Former senator Chris Dodd, now the chief lobbyist for the movie industry in Washington, is fresh from a licking by the high-tech industry, which scuttled anti-piracy legislation at the 11th hour. But he hasn’t given up the fight.
In 1966, when Jack Valenti left Lyndon Johnson’s White House to become president of the Motion Picture Association of America, his biggest headache was whether the phrase “Hump the hostess” could be uttered in Mike Nichols’s screen adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A couple of decades later, he predicted (erroneously, as it turned out) that video-cassette recorders would be the death of the movie business (and not part of its salvation) because they would allow pirated duplication of content.
Today, Valenti’s heir at the M.P.A.A., former senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, is still grappling with questions of ratings and censorship (witness the recent tussle over the documentary Bully) and with the steady theft of creative content by digital pirates and enterprising teenagers around the world. But he is also contending with something Jack Valenti might only have imagined when he reigned supreme as Washington’s highest-paid lobbyist for its sexiest trade group: a rival global industry in Silicon Valley with its own multi-billion-dollar commercial interests and strong political clout, whose priorities do not always neatly coincide with those of the major movie studios.
That clash played out dramatically in Washington last winter when sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, which had gathered wide support in Congress, suddenly collapsed in the face of unified opposition from the technology industry, its grassroots consumers, and President Obama himself. The measure was intended to fight the profusion of digital storage sites such as Megaupload that carry copyrighted content without paying for it, but tech companies argued that it would stifle free expression and innovation because it could force giants like Google to monitor Web sites and block offenders from showing up in search results. In a telephone chat with me this week, Dodd acknowledged that the bill was dead and not coming back, but insisted that his industry has weathered comparable challenges in the past and that smart leaders of both industries—together with the government—will figure out a way to serve technology and protect content.
Dodd acknowledged sopa was dead and not coming back, but insisted that his industry has weathered comparable challenges in the past—and that together with the government, will figure out a way to serve technology and protect content.
“When Jack took this job, there were three networks, I think 13 freestanding studios, and Lew Wasserman ran the world,” Dodd said, referring to the all-powerful chairman of MCA/Universal, who is often called Hollywood’s “Last Mogul.” Now, he noted, the studios themselves are all part of giant corporations, whose own interests don’t always jibe, in the sense that Sony produces devices and also content, through Columbia Pictures, while Comcast owns cable-television systems and also makes movies through Universal. He rejected casting the current conflict as one between “old” media and “new,” and noted that a company like Pixar uses cutting-edge digital technology to produce content with old-fashioned first-rate storytelling at its heart.
And the latest fight, while bitter, is not the first storm the movies have survived in the past 90-odd years. “First it was radio,” Dodd said, “and the argument that this new industry was going to cause people to stay home and not go to the movies. Then it was a larger one, television, that came along in the 40s and 50s. TV was going to put the studios all out of business. Then it was the VCR. The difference in those cases is they had enough time to think about it and finally realize that technology wasn’t their enemy, it was their friend, and that TV would provide a new venue for their content. I’d make the same case to you today.”
He noted that the Nielsen organization had recently conducted a survey that found people who owned half a dozen personal-entertainment devices of one kind or another went to the movies in a theater 13 times a year, while the average American went only four times. “It sounds counter-intuitive,” Dodd said, “but the reason is that they love content. You need content.”
Dodd noted the irony that both the high-tech and movie industries are headquartered in the same state, “a car ride away” from each other, but said the stakes were global, with more than 60 percent of the American movie industry’s box office now coming from offshore. He insisted that quality content will be vital to technology companies’ intra-industry competition and efforts to expand, and that Silicon Valley can’t say to Hollywood, “‘Produce it, but by the way, we’re going to encourage our customers to steal it.’ It’s not in their self-interest to do it.”
He said the prospect of any new legislation was dead for this year, “and it should be, in my view,” adding, “It’s too hot. There’s too much white noise. We need to get the industry leaders who understand both of these worlds well to say, ‘Let’s get smart here, folks. This ought not to be this pick-a-side thing.’ Because it hurts everyone.”
