Hollywood, the rating system and the movie-going public.

• Author: Valenti, Jack

No on can force people to watch films to which they object. The audience chooses what it wants to see by buying tickets.

Hollywood is glamorous and dazzling, but thoroughly misunderstood by many of those who write about that mesmerizing place, and surely by most of the public who are curiously fascinated by it. For starters, the "Hollywood" most folks refer to died some 40 years ago and long has been interred in Forest Lawn Cemetery. That Hollywood was inhabited by movie moguls of varying and diverse temperaments, presiding over a fiefdom of studios in which all creative people were under contract, doing the bidding of the titans who ran the studios. Those were the beguiling golden days, or so film historians maintain.

They also were the days of unyielding studio control. The studios owned the production facilities as well as the theaters where movies were shown. So, when Will Hays, my predecessor as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), constructed the Hays Production Code, wherein the content of all movies sternly was monitored, the all-powerful studio bosses enforced the Code. If any producer /director was unable to get a Seal of Approval for his or her film, the result was exile from the marketplace. No theater could be found to exhibit the feature.

That hegemony ended in 1950, when the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust case against the studios, and won. The studios were forced to sell their theaters to independent businessmen, and thus was shattered the vise-like grip of Hollywood on the content of movies. Since individual entrepreneurs now owned the movie houses, the big studios no longer could enforce the Hays Production Code, which collapsed. If anyone mourns its death, the villains are government anti-trust lawyers and the Federal courts.

Today, Hollywood is inhabited by seven major studios, a dozen mini-majors, 30 or 40 smaller distributors, and thousands of independent producers, directors, and writers, many of whom have their own production companies. It is Adam Smith's world come to full blossom, where the ferocity of competition is ceaseless, frenzied, often disorderly, and the marketplace is the arbiter of what succeeds or fails. No one company or group of companies has the power to beckon or banish.

Those who write scripts, act in the resulting movies, and direct them, along with the artisans and craftsmen deployed in the making of films and studios that green-light, finance, market, and...