Valenti reflective in his last Cannes trip as MPAA chief

Even after 38 years as undisputed champion for Hollywood studios, Jack Valenti has no delusions that he is irreplaceable. The day of Nov. 22, 1963, saw to that.

Valenti was a political consultant handling press for John F. Kennedy’s visit to Texas and was riding in the motorcade when the president was assassinated. Soon after, he was a witness as his friend Lyndon Johnson took the oath as president.

What it taught him: “No one is indispensable,” Valenti, 82, said at the Cannes Film Festival. “I watched the 35th president slain in the streets of Dallas and the immediate succession of the 36th president. The president is dead, the president lives. The nation goes on.

“People are kind enough to say to me, ‘Well, no one can replace you.’ That’s hogwash. They can and will.”

Valenti announced in March that he was retiring as head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which oversees U.S. movie ratings and lobbies for Hollywood’s top seven studios in Washington. The list of possible successors has been whittled from about 20 to five finalists, and Valenti said he expects to leave the job sometime this summer once the association’s board settles on a replacement.

Visiting Cannes for the 37th year, Valenti joined an international meeting on movie piracy and caught the Coen brothers’ “The Ladykillers.”

Since he hopes to maintain ties with Hollywood in some fashion, Valenti has avoided turning his Cannes trip into a teary goodbye to old friends.

“I’ve really consciously stayed away from saying, ‘This is my last visit, and I embrace you manfully,’ and all that, because I’m not sure what I’m going to do,” Valenti said in an interview at his hotel suite, near the festival’s headquarters. “I just hate to go through farewells and then suddenly, I show up someplace. So the answer is no, this is not a farewell tour. This is business as usual.”

Born in Texas, Valenti worked as an usher at a Houston movie theater in his teens. He flew bombing missions in World War II, earned a business degree from Harvard and ran an advertising company before joining Johnson’s inner circle as a speechwriter and congressional liaison after Kennedy’s assassination.

Valenti left in 1966 to head the MPAA.

“Thirty-eight years is a long run, and someone asked me, what is my greatest accomplishment in the movie business, and my ready answer is, ‘I survived.’

“I’m the luckiest guy in the world, because I spent my entire public working career in two of life’s classic fascinations, politics and Hollywood. You can’t beat that.”