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Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon shapes and censors the movies by David L.
Robb, a former journalist for Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, is a timely
work. Published in 2004, a year after the US-led occupation of Iraq, it exposes
one of the dark secrets of American movies—military interference in film
production and Hollywood’s acquiescence to it.
While collaboration between the US military and Hollywood, of course, is not
a new phenomenon, few moviegoers realise how much control the Pentagon has over
the American film industry. Citing letters, internal memos and interviews with
producers, writers and directors, Robb’s book contains valuable information
about its insidious and destructive influence on American cinema.
When the US entered World War I, Washington established the Committee of Public
Information, which formulated guidelines for all media to promote domestic support
for the war. The small but growing movie industry readily offered its support,
with the Motion Picture News proclaiming in a 1917 editorial, “[E]very
individual at work in this industry” has promised to provide “slides,
film leaders and trailers, posters ... to spread that propaganda so necessary
to the immediate mobilisation of the country’s great resources.”
While this support diminished when the war ended, directors such as D.W. Griffiths,
King Vidor and others still sought, and were provided with, assistance from
the US army on several films during the 1920s and 30s.
With America’s entry into World War II in 1941, this collaboration expanded
to an unprecedented level. Hollywood studios, working in association with the
Pentagon, rapidly churned out scores of war dramas and documentaries to boost
the American war effort. Military officials provided equipment, personnel and
advice on numerous American movies. Director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight
(1943-44), six powerful documentaries, are perhaps the best known of these films.
After the war, the Pentagon formally established its “film approval”
process and then, in 1948, set up a special movie liaison office, as part of
the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. With the
onset of the Cold War, the US military demanded even greater control over the
movies it “assisted”.
Producers and directors wanting access to military equipment, locations or
personnel, or even Department of Defense (DOD) archival footage—which
was always very costly—were required to have their work vetted by the
Pentagon. Those prepared to reshape their movies in line with Pentagon directives
were given substantial financial and technical help; those unwilling to accept
its dictates were denied any assistance.
Since then, plot and character changes and outright historical falsification
have been the most common demands made by the military, its stated aim being
to encourage movies that boost “recruitment and retention programs”.
Filmmakers are told that excessive foul language, alcohol and drug use, sexism,
racism and other bigotry in the armed forces must be toned down and replaced
with “positive” portrayals. Nor is it unusual for the Pentagon to
demand entire scenes, even central characters, be deleted.
Special military “advisers” are appointed to ensure that filmmakers
do not attempt to introduce non-scripted innovations that depart from Pentagon
directives. As Major David Georgi, the military adviser to Clear and Present
Danger, told Robb: “Always, somewhere in the mind of the producers, they’d
try and turn the picture in the direction that they had originally presented
to us.... It would be my job as a technical advisor to make sure that the movie
did not stray substantially from the original approved version” (Operation
Hollywood, p. 38).
Today this interference is such a commonplace that the military and other agencies
do not even attempt to disguise their operations. The Air Force Entertainment
Liaison Office, for example, now boasts it own web site—Wings over Hollywood—and
in 2001, the CIA appointed its own film industry liaison officer. His role is
to give “advice and guidance” to authors, screenwriters, directors
and producers and encourage a “better understanding of and appreciation
for the Agency”.
Rewriting of history
The list of post-war films subjected to military interference and cited in
Operation Hollywood is too long to include in this review. Phil Stub, the civilian
head of the film liaison office since 1989, for example, has demanded changes
to more than 100 films and television programs in the course of his tenure.
Some of the better-known movies refused help because their directors would
not agree to Pentagon demands include: The Last Detail (1973), Apocalypse Now
(1979), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Born on the Fourth of the July (1989)
and Forrest Gump (1994).
According to Army Major Ray Smith from the film liaison office, Apocalypse
Now’s central story line—a CIA mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz
(Marlon Brando), a rebel US military officer in Vietnam—was “not
realistic”. Smith falsely claimed: “The army does not lend officers
to the CIA to execute or murder other army officers. And even if we did, we
wouldn’t help you make it.” He refused all assistance, forcing director
Francis Ford Coppola to shoot his film in the Philippines.
A few years later, An Officer and a Gentleman was denied all access to military
equipment and locations, because the Pentagon claimed that the movie’s
depiction of a navy officers’ training program was “inaccurate”.
The navy wanted a soldier who makes a Filipino girl pregnant out of wedlock
removed from the story, as well as an attack on a US soldier by a Filipino gang,
on the grounds that both would harm US-Philippines relations.
