollywood's global domination. Testifying (at astounding length) before the House Judiciary Committee in 1982, Valenti boasted that the U.S. movie industry "returned to this country almost $1 billion in surplus balance of trade." A decade later that number had tripled...
...course, just the reverse happened. Hollywood found a gigantic new market in videos and, 15 years later, in DVDs; digital sales and rentals now account for more than half of the industry's income. But like any lobbyist who sees change as a threat to be forestalled by protective legislation, bombs to be fought with bombast, Valenti often couldn't see past his and his employers' fears. In 1974 he warned that the infant cable industry would become "a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material...