Scourge Of Modern Cinema Dead

Jack Valenti, Movie Ratings Pioneer, Dies at 85
By DAVID GERMAIN
AP
Los Angeles (April 26) - Jack Valenti, the former White House aide and film industry lobbyist who instituted the modern movie ratings system and guided Hollywood from the censorship era to the digital age, died Thursday. He was 85.
(photo: Fred Chartrand, AP)

As cultural throwbacks go, Jack Valenti, who had every chance to be a voice for freedom of expression based on his Kennedy associations, instead used his prominence to put a permanent pock-mark on the face of artistic expression.

His MPAA Ratings System (G, PG, R, X, etc.) did more to limit the freedom of directors, writers, actors and the American public who would consume their work than Joe McCarthy, Don Wildmon, and Michael Powell (former head of the Federal Communications Commission) put together.

By slapping his arbitrary rating on every single piece of cinema produced in the last 40-some years, he escorted the film industry from blatant blacklisting to a more underhanded form of censorship that Americans could swallow. His assignment of an "X" to a piece of work based on language or sexual content was the kiss of death to many an expression that might have survived had it relied on blood and guts instead.

Rather than revel in his demise, we here at SMTS instead hope to revel in the demise of the system to which he gave birth. If parents want to have an advanced clue as to what their children may view in the theatre, they can pay $20 like the rest of us and see it first.

Here's hoping this is one man who gets to take his creation to the grave with him.