Film industry chief Valenti's legacy will be movie ratings system

Published: 2004-07-23

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- If anything, Jack Valenti will be remembered as the man behind movie ratings. Valenti, a Catholic, is stepping down Sept. 1 as head of the Motion Picture Association of America after spending 38 years at the helm of a fractious industry that has survived not only occasional congressional and consumer revolts over content and regulation, but plenty of infighting from its member studios. The ratings took shape in 1968. "There was rebellion in the creative community" at that time, Valenti recalled. Some of that may have been stirred two years before. One of his first actions upon taking the job, he added, was dumping the Hays Code regulating movie content "which I thought was abominable censorship and could not last. But when I discarded it, I found out that nature, politics and Hollywood do not care for vacuums," he said. "I had left a vacuum. And the more and more I thought about it, I thought I could come up with some design that freed the screen, allowed filmmakers to tell their stories the way they choose to tell it -- but with the potential downside that some of their films would be restricted for viewing by children." The concept of ratings, Valenti said in an interview with Catholic News Service, was "to put the authority of which kid goes to which movie in the hands of parents, and not anyone else."

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