Chris Dodd, former Democratic Senator from Connecticut and current Motion Picture Association of America chairman, called the NRA’s attack on film violence “predictable.”
“You go back over the years and people suggested comic books,” Dodd said during a talk at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Friday, his first major speech since becoming MPAA head.
Dodd is best known for his role in the passage of Dodd-Frank, the banking legislation that regulated credit card fees and led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He is now the head of the MPAA, the movie industry lobbying firm and regulatory body.
Dodd may be a progressive, but the MPAA exec said that Americans should have the freedom to choose what type of movies they see, violent or not. The former Senator advised people to do their research before they spend their money on a movie ticket.
“People ought to have information about what they’re going to see when they walk in, so they can make that choice,” he said.
Sticking up for the First Amendment, he said, “You start getting in the business here of trying to regulate content and that’s a very slippery slope.”
According to Dodd, it’s the parents’ responsibility to control what their children are watching.
He also took up for the controversial film “Zero Dark Thirty” arguing that “it’s a movie,” “not a documentary.”
“My view is they wanted to tell this story of what transpired over a decade that ultimately led to the successful appehension and the killing of Osama Bin Laden,” Dodd said. “Part of that story involved enhanced interrogation techniques and you saw them on the film.”
He added there may have been “even greater citicism for disregarding something that was used.”
In Dodd’s view, the film honored “the incredible Americans whose names some of us are never going to know who get up every morning and go to work to keep us safe.”
And while Dodd considers regulating movie content a “slippery slope,” in 2004, during his time in the Senate, he voted to extend the assault weapons ban for another 10 years. Ironic to defend the First Amendment, but attack the Second.
