Jack Valenti Celebrates Disneyland’s Birthday
Jack Valenti died on Thursday, April 26, 2007 at age 85.
Valenti served as an aide to President Lyndon Johnson before heading the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as the movie industry’s No. 1 lobbyist for 38 years. He retired in August 2004.
Robert A. Iger, president and CEO of The Walt Disney Company issued the following statement:
“Jack was one of a kind. He was not only an incredible champion for the movie industry, but a man of great intelligence, integrity and humor with an uncanny ability to turn great thoughts into great words. The love he had for his family, his country and the industry was extraordinary. He will be missed by all those who knew him.”
Dick Cook, chairman, The Walt Disney Studios, issued this statement:
“All of us in the motion picture industry owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Jack Valenti and mourn his passing. For nearly four decades, he faithfully and vigorously protected the rights of the film community, and was the most eloquent spokesperson that Hollywood ever could have hoped for. In addition to his role in creating the film rating system, he sought to protect intellectual properties and ensure that new technologies had the proper and necessary safeguards. Jack was a legendary figure whose wisdom and influence benefited Hollywood and the world. On a personal note, I considered him a friend and mentor. Our sympathies go out to Mary Margaret and his family. Hollywood has lost one of its greatest friends and supporters.”
Valenti was actually a strong Disney supporter for many years, which is why he garnered such high praise from the Disney Company. In fact, before his career in entertainment, Valenti had an unusual connection with Walt Disney.
Valenti, at the time heading a public relations agency working with the White House, was in John F. Kennedy’s motorcade, six cars back from the president’s limousine, when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. He accompanied Lyndon Johnson back to Washington and can be seen in the historic photograph of Johnson being sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.
Jack Valenti, far left, in one of the most famous photos in US History.
Valenti became a special assistant and confidant to President Lyndon Johnson but he was lured to Hollywood in 1966.
During Valenti’s time with the president, Walt Disney’s affinity for Johnson’s political opponent, Republican Barry Goldwater was no secret to Johnson. The revelation came up in one of Johnson’s recorded telephone conversations on September 6, 1964, eight days before President Johnson presented the Medal of Freedom to Walt Disney.
LBJ was talking with Edwin L. Weisl, Sr., a New York lawyer, about raising campaign money from Weisl’s “movie friends.”
“Balaban will go on, Warner will go on,” Weisl told him. “All but Disney.”
LBJ: “Is Disney against us?”
Weisl: “Yeah.”
LBJ: “Why is he against us?”
Weisl: “He likes Goldwater.”
Walt’s support of Goldwater led to the urban myth that Walt wore a “Vote Goldwater” button on his jacket when he accepted the Medal of Freedom from Johnson. That misconception has been very nicely dismantled at urban legends Web site Snopes.com.
As head of the MPAA, Valenti abolished the industry’s restrictive Hays code, which prohibited explicit violence and frank treatment of sex, and in 1968 oversaw creation of today’s letter-based ratings system.
“While I believe that every director, studio has the right to make the movies they want to make, everybody else has a right not to watch it,” Valenti told The Associated Press shortly before his retirement in 2004. “All we do is give advance cautionary warnings and say this is what we think is in this movie.”
In the mid-1970s, Universal and Walt Disney Productions on behalf of the Hollywood majors, charged that the ability of the Betamax to copy programming off air was an infringement of copyright and sought to halt the sale of the machines. The studios were ostensibly trying to protect film and television producers from the economic consequences of unauthorized mass duplication and distribution
The Betamax case was filed in the U.S. Federal District Court of Los Angeles in November 1976 and went to trial on Jan. 30, 1979. Handing down its decision in October 1979, the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Sony, stating that taping off air for entertainment or time shifting constituted fair use. An appeals court later overturned the decision. The Betamax case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the appeals court decision on Jan. 17, 1984.
In his official position at the MPAA, Valenti strongly defended Universal and Walt Disney Productions and issued the following statement: “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone,” he once told Congress.
After leaving the film association, Valenti worked with the television industry to fight tougher decency regulations for television.
On Sunday, June 15, 1980, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner issued a special 16-page advertising supplement to publicize Disneyland’s 25th Birthday Summer celebration. In that supplement, Valenti wrote a short essay sharing his thoughts about Disneyland:
“In this world in which we are captivated and sometimes overtaken by the swiftness of technology, we can acknowledge with immense pride that a great pioneer in technological pinning came from the motion picture industry.
“Disneyland is a monument to Walt Disney’s fertile technological conceptions.
“It is that, first and last. Through technological marvels we journey into the past. We hurl into the future in this giant toyland which has been called ‘the happiest place on earth’—a place whose purpose is pursuit of happiness.
“In my frequent trips all over the world on behalf of the American film I often hear it said that the places foreign visitors would like most to see in our country are Hollywood and Disneyland. In both, Walt Disney was a creator of memorable and enduring stature.
“He has had imitators by the dozens but none who has matched him, none who, as he did, has built the models for others to follow.
“A parent once said of Disneyland (a remark so pertinent and perceptive that I want to repeat it):
“‘Disneyland may be just another damned amusement park, but to my kids it is the Taj Mahal, Niagara Falls, Sherwood Forest and Davy Crockett all rolled into one.’
“A fairyland to children, yes, and to adults as well, for isn’t there a child inside most of us all our lives?
“One doesn’t go through Disneyland ‘just for the fun of it’ though there is that in abundance. The magic of the place has a transforming quality. It brings the past into the present, and the present into the future, and provides an experience that becomes a part of all of us-a rich and rewarding part.
“The Disneyland imprint is distinctive, bold, imaginative, and expresses hope and vision, joyfulness and confidence.
“On the second anniversary of Disneyland, a Disney associate said:
“‘By the time Walt gets through this will be not only the seventh wonder of the world, but the eighth and ninth and tenth as well.’
“On this 25th anniversary we know that that prediction no longer seems far fetched or too wide of the mark. To millions who swarm to Disneyland, it is perhaps the closest to a wonder of the world they’ll ever see.”
The white-haired Valenti was familiar to movie fans through his many appearances at the Academy Awards and other public functions.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I spent my entire public working career in two of life’s classic fascinations, politics and Hollywood,” he said in 2004. “You can’t beat that.”
