The
half-hour press conference ended with his blue skying about the future of
satellite saturated, digitally compressed, optically fibred media utopias of
choice. When an American reporter alleged that his hyperbolic fantasy reminded
him of Thoreau’s response to similar trade piffle about the opening of the
Transatlantic cable in 1851 (“And what will be the first thing to come into the
broad flapping American ear, that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough?”)
Valenti stuttered and stumbled in response that people unwilling to face the
media future bravely were condemned, as Thoreau said, to lead lives of “quiet
desperation”, thus quietly and desperately turning poor old Henry David’s most
famous quote on its head. Valenti, it seems, has good researchers digging for
those learned quotes to wow the foreign press. He don’t do too good with
American literature on his feet.
But
Valenti is more than a glib fixer: He knows the film business inside and out,
and in very good at tutoring the foreign media about those minute particulars.
When chided for his bellicose remarks after GATF exempted Audiovisual
industries in December 1993, Valenti conceded that his extreme statements were
what Americans called “campaign talk” aimed to Congressmen at home, not at
European filmmakers at all. “Retribution,” he now assured the European media
assembled to grill him in Berlin, “is a word deleted from my lexicon.” (Not a
minute too soon!)
He went onto explain, like a teacher dealing with a class of
slow learners, that the “American film industry” was in actuality 24,000
screens 92% owned by individual businessmen whose daily task it was to find
product that would pay their bills. Why, a German reporter asked, does only 1%
of American screen time feature European movies? Because most Americans have
trouble with foreign languages. Valenti riposted that his daughter (who was
fluent in Spanish and French) considered dubbing an esthetic monstrosity, and
to him, dubbing an American voice over Gerard Depardieu, would in his opinion
be nothing short of “blasphemy”.
His
solution: let Europeans buy five or six or seven hundred screens and experiment
with them. In university towns like Boston or Austin, subtitle. In the esthetic
stix, to parody that old Variety tag, give the hix dubbed pix. Valenti would go
one step further: if you really want to penetrate the American market, invest
in it. He knew ten majors right now who were looking for investors. And study
how the American majors research their foreign markets. They spend millions
trying, say, to find out what appeals to movie audiences in Malaysia or Brazil.
Don’t whine about the fact that only 416 non-English language films have made
it to American screens in the past five years. Of the 161 American films made
by the majors last year (out of a total of 550), only 28 were successful or
moderately successful.
American
film producers don’t waste time whining, they study the market and try again.
And he reminded the European press that every hour of every day the American
majors were competing against each other “like scorpion in a bottle”. If they
think a European film will make money for them, they’ll go for it. Furthermore,
unlike some European markets, there are absolutely no barriers to access into
the United States. In the tones of a revivalist preacher, and with an
astonishingly ecclesiastical rhetoric, Valenti called for a global film
community where only talent mattered. “Politicians don’t make films,
parliaments don’t, only talented people do. Let them be free everywhere,” he
perorated from his bully pulpit. And I do mean bull.
He
had the Euromedia on his side most completely when talking about the $5.2
billion annual loss from piracy worldwide. He asserted that the American
industry invested $35 million last year fighting this stealing of creative
work. 41 countries are now involved in this struggle which Valenti considers
his greatest single achievement as industry policymaker.
The
conference ended on a sour note with a French reporter claiming that poorly
educated Americans were much less curious about Europe than vice versa. Valenti
conceded sadly that this was true and did a Back to Basics number that you find
hard to give credence too, facing a screenful of the more fatuous American mind
numb movies. Then Valenti went into his Adam Smith is King number, saying he
didn’t want any government official telling him how to raise his family. He
gave complete freedom to others as long as they were ready to reciprocate. In
short, Valenti is happily schizzy—unassailable when laying out the economic
parameters of his business, a travesty when trying to think about the meanings
of all these particulars. Very American, that is. A pragmatist incapable of
sustained thought in a complex subject. A bromide dispenser.
So,
for all his speechwriting research into Talleyrand and Goethe, he simply
doesn’t understand that, for example, the French are so serious about
protecting their language and culture that they have devised a little rolling
Cannes festival for the working class suburbs of Paris in which new features
are followed by lively and literate discussions with the films’ directors. I
engaged in two of these palavers—in Ivry-sur-Seine where I live and, I was so
impressed by the unpretentious seriousness of the first night of the rolling
film festival, that I went to the next stop at Fontenay-sous-bois where I was
treated to a marvelous Georgian feature on the period in the 1920s before the
Bolsheviks took over Tblisi.
The 44-year-old former actress director taught me
more about the complexities of her land and heritage in a fifteen minute
interview that I had been able to amass in twenty years of Opedifying reading.
Valenti loves to invoke his residency at LBJ’s White House, and this press convergence
also had such sentimental moments: How could he be opposed to European
subsidies, he wheedled, when he had helped put the National Endowment for the
Arts together. Ah, Jack, we never really knew you.
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