When the late Jack Valenti held court, with his silver mane, White House contacts and celebrity friends, the Motion Picture Assn. of America boasted the Washington lobbying establishment's equivalent of the double feature: political clout playing alongside Hollywood glitz.
Politicians and other power brokers snapped up invitations to private screenings of new movies in the MPAA's 70-seat theater just two blocks from the White House. Members of Congress and foreign dignitaries sipped champagne and mingled with movie stars -- and later might listen attentively when Valenti lobbied on industry issues.
Those heady days seem to be giving way to a less glamorous and less expansive future.
Like a director who has just been told that his ambitious movie project must be scaled back, the Hollywood trade association recently took a big hit when its member studios cut as much as 20%, or about $20 million, from its budget, leading to staff layoffs in Los Angeles and Washington.
The cuts come just when the association needs money to cope with myriad problems spawned by digital and other technological changes, including virulent piracy of the studios' most valuable products: movies and TV shows.
As if to reinforce the point, in recent weeks the Internet has been crackling with a pirated copy of the big summer film, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," a leak so troubling that the FBI launched an investigation.
The pirating of "Wolverine" may not ultimately hurt it at the box office, if early surveys of enthusiastic audiences are indicative of how the film will perform.
Nonetheless, the companies behind Hollywood's lobbying activities today encompass a lot more than just the movie business.
The organization's members -- 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. -- are owned by multimedia giants whose interests go beyond the parochial views of Hollywood. Although it was once a relatively simple task to get all the studios on the same page, today the MPAA finds itself sometimes having to negotiate compromises among the competing agendas of its members' parent companies. Most of the companies now employ their own high-paid in-house lobbyists, who need to worry about the interests of only one company rather than six.
