Jack Valenti etched the letters G, PG and R into American cinema.
That cultural legacy came early in his stewardship of Hollywood's top trade group, when he established the movie-ratings system still in place nearly 40 years later.
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Associated Press reporter David Germain, in "Valenti became Hollywood's man of letters" in The Desert Sun (27 April 2007)Jack Valenti
In a sometimes unreasonable business, Jack Valenti was a giant voice of reason. He was the greatest ambassador Hollywood has ever known and I will value his wisdom and friendship for all time.
Jack Valenti
Mostly, filmmakers complain that they must work against muddled or moving boundaries. And parents’ groups grouse about “ratings creep,” a perceived tendency for a category like PG-13 to permit ever more violence, sex and profanity over the years to reach impressionable youth. Yet it was Mr. Valenti’s genius to have devised an apparatus that is not bound by precedent, changes its definitions at will and, ultimately, serves the motion picture industry by becoming, at any given moment, as permissive or restrictive as the prevailing climate seems to demand... for nearly 40 years, Mr. Valenti’s raters have largely kept politicians and busybodies out of the film business, even if that meant playing somewhat unpredictable busybodies themselves. They haven’t always been fair, and not entirely pleasant to deal with. But in the end, theirs was no mean achievement.
Jack Valenti
I thought Jack Valenti was wrong about most of the tech-policy issues that he spoke about, but I'm going to miss that guy... One of the lingering regrets of my career is showing up a few minutes late to a Post boardroom luncheon with Valenti that had started with him denouncing a column I'd written about the MPAA's "technological totalitarianism." When I sat down, then-managing editor Steve Coll leaned over to summarize Valenti's opening statement as "he took your name in vain"; I felt like I'd missed the whole show.
Jack Valenti
"I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema ... I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema."
Michael Powell
WRONG
That is exactly what the Harvard study stays. It says the descriptors are way off and that the T rated games contain M levels of violence. I've even spoken with Harvard's Kimberly Thompson about the "ratings creep." No, that's not Patricia Vance. It's the fake nature of the game ratings. Grow up and learn how to read. Jack ThompsonJack Thompson
Valenti, Jack
Valera, Eamon de
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