“What happened, Jack”, Michael Medved writes, to all those missing moviegoers?“
Despite his unquestioned eloquence, elegance and charm, Mr. Valenti presided over history’s most disastrous decline in the audience for feature films. In 1965, the year before he left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.
In other words, some potent, puzzling force drove more than half of the nation’s film fans to break the habit of movie going.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Chris Kanis notes the difference a change in administrations makes when it comes to Hollywood and foreign policy.
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