It’s a sweltering Friday afternoon in August, and most of official Washington has cleared out of town. In Los Angeles, the motion picture capital of the world, movie studio executives have jetted off to vacation hot spots.
But Dan Glickman, whose job is dealing with the intersection of Hollywood and politics as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, is at work in his downtown D.C. office, in a suit and tie.
Glickman spent the previous night trapped at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, unable to return from a business trip after a line of thunderstorms caused dozens of flights to be canceled. With every hotel booked, he faced the prospect of sleeping on an airport cot until relatives living nearby offered him a place to sleep.
It’s hard to imagine Glickman’s silver-haired predecessor, Jack Valenti, doing anything more strenuous in August than kicking back with high-powered Hollywood friends. But these days it takes a lot more than glamour to lobby for the movie industry, and central casting couldn’t have done any better than the well-connected Glickman.
“I like the job,” said Glickman, 62, a former Democratic congressman from Kansas who served six years as President Clinton’s agriculture secretary. “I hope [the studio executives] think I’m doing the job, too.”
“Dan has big shoes to fill,” said Carol Melton, who heads global policy operations for Time Warner, one of the six major movie studios represented by the MPAA. “He has grown into the job.”
Three years after he was tapped to replace Valenti, the decidedly unglamorous Glickman still deals with the endless comparisons to his predecessor, whose 38-year tenure at the helm of the MPAA is the stuff of legend.
“Coming in, replacing Jack, was obviously a very significant challenge and opportunity,” said Glickman, whose son is a movie producer. “But his big point to me when I took the job was, you are not me, don’t try to be like me, you don’t want to be me. And he was right. We are different people.”
The flamboyant Valenti, who died at age 85 in April, had close ties with the major studio heads and many major movie stars. His office walls were plastered with photographs of himself and seemingly every Hollywood legend who ever graced the silver screen. He won favor with lawmakers by inviting them to private screenings of upcoming movies, often with a star or two present to add glitter.
Glickman occupies Valenti’s old first-floor office, but the movie-star photos are gone, replaced by pictures of Glickman with his politician friends and mementos from his long career as a public servant. The central photo is a portrait of the Clinton Cabinet in which he served.
Among the few Hollywood touches is a picture of actor Will Smith, but he’s shown shaking hands with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y., at a congressional event to promote the importance of the movie industry on the economy.
While Valenti concentrated on promoting American movies overseas and guarding against censorship, Glickman is mainlyconcerned with the more technical issue of movie piracy. The MPAA is pressing Congress to pass legislation aimed at curbing the growing movie theft made possible by the Internet, which the industry says costs it more than $42 billion annually.
“The biggest challenge he has right now is to guard the copyrights of his member companies,” Sony Pictures lobbyist Jim Free said.
Glickman is in the right position to solicit Congress for help, another lobbyist said, because he has built close ties over three decades with the most important players on Capitol Hill.
“Dan brings his own really special set of skills to the job at hand,” said Matt Gerson, head lobbyist for Universal Music Group who also spent years lobbying for Universal Pictures. “He served with a number of the people who are now committee chairmen — Ed Markey, Charlie Rangel, Max Baucus. I can promise you when these guys were freshman congressmen they were [Dan’s] good friends. That is just the way Dan is.”
Markey, who chairs the Energy and Commerce subcommittee that deals closely with Glickman, arrived in Congress on the same day as Glickman in 1976.
“Dan has fabulous relationships with Congress,” Markey said. “He is a one-man multinational advocate for the movie industry, and he has an in-depth knowledge of every one of the industry’s issues.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., added that Glickman is also “widely respected for his intellect and integrity.”
In July, Glickman put those congressional ties to use, getting the Senate to insert a provision in a higher-education bill that would require the 25 college campuses most plagued by Internet movie piracy to show they were taking steps to combat the problem. Piracy on college campuses costs the movie industry $500 million a year, according to the MPAA.
Glickman wants college campuses to install filtering software on campus computers that wouldprevent movie piracy. So far, only a handful of colleges and universities have agreed to do it.
Glickman attempted to get language inserted into the higher-education bill that would have mandated the filtering devices, but it didn’t make the cut after colleges and universities protested.
“There was some feeling on their part that perhaps we were pushing harder than they would have liked to have seen us push, but the problem is too serious,” Glickman said, adding that 44 percent of all movie piracy in the United States occurs on college campuses.
Glickman was serving as director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University when he was tapped for the MPAA job by the studio heads.
Lawmakers in the Republican-led Congress at first scratched their heads at the choice, not only because Glickman is a Democrat, but also because he lacked any connection with Hollywood.
“A lot of people say, ‘What does this guy in the soybean business know?’” he said. “And I dealt with infected buffalo guts!”
For those who do not understand why Glickman’s resume fit the MPAA’s mission, he draws parallels between the movie industry and his old job representing crops and livestock.
“I used to promote food for the digestive system, and now I promote food for the soul, food for the heart,” said Glickman, a self-described movie buff. “And they are both big export industries.”
Glickman’s experience selling U.S. agriculture around the world helped land him the MPAA job, he said, because foreign ticket and DVD sales are such an enormous part of the business.
“A big part of the reason I was brought into the job was because I have had some international experience, being an ambassador for the food industry,” Glickman said.
His office includes one artifact from the Valenti era — a gigantic pre-World War II globe that Valenti treasured as he traveled the world to promote American movies.
Glickman’s travels abroad are now more likely to include efforts to prevent illegal movie downloads, the focus of a trip to Australia in August.
Like Valenti, he holds a deep love of the film industry and an appreciation for its importance in the world.
“The goal of this industry is to make people happy and have enjoyment,” Glickman said. “So many other things that people do in life don’t do that.”
Dan Glickman’s tips for success
1 Self -deprecating humor is the most basic quality to get people to like you. If they like you, they’ll do business with you.
2 Don’t surprise people. That is the surest way to make enemies. Even if they don’t agree with you, you have to let them know what you are doing.
3 Return phone calls. The surest way to make people think you are inaccessible is to not call them back.
4 Treat everyone on the food chain the same way. That low-level congressional staffer turns out to be the congressman some day.
5 Be authentic and genuine. I like to think I’m the same guy I was growing up in Kansas.
