Jack Valenti, whose soaring flights of rhetoric have defined Hollywood’s voice in Washington, D.C., for two generations, is nearing the end of his post as the film industry’s chief lobbyist.
With announced plans to step down when a replacement is found, he will leave behind an industry deeply entangled in a love-hate relationship with the technology world. On the one hand, Silicon Valley-created tools have revolutionized the moviemaking business, allowing the creation of films like “Lord of the Rings,” “Shrek” and Pixar’s string of hits.
On the other, Hollywood studio executives see movie swapping on the Internet and DVD burners as the modern equivalent of plunder-obsessed Greeks pouring through Trojan walls. Studio heads remain worried that their traditional ways of doing business will be catastrophically disrupted and hope to avoid the plight of the music business over the past several years.
In recent years, Valenti has asked Congress to impose far-reaching technological measures blocking or impeding digital copying. The most ambitious proposals have failed, but much of the Motion Pictures Association of America’s copy protection proposals have been moving forward piecemeal in other venues, including the Federal Communications Commission.
With speeches that sound drawn from a Hollywood screenwriter’s pen rather than from a lobbyist’s desk, Valenti had been an apt representative of Hollywood’s own self-image of glitz and magic. He is a deep believer in the appeal of filmmaking in its most classic sense–as an immersive storytelling medium unlike any other.
But he will likely be remembered best for his decades-long battles against the unrestrained spread of copying technologies, from videocassette recorders to today’s peer-to-peer tools. As he prepares to step down, his organization is boosting its monitoring of film swapping on the Internet, while holding lawsuits against individual computer users out as a potential next step.
