The First 100 Days

"I don't ever remember seeing a bad movie," purred Jack Valenti 16 weeks ago, when he signed up as the new president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Hardly an auspicious utterance for a man who was going to get $175,000 a year to kick some life into Hollywood. Valenti also vowed "to bring the Great Society to the movie industry." That is a scene that remains to be screened. Still, after President Valenti's first 100 days in office, even cynical Hollywood cannot knock him for trying.

His ingenuous indefatigability has brought industry reviews running from "eager" (Director Richard Quine) to "dynamic and courageous" (Producer Frank McCarthy). "He has been soaking up the business like a sponge," says Director Fielder Cook. "He's the best thing that has happened to the industry in a long time."

"It's my L.B.J. syndrome at work," explains Valenti. He is working a back-to-backbreaking 16-hour day commuting between "The Other 1600," his Washington headquarters,*and his Manhattan office. And one week in five he hops to the coast to learn what he can about film making.

Bristling Broadside. Valenti has already visited the sets of several pictures, has studied the editing, dubbing and scoring processes, has even sat in on a contract-haggling session in the William Morris talent agency. Between rubbernecking tours, he has picked some of the best and least complacent brains in the business--George Stevens Sr., Elia Kazan, Sidney Lumet. His homework has included not only the autobiography of Jack Warner but / Lost It at the Movies, Critic Pauline Kael's bristling broadside on what is wrong with Hollywood. (Valenti underlined the most compelling passages with a yellow felt-tip pen for future reference.)

He is most concerned with raising Hollywood's "standards of excellence." "Forget about image," he preaches. "Image is an illusive word. Du Pont's greatest public-relations instrument is nylon. What we've got to do is make excellent movies"--not the sort of movies, he implies, that are being turned out by the M.P.A.A. members that hired him but rather those of the creative cinema of postwar Italy, the New Wave in France and now England. "The next creative center," he concludes, "will be here. We are educating an audience that will not accept the ordinary. We want the world to look at America and say, 'By golly, those Americans are really doing something.' "

Blanching Moguls. Valenti does not presume to "tell the heads of movie companies what kind of films to make" or pretend that the industry is not ruled by the box office. He does think that he can infuse Hollywood with imagination and a zest for quality. He wants to upgrade the Oscar competition, turn it from a popularity contest into a genuine system of reward for achievement. It may make some oldtime movie moguls blanch at the thought, but only a freshman like Valenti can get away with the proclamation that the M.P.A.A. will march "with banners flying to the campus" to encourage new talent, which is "the soul juice of this industry." He has even made a beginning in that direction, last week launched a new $30,000 national competition for student-made films, and has started talks with Stanford Research Institute officials on the possibility of establishing a national film institute.

In the works as well is a Valenti drive to revise the M.P.A.A.'s film production rules. It was Valenti, in fact, who steered Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Alfie past the obsolete proscriptions of the Censorship Code. He is on the right track. While a liberalized code would not necessarily make movies better--and indeed might offer license to be merely vulgar or deliberately obscene--it would undoubtedly provide a better climate for serious moviemakers, who find the code of the '30s hypocritical.

It will be some time before Valenti succeeds in dousing Hollywood with a good helping of "soul juice"--if he succeeds at all--but he is such an excessively eager fellow that his mere presence has given Hollywood a lift. Says he: "I came to this job not misshapen by old ideas and old prejudices. I don't know what's 'impossible' to do, and so I go ahead and try to do it. Will it work? I don't know, but I'm damn sure going to give it a whirl."

*The name comes from the M.P.A.A.'s Washington address, 1600 I Street, just four blocks from Jack's old office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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