For two years, Jack Valenti, the venerable, 82-year-old chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, has been trying to retire.
After nearly four decades as Hollywood’s leading lobbyist, the silver-haired former adman and White House adviser announced in March that he would be gone within a few months. But summer approaches, and the association is nowhere close to finding Valenti’s successor.
Doesn’t anyone want to run the MPAA?
“This is one of the most fascinating, exciting jobs a person can have,” Valenti said with some urgency in a recent interview. “This is a global job. You’ll meet the premier of China, the cultural minister of France. You’ll be involved with creative people. It pays well. If that’s not something that engages people, I don’t know what the hell would.”
The job of running the association ought to have a long, juicy waiting list of Washington VIPs. Who wouldn’t want a million dollars a year to plump for Tom Cruise instead of, say, biomedical tax credits?
Oddly, not too many folks. Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) at first accepted, then — after being offered a lot more money by the pharmaceutical industry — rejected the job last fall. Since then Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) has also been wooed by the association to no avail. He let it be known that he wasn’t eager to defend Janet Jackson’s right to show a nipple ring.
New candidates
The process of finding Valenti’s replacement is nonetheless moving forward, if ever so slowly and under a cloak of heavy secrecy. According to several people familiar with the search, in the last three weeks, three new candidates have been interviewed by the seven studio chairmen who serve as the board members of the Motion Picture Association.
Those candidates are: Victoria Clarke, the former Pentagon spokeswoman under President Bush who is now a consultant for Comcast, the cable giant; Daniel J. Glickman, who served as agriculture secretary in the Clinton administration and who now heads the Institute of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Pat Mitchell, a former television producer who is now president of the Public Broadcasting Service.
All are respected members of the Washington establishment who would need crash courses in show business. Traditionally, the role of the motion picture association chief has been to marshal the towering egos and competing interests of the seven major Hollywood studios to win favorable legislation or trade incentives for the movie industry. By all accounts, Valenti, who also created the industry’s rating system, was spectacularly successful at wrangling the contentious moguls. He has unparalleled status in Congress, whose favor he has long courted with invitations to swanky screenings at the bunkerlike MPAA building on I Street.
But the job is becoming harder. The crisis of worldwide movie piracy, held at bay only by technological limits, threatens to sink the movie industry entirely, as it may the music business. Numerous Hollywood and Washington figures, including candidates for the job, point out that it’s a double whammy: The new chairman will have to follow Valenti’s 38-year act while coming up with a solution to the industry’s new perils. Potential candidates may remember that even the polished Valenti received a very public black eye last fall when he attempted to end the longstanding practice of distributing videotapes and DVDs to people who vote on the Academy Awards. He introduced the change as a way to cut down on piracy, but it was met with a revolt by art-house distributors and a rebuke by the courts.
“I think it’s a job people are interested in, but it’s perceived — and rightly so — to be a hard job,” said Hilary Rosen, the former chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry lobby. “If there are easier jobs available, for more money, then why take a hard job?”
Indeed, even if the job is ultimately offered to one of these three candidates, he or she may not take it. The studio chiefs have asked to meet with at least three other candidates in the wake of the recent interviews — a sign they are not entirely confident about their short list. Some of the names frequently mentioned are those of Rep. David Dreier (R-Calif.); the actor and former Republican senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee; the departing Universal lobbyist Matt Gerson; and Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.).
Executives inside the studios say that they will have to offer well above Valenti’s $1.2 million salary to attract the best person for the job, because other lobbying jobs now pay up to $2 million a year.
Everyone in Washington seems to want to know what the association will become in the post-Valenti era. The diminutive lobbyist with a peculiarly florid vocabulary came to personify the organization over the decades, not just creating the movie ratings system in 1968, but traveling tirelessly around the world to promote the Hollywood agenda.
Throughout the 1980s, Valenti successfully protected the so-called “fin-syn” regulations giving the Hollywood production community complete control over the rerun market for former hit network television shows. Under the rules, networks could share only minimally in profits from television’s secondary markets, which created millions of dollars in additional profits for the association’s member studios.
Two-person job
There is already a consensus that two people will probably be needed to replace Valenti, one to be the public face of the association and another to run its day-to-day operations. But that doesn’t resolve the fundamental question of the association’s identity.
“The challenge is not just replacing Jack Valenti,” acknowledged Leslie Hortum, the executive headhunter leading the search for a replacement. “You have to be saying: What is the MPAA today? What does it need going forward? That’s been the focus.”
Without careful definition, the association could easily fade into irrelevance. Each of the member studios is now a small part of a huge, multinational empire — from News Corp. to Viacom to General Electric to Sony — and their interests diverge as often as they coincide. The parent companies all have their own individual lobbying operations based in Washington.
This dynamic has changed the way the association operates; Valenti no longer meets en masse with the studio chairmen. Instead he plays the handmaiden, consulting with them as individuals as he cobbles together consensus.
Piracy, however, is the one issue that can be counted on to unite the seven studios — and the one reason they are focused so intently on finding Valenti’s replacement.
But even here they cannot easily agree. One senior studio executive, who declined to be named because of the secrecy of the association’s process, said that one of the first acts of the new chairman would be to bring lawsuits against individuals who download movies over the Internet — much as the music industry did against users of Napster and Kazaa.
This plan does not reflect consensus. Fox, Paramount and Universal are keen to prosecute downloaders, while Disney is more reluctant.
The former MPAA spokeswoman and Hollywood-Washington veteran Barbara Dixon put it this way: “You really need a power broker who can sit these guys in a room and carve out a consensus. It takes real people skills; it takes respect. It’s really hard.”
