Headed since 1966 by former White House staff member Jack Valenti, the MPAA lobbies the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Congress. Through the U.S. Department of State and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the association argues for free trade of television programs around the world.

The MPAA was formed by major Hollywood companies in 1922 as the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Both before and after the name change to the Motion Picture Association of America, the main activity of the association has been political, and the companies have always hired well-connected Washington insiders to represent their interests in the capital.

The first head was President Warren G. Harding’s brilliant campaign manager, Will H. Hays. In his day, Hays became famous for the MPPDA production code, a set of moralistic restrictions governing the content of motion pictures. Hays retired in 1945 and never had to deal with issues concerning television.

Hays’s successor was a former head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eric Johnston. It was Johnston who, beginning in the 1950s, first had to grapple with television, opposing the minimalist trade restrictions then being proposed by nations worldwide, restrictions that would work against his Hollywood corporate clients. Johnston preached free-trade policies that would enable Hollywood to move its filmed and video products into every country around the globe. In so doing, he became a leading advocate for the establishment of the European Common Market, which would create a single body of trade officials to deal with rather than a different set in each country.

Johnston died in August 1963. Ralph Hetzel served as interim head until 1966, when the moguls of the Hollywood studios persuaded White House assistant and Texan Jack Valenti to take the job. Since then, Valenti has had to deal with the coming of cable television and the rise of home video. He has had to adjust to Japanese purchases of the Columbia and Universal studios and to the opening of the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China as vast new television and movie markets. Despite all these changes and many others, his Hollywood employers have grown ever more powerful and the MPAA ever more influential in the television industry.

From his Washington, D.C., office a couple of blocks from the White House, Valenti exercises this power most visibly by inviting Washington power brokers to his lush headquarters. There, stars greet senators, members of Congress, foreign dignitaries, and government regulators. Glitter in workaholic Washington has been always in short supply, and the MPAA has always been its leading provider in the nation’s capital. Valenti asks nothing on these occasions; they serve to keep open the lines of communication on Capitol Hill, into the White House, and through embassies based in Washington.

Valenti has long functioned as the capital’s highest-paid and most effective lobbyist. Throughout the 1980s, for example, he consistently beat back moves to overturn regulations giving the Hollywood production community complete control over the rerun market for former hit network television shows. These “Financial Interest and Syndication” (Fin-Syn) rules had been put in place by President Richard M. Nixon as his revenge against the television networks. Under the Fin-Syn rules, networks could share only minimally in profits from television’s secondary markets. Valenti made sure the rules were retained and enforced far longer than anyone expected and therefore created millions of dollars in additional profits for his Hollywood studio clients.

If necessary, Valenti took his case directly to the president of the United States. When officials working in the administration of President Ronald Reagan proposed the elimination of the Fin-Syn rules, Valenti asked Universal Studio’s head Lew Wasserman to pay a visit to the president. Before becoming head of Universal, Wasserman had been Reagan’s Hollywood talent agent. Valenti and Wasserman convinced the president, who long railed against unnecessary governmental regulations, to retain the Fin-Syn rules and to reverse orders issued by his underlings.

Valenti and the MPAA have also long battled against any rules that restricted Hollywood’s TV exports. The protracted international negotiations that led to a new General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) treaty, for example, were held up so that Valenti could remove television from the negotiating table and block a French proposal for quotas restricting television imports. It was Valenti who stood beside U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor at a February 1995 news conference when a new U.S.–China trade accord was announced. This historic agreement protected television shows from rampant piracy in China, then the largest remaining potential market for television in the world.

In September 2001, Valenti turned 80 years old. During the previous decade, his energy never diminished as he dealt successfully with various issues. He directed the commission that developed parental guidance ratings for television and oversaw legislation requiring the V-chip (which allows users to block access to programming on the basis of its rating) to be placed in all new television sets sold in the United States. The accomplishment of such crucial tasks relied on Valenti’s proven success as a negotiator and were undertaken to satisfy—or appease—various critics of television, including powerful congressional figures. He continued to press for opening markets for television around the world and was particularly successful in China.

The Hollywood-based corporate members of the MPAA under Hays, Johnston, and Valenti have long enjoyed considerable political power at home and abroad, as the MPAA has effectively leveraged the prestige of the film and television business to extract favors and win influence. Following in this hallowed tradition will present a sizable challenge for Valenti’s eventual successor.