Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
Veteran Hollywood lobbyist and former US presidential adviser Jack Valenti will write a book detailing his extraordinary career, the entertainment industry press said Monday.
The 84-year-old Tinseltown insider has sold the rights to his memoirs to Crown/Harmony Books, a New York-based division of Random House publishers, which plans to release the book in November, Daily Variety said.
The book will cover Valenti's impoverished youth in Texas and track his remarkable life as an aide to president Lyndon B. Johnson and his long tenure as head of the powerful lobby group of the Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Association of America.
The book is also expected to give Valenti's account of the fateful November 1963 day in Dallas, Texas when he witnessed the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.
After Kennedy was shot, Valenti accompanied the new president Johnson and Kennedy's body back to Washington aboard Air Force One after Johnson asked him to join his administration as a special assistant at the White House.
The memoir will also detail Valenti's experiences as a World War II bomber pilot, his studies at Harvard University and his career as a political consultant.
"This is not a get-even book," Valenti told Variety. "There may be three or four people I vent a little spleen on, but it takes too much energy to be vengeful or hateful."
When asked whether anyone in Hollywood should be worried about his upcoming life story, Valenti said: "Hell, no. I just have a lot of interesting stories about some famous people."
Valenti retired nearly two years ago as head of the MPAA, a job he held for four decades during which he doggedly defended the interests of Hollywood's giant movie studios.
In 1968, he instituted the voluntary movie rating system, under which US films are classified by certain letters depending on the general suitability of their content, to replace an outdated censorship body.
ml/pmh
AFPEntertainment-US-film-people-Valenti
AFP 032038 GMT 04 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
