Hollywood: 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.' "