Dan Glickman notes a key difference between his old jobs as a politician and his new job representing the film industry.
“Most people like movies,” he said.
That’s not the only difference for the former Wichita congressman and U.S. secretary of agriculture. As president of the Motion Picture Association of America, he now reports to business leaders, not voters. He makes a lot more money — more than $1 million a year. And he exercises a different kind of power — the power of campaign contributions and industry clout.
Glickman has been shaping policy in Washington, D.C., for nearly 30 years, but his place here has changed sharply. Wichita still matters, but more in a cultural sense. He won his job as chief lobbyist for the motion picture industry in part because of his experience with more culturally conservative “Red America,” as well as his expertise on global trade and Congress.
A lobbyist’s dream job
The film-lobby position is considered a plum job, both for the power of the film industry and for the glamour of Hollywood that comes with it.
Glickman succeeds Jack Valenti, a former official in the Lyndon Johnson administration who held the post for 38 years. Valenti helped create the current film rating system and was legendary in Washington for his courtly manner and eloquence in promoting the film industry.
Unauthorized reproduction of films has existed as long as film itself. But camcorder technology has made high-quality film copying easier, hurting revenue, especially overseas. Glickman’s association estimates that its member companies lose more than $3.5 billion in revenue annually to illegal copying.
A potentially larger piracy threat could come from the ability to download movies off the Internet. The rise of peer-to-peer file-sharing technology could cause film revenue to drop in the same way that has already thrown the audio recording industry into turmoil, Glickman said.
Peer-to-peer technology is here to stay, Glickman said, and the film industry will have to come up with a “reasonable-cost, hassle-free way” for people to download movies legally for it to continue to prosper.
