Valenti Tells Europeans to Can TV Quota Law : Trade: MPAA chairman calls the barriers “dangerous” and issues a warning on the long-term effects to U.S. producers.

Jack Valenti, chairman of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, on Tuesday urged the European Community to scrap a recently enacted law imposing non-binding quotas on imported films and TV programs and called on Europeans to compete in an open, global market.

“It sends a dark signal to those outside,” Valenti said of the quota plan. “In a world growing smaller each day . . . trade barriers are as old-fashioned and as dangerous as armed conflict.”

Last month, the foreign ministers of the community’s 12 member states approved a law limiting imported television programming to no more than 50% of all transmissions “where practicable.” News, sports, commercials and teletext services were not included.

The quotas, part of a broader law establishing common television standards for EC member states as they prepare to dismantle internal frontiers, have been strenuously opposed by the U.S. government. The Bush Administration has pledged to press its case that the quotas violate international trade agreements.

Valenti, in an interview after his speech, said he also plans to look into the possibility that the EC legislation violates the free-speech provision of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 10 of the convention amounts to a First Amendment for the member nations.

In his half-hour speech to a gathering of American and European business executives here in the city that is home to the EC Executive Commission, Valenti referred to the EC law on quotas as “baloney,” “a needless crutch” and “a terrorizing contradiction for a group of countries in the process of eliminating internal trade restrictions.”

“It’s wrong,” he said, “and every professional craftsman in the world knows it’s wrong.”

The term where practicable was inserted in the law, following a prolonged dispute, by member nations that advocate freer trade. France was the most ardent supporter of a minority effort to enact tougher, binding quotas.

Any further watering down of the less stringent limits is regarded as highly unlikely by political analysts here.

The looser wording, coupled with the fact that the programming being imported into the EC countries is running well under the 50% limit, means that the new law will have little immediate impact on the American film and television industry. Valenti admitted this in a question-and-answer session.

Despite the sharp tenor of Valenti’s remarks, EC officials said that other executives in the American film industry were far less concerned about the recent EC action.

Holde L’Hoest, who heads EC efforts to forge closer ties between film and television industries of member states, quoted Michael Solomon, president of Warner Bros. International Television Distribution; Bruce Gordon, president of Paramount’s international television division, and Patrick Cox, general manager of NBC Europe, as indicating that the EC quotas were less serious than they appear.

Valenti, however, said the provisions present a long-term danger.

“I worry about the future,” he said. “When restrictions go on, they never come off, and they are usually a floor, not a ceiling. Quotas are like a fungus. They never go away. They grow, they slowly get worse, and some day they are going to hurt.”

There seems to be remarkably little enthusiasm for quotas among a broad cross-section of European television executives and film artists, who note that within the next five years they will be able to produce only a seventh of the continent’s estimated requirement of 16,000 hours of programming.

The quotas appear to have been pushed principally by governments eager to be seen as protecting their cultural heritage.

Although European industry leaders express doubt about the cultural effect of imported U.S. television, they tend to prefer efforts to foster closer internal EC cooperation to improve their competitiveness internationally.

In his speech, Valenti applauded such moves.

“Develop the factors that will allow each producer to conquer the whole of the European market,” he said, “and then the rest of the cinema and TV world.”

He urged Europeans to expand their film schools, to extend a $2.2-million EC fund supporting scriptwriters and “build a new generation of film and TV stars, actors, actresses, whose names and faces light up screens everywhere on this earth.”

Valenti said vibrant national and regional film industries have created a public interest that benefits all film makers.