The encomiums began about as you would expect at the Thursday afternoon memorial service in Hollywood for Jack Valenti, the legendary chief of the Motion Picture Association of America. Media moguls like Peter Chernin of the News Corporation and Alan Horn of Warner Brothers affectionately recalled Mr. Valenti’s intellect, loyalty, friendship and sage counsel.

Then his daughter Alexandra delivered a highly personal eulogy that not only pulled back the curtain on Mr. Valenti, a consummately prepared and famously discreet man, but also took some shots at his colleagues, the news media and the current administration in Washington.

“By the way, he dropped the F-bomb plenty of times,” she said.

Mr. Valenti’s public persona has been all but carved into Mount Rushmore since his death April 26, but his daughter’s eulogy brought it into high relief with the acid wit of one who had studied him in extreme closeup.

A photographer and director, Ms. Valenti, 38, nervously said she wished she had actually read her father’s book on public speaking, rather than merely searching for her name in the index. (“I learned that from him,” she said.)

“My father’s death has rocked me,” Ms. Valenti went on, saying it felt “like an acid trip, without any of the psychedelic fun.” She said she now understood what Mr. Valenti had meant when he advised her to “hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm.”

She recalled taking a call from Warren Beatty, in which the actor said that her father’s stroke had been “really inconvenient for me.” Ms. Valenti said she had retorted that Mr. Beatty had some nerve: “You got two pages in his book, and I got two paragraphs.”

This was clearly not the eulogy people were expecting.

Ms. Valenti said her father had called her “my tumultuous daughter,” and there was much history, and much love, between them. “I was a moody and emotional kid,” she said. “But thanks to my lovely team of therapists, that he shelled out for, I’m able to embrace our past.”

Her father was also the kind of man, she said, “who shows up at his daughter’s birthday party at 1 a.m. so he can give her a hug.”

Saying her father had “more energy than me and all of you,” Ms. Valenti lamented what her father would miss: movies, elections and “the conversations about how incompetent the president is.”

“I hope I’m not betraying his confidence,” she quickly added.

Mr. Valenti clearly loomed as large in his daughter’s eyes as he did in Hollywood’s.

“He had a not-so-conscious belief in his own immortality,” she said. “He used to say to us, ‘If I die.’ And I believed him.”