I’ve been hanging on to this review of Jack Valenti’s posthumous memoir for almost a year. This part is what caught my eye:
The Hollywood portion of his book is strangely without sizzle. The anecdotes are duds (“Not recognizing her was a first-class blunder, but I hadn’t expected Reese Witherspoon to be carrying a small child”), and the author’s insights into stardom don’t rise much above his overall assessment of the Academy Awards: it’s an honor just to be nominated. For all the decades he spent in the movie business, his memoir never really makes him look at home there.
Is that a bad thing? Especially, since he was a regulator of sorts (albeit an industry paid one), it seems appropriate that Jack Valenti wasn’t at home in Hollywood.