Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,855

This is the grave of Jack Valenti.

Born in 1921 in Houston, Valenti grew up in the relatively small Italian American community there. Not so many immigrants moved to the South, since competing with Black labor didn’t make a lot of economic sense, but some of the port cities had sizable communities. He joined the Army Air Force during World War II and did quite well, becoming the pilot of a B-25 bomber and flying 51 missions, which is a lot of missions to not get killed! He won the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.

Valenti was at the University of Houston when the war broke out. After he was mustered out, he returned and finished his bachelor’s degree in 1946. He was also president of the student government and he very much had big political ambitions. Postwar Texas was a good time and place for that. The state was growing quickly and was a complicated place, not dominated by cotton like much of the South, but rather combining that with other forms of agriculture and oil, plus the rapid rise of defense plants there. It was a heady time for Texas and for young ambitious politicos who could rise there. This is of course why George Bush ended up out there instead of staying in Connecticut with Daddy.

So Valenti went to Harvard and got his MBA in 1948 and then took a job with Humble Oil back in Texas. This was a part of the Standard Oil empire and he worked in marketing and advertising primarily. He made a name for himself by encouraging corporate executives to invest in really clean bathrooms that would convince drivers to stop at their gas stations. And I mean, it’s a great plan, who doesn’t choose their gas stops based on where they think there will be the best and cleanest bathrooms? I know I do if I have a choice and some local knowledge of the chains. In southern New England, it’s Cumberland Farms, in Pennsylvania it’s Sheetz or Wawa, etc.

In 1952, Valenti started his own advertising firm with Weldon Weekley and they brought Conoco along with them as their first major client. Successful in advertising oil companies, they moved into politics and in 1956, Valenti met Lyndon Johnson. They got along famously. LBJ saw Valenti as a very useful figure in his Texas political machine and he proved that through doing campaigns for Johnson allies running for Congress. So they got work in the 1960 presidential campaign and did well there too.

Valenti went to Washington and did media work during the Kennedy years, but mostly was part of LBJ’s team, which largely meant not enough to do, as Johnson himself felt. Valenti was with Johnson when Kennedy was assassinated and is in the famous photo of Lyndon taking the oath of office with a horrified looking Jackie standing next to him.

Valenti became a key LBJ man. He literally lived at the White House for two months as Johnson was transitioning into the office. He then became the liaison with Republicans in Congress. But Valenti decided on a different career after a couple of years working as a presidential aide. He became the president of the Motion Picture Association of America. This was a really important moment for the film industry, because the movies were changing rapidly and so were moral standards in America and not everyone was real happy about that. The film industry needed a super politically connected man to navigate this and they sure got it with Valenti, who could work anyone in Washington, either party, and come away unscathed.

J. Edgar Hoover hated him though. So he had the FBI compile a file on whether Valenti was a homosexual. That Hoover, what a class act.

Valenti thus came up with the ratings system for the movies in 1968. That is the four ratings of G, PG, R, or X. PG was originally M and was changed in 1972. The X was a mistake, as Valenti freely admitted, since it became something that smut peddlers could be proud of and as a letter really turns oun idiots from Larry Flynt to Elon Musk, so it took on a “cool letter” thing for some reason in these people’s addled brains. Much later, that became NC-17, which is appropriately awkward and basically does not exist anymore because studios just don’t make those films. But for films such as Midnight Cowboy and A Clockwork Orange, getting the X rating both added to their mystique and made them hard to make a lot of money on, at least initially. PG-13 originated in 1984 after Steven Spielberg complained to Valenti that there needed to be a middle ground between these PG and R that was screwing over a lot of directors and, most importantly, costing a lot of studios a lot of money. Valenti understood that argument.

Now, Valenti had one true passion when it came to his long tenure in the film industry and that was extending copyrights. Really, this was just about studio profit. I mean, the man tried to get the videocassette banned in the early 80s, saying watching movies at home would destroy the film industry. This of course is an issue to the present and much more so with streaming. I mean, why go see a 2 hour movie when you can watch bloated pointless shitty Netflix shows with terrible writing in one long evening! Anyway, Valenti’s baby was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed by Congress in 1998 and signed by Bill Clinton. The DMCA became the law used to go after Napster and other forms of pirating music. Of course, everyone got around this by just allowing corporate pirating, i.e., Spotify, one of the great evils of the modern world which basically every musician loathes because it is the original AI taking away their jobs.

Then there was the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. A passion of Sonny Bono when somehow he was elected to Congress (can you imagine Americans electing dumb celebrities to higher office today…..), this is what extended copyright for Disney most notoriously that vastly extended copyrights and made sure that a huge amount of art wouldn’t see the public domain for a long time. If anything, Valenti thought this didn’t do enough. He wanted copyright to last forever.

Valenti truly hated Oliver Stone’s JFK. And to be fair, it’s terrible. But Valenti accused Stone of defaming Lyndon Johnson, the crime one could not commit in his mind. He stated, “I owe where I am today to Lyndon Johnson. I could not live with myself if I stood by mutely and let some filmmaker soil his memory.”

Valenti finally left the MPAA in 2004. It was definitely time. He died in 2007, at the age of 85.

Jack Valenti is buried on the confiscated grounds of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other Johnson advisers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. George Ball is in Pittsburgh and Marvin Watson is in Austin, Texas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.