Slashdot Mirror
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
saforrest writes "Jack Valenti, a man whose influence in both Washington and Hollywood was profound, died today at age 85. He first became famous as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson: he can even be seen in the famous photo aboard Air Force One. In 1966, he quit this job to become president of the MPAA, from 1966 to 2004."
"If you want to have a backup of a movie you should go out and purchase another copy of that movie." "The VCR is akin to the Boston Strangler." - Jack Valenti
Where my dad comes from in Greece (Lesbos - yes, my Dad is a Lesbian), they have a saying.
phonetically: "Homa sto kolo tou, zoi se logo mas"
which roughly translates as "Dirt up his arse, life to us"
It is typically said when learning of the death of someone you prefer in their new state.
...right on his grave.Rot in hell, you son of a bitch. the first post was so much more insightful than this.
Velenti was famous for this quote.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
And thus the first quote can be seen as quite hilarious.
I got modded down as a troll and went from Excellent Karma to terrible, all because I made posts like:
Please mod me insightful for no particular reason.
It was on April Fool's Day. Were my posts offtopic? Definitely. Were they troll? Definitely not.
The Karma system is broken.
Tacitus? that punk? I tell you, nothing and no one good EVER came out of Gallia Narbonensis.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
It's been ages since I've been to a movie because of him.
It's all anime for me now.
Now that really IS a travesty.
Personally, I disliked Jack way before any of YOU people did... well I hated him for stuff he did earlier, at any rate.
I'll always remember him as the SOB who helped the (even bigger SOB) LBJ win office by really shady tactics. In a documentary about Barry Goldwater (LBJ's opponent), Jack basically said "yeah, it was messed up, but it's OK cuz it worked!" Yeah, thanks for Vietnam, cock.
Of course, the MPAA rating system (which has a really Excellent documentary written about it) has pretty much borked the movie industry.
Latewire
you have made this statement in multiple places in this discussion. I have tried to verify the veracity of your claims, however google finds nothing, and the ny court law server is throwing errors when i query it, but the ny court system web site specifically has a "how to defend myself when i cannot afford a lawyer" pdf, which might indicate you are incorrect (..if a lawyer is free to anybody in any court, why would you even need a pdf guide to defending yourself pro se.. EVERYONE would just take the free lawyer). Unfortunately it crashes both firefox and ie, so i'll never know what it contains.
;) ..(redneck places like.. you know.. CA.. WA..) ...so if you can find a cite (or a new england lawyer can reply and confirm/deny), because this sounds somewhat implausible to me. in my experience, even in CRIMINAL court, getting access to a free lawyer is very difficult unless you are up on very serious charges or completely indigent. for instance, in WA, one must show bank records to the court (etc) to prove one has no means of income, etc.. and even then they provide you with an attorney, you must agree to pay something like $350-500 to their firm for representing you.
and you have the gall (in another post) to call other states "redneck" ? tell your 'redneck state' to hire some better sysadmins from the "crazy redneck" states i've lived in where one is NOT provided an attorney by the civil courts
so, since everyone here seems to disagree with you, I would respectfully ask for you to cite your source.. I am quite interested to find out if this is true. As of yet, I am under the impression that nothing is free in the US legal system.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
Sadly the new system results in ugly censorship too. That is what you get when there is a monopoly like the movie industry. One arm is the ratings board, telling you what their other arm, the movie theatres and DVD stores will carry. Independents get harsher ratings which makes Walmart and the likes not carry them in some cases. The ratings board is secret (only in the USA, other rating systems in the world, something like 20 that were studied for comparison don't hide the raters). There are no standards by which the ratings board works, appeal is done in-house and is merely a formality. Jack Valenti was shown to be personally managing the ratings board, the whole ugly mess is his brainchild. It is a form of less inconvenient and public censorship. There is nothing to be hailed about it.
For further information please watch the documentary "This film is not yet rated".
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
You're not a very good Christian.
Forgiveness requires admission, repentance, atonement, and determination to not repeat past sins.
You can't just absolve someone, for no reason.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
.. when ridiculing someone's death nets you +5 insightful. I'm sure many of you have spent a lot of time sitting alone and clenching your fists at people, but no matter how much you disagree with someone's opinions, you just don't marginalise and ridicule his death because of it.
Get a sense of decency.
He lobbied for a law so wide ranging that it made it a criminal offense, as in jail time, for making an unauthorized DVD player, just because if someone's capable of making a DVD player, they're also capable of making something that could copy DVDs. And if someone can copy a DVD, they can also potentially distribute unauthorized copies. Something that was already illegal.
The guy was at best a shortsighted raving lunatic.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Vietnam was Kennedy's doing, wasn't it?
We had "advisers" in there as early as Eisenhower. There was some escalation under Kennedy but not very much. LBJ escalated the conflict out of a seemingly insane attempt to 'save face' to show we weren't going to be intimidated by those [insert racial epithet]. More Americans died in Vietnam under LBJ than any other president. There's a documentary called "The Fog Of War" that shows a recorded conversation between Robert MacNamara and LBJ talking about the supposed torpedo fired at US boats around Vietnam which instigated our involvement (recent evidence shows this torpedo never existed). The conversation makes it clear that LBJ was basically a nut and a warmonger who wanted to "kick some ass" (actual quote).
As much as I'd like to blame Kennedy for Vietnam (so people would stop idolizing the guy), it really was LBJ's war.
Oddly enough, Jack Valenti's campaign against Goldwater painted Barry as the warmonger. Funny how that works out.
Latewire