Jack Valenti, The vision of the world and all the wonders that would be
Jack Valenti, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) declares that the world has embarked on a journey into an environment filled with new technologies, whose shape and form are not fully known, nor are its dimensions adequately defined. While the instinct of many is to greet new technological developments with dread and nervousness, Valenti offers the assurance that it is not the alluring seduction of technology, but how audiences will react to what technology delivers.
The past is always more pleasant because it isn't here. In the make-believe world of movies and television in which I have lived for the past 30 years, to look backward is to lose stride and velocity. We in the audiovisual entertainment landscape cannot be like the Bourbon kings of France of whom Voltaire once remarked that "they had eyes in the back of their head so they always knew where they had been, but never knew where they were going."
A lot of people in our business are nervous about the onrush of new technology. Will this technical witchcraft shrink the future or so fracture it that the result is the same?
The press is full of predictions by experts. Alas, predictions are wobbly ghosts, thinly prepared for accuracy. I will be totally honest in my comments. Which is why I begin with a confession. No one in our industry or anywhere else can with even modest accuracy confide in you the precise dimensions of tomorrow's telecommunications future. No one! If any of you truly believe in long-range economic or other forecasts, beyond 10 days or two weeks, you are enrolled in a defunct mythology. Long range forecasts are usually unwarranted assumptions leaping to preconceived conclusions.
In 1977, Kenneth Olson, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment said "There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home."
In 1927, Jack Warner, head of the Warner Bros movie studio asked "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk."
You get the idea, don't you?
Nonetheless, let me offer you what I believe, what I know, and what I don't know. You be the judge of what it's worth.
Just on the horizon is the widening entrance of the magical new technology. This means new audiovisual transportation services, whose legerdemain verges on sorcery. Complex systems like optic fibre, digital transmission of visual material, new, more powerful satellites, direct to home delivery of programmes via pizza-sized dishes, digital audio and video discs, and doubtless new divices not even now imagined.
While no one is certain when this magic will come, we know it will come. What we don't know is how commonplace it will be, how it will be received by consumers, how much they will be willing to pay, and to what extent viewers will want to be personally involved.
In this new adventure, Europe is rising to the challenge. (Former European Commission president) Jacques Delors' White Paper on Employment envisions the creation of many new audiovisual jobs directly emerging from this New Technology. But that can only be achieved when the marketplace is allowed to take bold investment risks. What governments can do, ought to do, is make the future hospitable to investment. How? By attaching a delicate hand to regulation and by offering fiscal incentives to encourage production.
As you perhaps know, there still resounds in Europe a great and sometimes fiery debate as to the role of government in cinema and television. This is a political controversy in which we, Americans, are observers. However, our views on a free and competitive marketplace are no secret. Government imposed restrictions never work in a brittle landscape such as cinema and television.
Let us understand the unique face and form of movies and television. We are story-tellers. We deal in fragile forms. What we create flies on gossamer wings. We can't research our scripts before they are filmed. How an audience will react to a specific creative work still remains a confusion inside a mystery wrapped in a paradox. In the movie business, until that moment when a new film confronts a live audience in a darkened theatre, one never knows whether it will be embraced or abandoned, not only in the theatre but in other markets as well. It is why our nerve edges are always twanging in anxiety.
It is also why in the empire of make-believe, the audience is king. Those who treat audiences casually put to hazard their cinema future. The only way to build a healthy film and TV industry is to lift the level of creative competition and allow audiences to make the final choices about what they want to watch. This means a choice of every kind of story, the classic and the commercial, the graceful and the absurd.
There is a majestic simplicity in the movie and TV business which can be summed up in two sentences. If you made films that a lot of people want to see, you will do very well. If you make films that few people want to see, you will not do well.
There is one word which runs like a scarlet thread through our industry. That word is talent. Talented people are the architects of the Grand Visual Enticement. But no nation has a monopoly on talent or creative foresight. No country has a patent on how to make fine films.
Let me cite for you what we are doing and will continue to do. For the past year we have met with representatives of the European film community to search out how we can together build a healthy cinema industry in Europe.
We have implemented a plan for film training in Europe by contributing US$2million over five years. Half of these funds are going to the European Film College in Ebeltoft.
A plan is now being devised together with our European colleagues for the deployment of the rest of the funds. This overall joint EU/US training project was born with one objective: To try to help, in modest way, the European artistic and production community so that the next generation of audiovisual artists in Europe will be the most literate, the best educated and the finest story tellers of any in this century.
We are in the process of commencing an internship programme wherein young Europeans will spend working time with American companies to learn the latest in film distribution and marketing techniques.
For more than a decade we have been engaged in a daily struggle to combat piracy which is a cancer in the belly of the cinema world. Thievery of intellectual property knows no nationality. These pirates plunder the creative works of Europeans. American and other filmmakers. That is why we will, in the next few months, begin a collective effort in Europe to share our anti-piracy experiences.
The future of all audiovisual works is put to hazard by the fact that the 1,000th print of a digital movie is as pure as the first copy. We will in meetings with the European film and TV community, among other issues, eliminate our progress in framing parliamentary legislation, which will protect copyrighted works in cyberspace from being avalanched by wholesale digital copying.
This dialogue with the European film and TV community is aimed at yielding joint action on common problems. You may rightly ask why the American industry is involved in all these labours. Because we believe that the healthier the national film and television industries in Europe, the more local citizens will go to the cinema, the more they will watch television, and the more they will rent and buy pre-recorded cassettes and video discs. The market will widen. The market will grow. Everyone will benefit. I would rather have a small part of a large market, than a large share of a small market.
What we do know is that the one common experience shared by people on all the continents is the movie, no matter its national origin. In just about every country in the world, movie stars are better known than presidents and prime ministers. By the turn of this Century, when all continents are linked by the magical tentacles of binary numbers, film libraries in every language will be on global display. It is this world-watching public to whom the creative and distribution community owes the very best that is in us.
We will present the magic of movies, in the words of Tennyson, "...the vision of the world, all the wonder that would be."
Excerpts from a speech by Jack Valenti delivered by William Baker, MPA's president and COO, to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on 21 February 1996. With special thanks to Michael Bartholomew.
