Word: valenty
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...when Jack Valenti was named the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the studio system was largely intact. Industry pioneers like Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck were still running the companies they had founded. Old lions like Cary Grant, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Charlie Chaplin continued to make pictures. Jerry Lewis, Doris Day and Elvis were starring in their two anodyne movies a year. Virtually all income came from box office receipts and showings on broadcast TV stations. There were no home computers, cable networks, videocassettes or DVDs. No four-letter word had been spoken...
...Valenti, who died Thursday at 85 from complications of a stroke, seemed a good fit for that antique era. A hardscrabble Texas kid who at 14 had worked as "an usher in a second-run theater in Houston called the Iris," he flew 51 combat missions for the Air Force in World War II, got a Harvard M.B.A. on the GI Bill and hooked up with a back-home politician named Lyndon Johnson. Valenti was the Vice President's press rep on a trip to Dallas in November 1963 and stood next to him on the flight back to Washington...
...Just about everything changed in movies, in their content and their conduits to the audience. Yet Valenti, as the industry's chief lobbyist (his employers were the six major studios), made sure that business proceeded as usual, without federal interference or oversight. He politicked hard and heartily with his old Washington friends for favorable tariff rulings, and in the process maintained Hollywood's status as one of the few national cinemas not subject to government censorship. (It's also one of the few to receive no direct government subsidies for film production, so I guess that's a fair swap...
...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...
...Franklin & Marshall on Saturday. PENN 28, HARVARD 12Against the Quakers (6-5, 2-0), Harvard took a quick lead by taking three of the first four matches on the day. The 133-lb. bout featured the two wrestlers in the 2006 EIWA finals—No. 2 Matt Valenti and tri-captain Robbie Preston, ranked 10th in the nation. Valenti had defeated Preston in the EIWA finals, 4-2, and Preston could not manage to return the favor, falling 5-1 after a close match in which he led 1-0 early in the second period.The Crimson, however...