In 1966 , the transformation became apparent, when Jack Valenti replaced Hays' successor, Eric Johnston as the new president of the MPAA. The son of a deeply religious clerk at the county tax office in his hometown of Houston, and grandson of Italian immigrants, Valenti used his tremendous likeability and keen political eye to graduate from Harvard business school and eventually become President Lyndon B. Johnson's special assistant between 1963 and 1966. His familiarity with high-ranking political circles in Washington as well as his reputation for going about his work with “a shrewdly underplayed savvy” is what initially attracted the heads of studio to him. As Richard Heffner, who worked closely with Valenti put it “He came to serve their interest. He came as their lobbyist” .
At the heart of the new struggle for Valenti and his MPAA, or so it appeared, was the simple fact that the Hays Code had become dated. What was considered socially acceptable language and film content had evolved since 1930 but the code had not. His ultimate goal was to strike a balance: Valenti felt, initially, that he did not want to limit the artist's freedom but that he had to instate some kind of policing service to adhere to social and governmental pressures. He quickly changed his tune however, proclaiming at a press conference in the late nineteen sixties that “No film can ever survive the brazen hiss of public scorn,” . Valenti eventually did what he thought was best for his employers.
He finished by creating the Motion Picture Rating System of 1968. There were originally four ratings: G (Suggested For General Audiences), M (Suggested For Mature Audiences), R (Restricted Persons Under 16 Not Admitted Unless Accompanied by Parents or Adult Guardians) and X (Persons Under 16 Not Admitted) . Although he had initially been opposed to a rating system, particularly one based on age, Valenti publicly sang the praises of his new policy as a near perfect balance, resolving all of the quarries at hand . He would please his critics all the while allowing the industry to evolve with the times.
The simple problem of remaining current however does not fully encapsulate the issue that pushed Valenti to create this system. Much like in the thirties, there was growing interest within every level of society (the viewers, local and federal government) to instate some form of a rating system even if - need be - by the government: “Senator Margaret Chase Smith pushed for a movie classification system on the national level” and “In Dallas, a film classification board, the first of its kind in the United States attempted to use viewer age as the criterion for rating the appropriateness of films” . Despite fairly unanimous opposition to strong government involvement of any sort, Valenti feared that the brewing debate over the ratings would result in the studios' loss of power and/or money, particularly in the area of distribution . So once again the MPAA updated their system by adhering to the demands of government and population to avoid the loss of money and influence. Valenti's next hurdle however would not be so easily dealt with or manipulated.
Unions, McCarthy and The Blacklist
In the forties there were two large labor strikes. The first was the Disney strike of 1941. The workers, angered by the empty promises of profit sharing on Snow White and insulted by various legal maneuvers by Disney lawyers, began a strike on May 29 . The Strike lasted five weeks after which the labor won a clear victory in that the negotiations mediator, sent by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt sided with the Union on “nearly every issue” .
The second and substantially more violent was the Warner Brothers strike, which began in March of 1945. In the years preceding the strike, the Set Decorators had been floating between several official unions and representation organizations. “In 1937 seventy-seven Set Decorators broke away from the IATSE to form their own association, the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators (SMPID,) and negotiated an independent contract with the Producers”. Briefly, after a long and diluted series of affiliations and structural changes within the set decorators' unionization, the dispute stemmed from the Producers' unwillingness to recognize Union Local 1420 as the set decorators' official bargaining agent in 1945. When the studios then sought to solve the problem by finding new painters and carpenters, things took a turn for the worst: “On October 5th, some 300 strikers gather at Warner Bros. main gate at 4 A.M. on a typically warm day during this pivotal month. Shortly thereafter, strikebreakers, Chicago goons and county police attacked. They were armed with chains, bolts, hammers, six inch pipes, brass knuckles, wooden mallets and battery cables. The county sheriffs marched two and three abreast, steel-helmeted and reinforced with tear gas masks, and night sticks. Some carried 30-30 Garrand rifles and two were weighted down with an arsenal of tear gas bombs,” . Needless to say, the situation was grim for all the parties involved, and the political headway that the studios had made with the improvement of the ratings system was beginning to dissipate.
