The Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) film ratings system was bitterly opposed by the industry from its conception. Instituted in 1968, the system raised heated controversy concerning censorship and morality. For Jack Valenti, the man behind this initiative and the author of autobiographical This Time, This Place: My Life in War, the White House, and Hollywood (2007, Harmony Books, 468 pages, U.S., $25.95), MPAA battles were the only apparent conflicts in a life otherwise marked by unhindered, banal success. This Time, This Place was completed just a few months before Valenti’s death in April 2007. He did not live to see it published. Valenti, chairman and CEO of the MPAA, describes the ratings system as both his pet project and an albatross around his neck. But the ratings clash, which holds great dramatic potential, falls flat as told by Valenti. In fact, the entire memoir, defined in the preface as “a collection of memories of triumphs and tumult, tragedies and adventures,” seems to be lacking in three out of four of those theatrical modifiers. Triumph abounds, but tragedy, despite a lengthy portion devoted to the author’s service in World War II, is missing in action. Born in 1921 to lower middle class first generation Italian-Americans in Houston, Texas, Valenti’s beginnings were the stuff of American folklore. Though his family was poor, his childhood reads like a scene out of a Mark Twain novel: “We children seldom wore shoes when we played together, so the soles of our feet began to take on the attributes of leather. We walked to Davy Crockett Elementary School about seven blocks away.” A doting mother, a stern but kind father, and a chorus of boisterous relatives raised Valenti. The already povertystricken family was unaffected by the Depression, and though Valenti had to work from a young age, his early years are nevertheless described as bucolic. Valenti’s first job was taking tickets at a movie theater, a detail that nicely foreshadows his future career, and from there he went on to work at Humble Oil Company and attend night school at the University of Houston. When the U.S. entered World War II, Valenti was quick to drop out of school and enlist as a fighter pilot. He emerged miraculously unscathed from his many missions. But while he describes his combat experience as rife with “belly-spilling, throatgrabbing fear,” his incredibly optimistic tone paints the war as less a visceral experience than a minor annoyance. After obtaining a long sought-after MBA at Harvard, Valenti had successful careers in advertising, politics, and the film industry. The book’s strongest anecdote recalls November 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Valenti was present in Dallas and also witnessed the subsequent swearing in of President liberally spotted with her husband’s blood as well as fragments of his brain matter that had sprayed her when the assassin’s bullet struck, but she had refused to change into another garment.” Unfortunately, in the kind of metaphor that routinely undermines the better passages of the book, Valenti refers to the Dallas event as “The Longest Day,” a moniker usually reserved for the 1944 invasion of Normandy. Valenti was appointed as head of the Valenti had an agenda of his own. Prior to his appointment, the Association endorsed the Hayes Code of the 1930s, which called for the censorship of all films that, in their view, possessed traces of vulgarity, antiAmericanism or immorality. To his credit, Valenti wasted no time abolishing the flagrantly unconstitutional Code. However, critics saw his freshly minted movie ratings system as a lateral move, rather than a solution. Valenti glosses over the dispute, dismissing some of the major studios as “particularly edgy,” summarizing more than a year of negotiations in a single paragraph, and missing an opportunity to offer insight into the political machinations of Hollywood heavyweights. In 2003, towards the end of his 38-year tenure at the MPAA, Valenti again faced industry opposition. When the studios found that they were losing revenue to piracy, the MPAA determined that screener copies (copies of films sent to a variety of people prior to release, including members of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) were at the root of the problem and barred the practice. For major studios with reliable distribution, the proposal, known as the Screener Ban Injunction, posed few problems. But for indie production companies, who sent out screeners to a variety of distributors in the hopes of being picked up, the Screener Ban would be a fatal blow. For once Valenti positions himself and his MPAA colleagues as the bad guys, and admits that the Screener Ban was an imprudent step that in time “would haunt him.” The indie production companies fought the MPAA with chutzpah, in an industry battle that came out in the little guy’s favor. Aside from the screener incident, the better part of Valenti’s account of his time at the MPAA is spent gushing about high-profile friends. The chapter on Hollywood is comprised of sections, each devoted to his relationship with a mythically famous movie star. Marlon Brando and Katherine Hepburn merit their own sections, though he met them once and twice respectively, and Kirk Douglas, a close friend of Valenti’s, is omnipresent. Few and far between are the charming insider anecdotes that one would expect of a man so well acquainted with Hollywood’s power players. The LBJ-era politician seems alive and well in these tales, where tact and diplomacy win out over humor and intrigue. To expect a book about Hollywood not to name drop is to be naïve, but passages that go into baroque detail about the seating arrangements at parties read more like laundry lists than juicy gossip. “Mary Margaret sat between Cary Grant and Gene Kelly, I sat between Angie Dickinson and Dinah Shore. Also at the table were Fred Astaire, Kirk and Anne Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Julie Andrews, and Barbara Stanwyck.” Perhaps the moment of authorship, so late in Valenti’s illustrious life, provides explanation for the book’s shortcomings. Jack Valenti’s accomplishments in politics and Hollywood were vast and he had much for which to be grateful. This Time, This Place is a thank you letter to those who helped and inspired him, with all the hardship omitted. It is an old man’s recollection of life as he wanted to be remembered. ES V I D E O • A G E JA N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 8 B o o k R e v i e w Valenti’s Life Written As a PG Movie Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One. His gritty description of Jacqueline Kennedy is one of the book’s rare powerful moments, if lacking in originality: “I saw her emerge slowly from the rear of the plane, walking as if in a trance. Her pink blouse was MPAA in 1966, after serving for three years as a special assistant to President Johnson. The chairmanship of the MPAA was historically a lobbyist position, created to act out the desires of the studio heads, but it was clear from the beginning that
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