The military also objected to the rhyming boot camp chants, or “Jody
calls”, by the jogging soldiers in the film. “Flyin’ low and
feelin’ mean, Find a family by the stream. Pick off a pair and hear’em
scream, Cause napalm stick to kids...” was one of the chants the Pentagon
wanted deleted. But Douglas Day Stewart, the film’s screenwriter and associate
producer, knew the cadets were still singing this dehumanising chant when he
researched the story, and refused to remove it.
Thirteen Days (2000) and John Woo’s Windtalkers (2002) are two of the
more recent films cited in Robb’s book.
Thirteen Days dramatises the conflict between John F. Kennedy and the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, particularly Generals Curtis E. LeMay and Maxwell Taylor, during
the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay, a notorious war hawk, wanted Kennedy to
immediately attack Cuba and risk a direct nuclear confrontation with the Soviet
Union. (See: “The Cuban missile crisis in historical perspective: some
thoughts on the film Thirteen Days”).
Strub refused access to US air force jets and other equipment unless LeMay
was portrayed in a less bellicose manner. He also wanted a scene involving the
shooting down of an American U2 reconnaissance pilot over Cuba removed. The
Pentagon maintained this demand in defiance of the historical record: LeMay’s
belligerence and military aggression were well-known and extensively documented,
and the U2 pilot had been posthumously awarded an Air Force Cross for the Cuban
mission, his wife receiving a letter of condolence from JFK himself.
Thirteen Days’ producers correctly refused to compromise and consequently
were forced to shoot their jet footage in the Philippines, use digital effects,
and spend far more on the production than they had planned.
As producer Peter Almond explained in Operation Hollywood: “There’s
a kind of devil’s brew. The problem ... with these big-scale projects
that involve military assets is that we’re kind of dependent on them for
comparatively inexpensive use of the assets in making our stories. So they have
us kind of over a barrel” (p. 56).
Capitulation to Pentagon demands
Windtalkers also ran into trouble with the Pentagon over its portrayal of the
Code Talkers story. Code Talkers were Navajo Indians who joined the US Marines
during WWII and used their native language as a code that the Japanese were
unable to break.
Marine sergeant Joe Enders (Nicolas Cage) is assigned to protect a Code Talker,
with orders to kill him in the event of his capture by the Japanese. This became
a major point of contention with the Pentagon.
Captain Matt Morgan of the Marine film liaison office claimed that the movie’s
portrayals were “un-Marine” and demanded changes. He claimed that
the orders to Enders “to take your guy out” were a “fiction”
and had to be removed. Contrary to Morgan’s claims, however, Marines were
given just such orders. This has been verified by surviving Code Talkers and
the US Congress.
In contrast to Thirteen Days, however, the producers of Windtalkers agreed
to change this aspect of the script. But this was not enough; Strub and Morgan
wanted an entire character, The Dentist, deleted. The Dentist was a deranged
and brutalised soldier who removed gold teeth from dead Japanese soldiers. Morgan
claimed the portrayal was “un-Marine”.
The military also demanded another scene, where Cage kills a surrendering Japanese
soldier with a flamethrower, be excised. Director John Woo shamelessly caved
in to all these demands, despite the fact that the original script was based
on the historical record. When Windtalkers was finally released, a Marine Corp
news release triumphantly claimed that Woo’s movie, not only “has
it all” but is “accurate down to the smallest detail”.
Pentagon interference has not been limited to war movies. Screwball comedy
Stripes (1981), starring Bill Murray as a misfit army recruit, was drastically
changed in pre-production, and children’s television shows such as “Lassie”
and “The Mickey Mouse Club” had some of their scripts rewritten
in order to make the US armed forces more palatable to children.
Dan Goldberg, the producer and co-writer of Stripes, assured the Pentagon that
he planned to make a comedy with “patriotic overtones that would hopefully
have a positive effect on Army recruiting”. But the Army ordered Stripes
to be rewritten from beginning to end.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Griffitts, chief of the army’s Policy and
Plans Division, did not agree with the depiction of drug use in the barracks
and Drill Sergeant Hulka (Warren Oates), he claimed, was too sadistic. In fact,
Hulka was a relatively mild practioner of the brutal methods used in army boot
camps.
On Pentagon orders, all references to the US Army deployments in Latin America
or Mexico were scrapped; jokes about rape and pillage deleted; and various characters
toned down or eliminated entirely. In exchange for access to a Fort Knox location
and permission to use tanks and a C-140 transport plane, Goldberg capitulated
to every Pentagon demand.
Producers of the mindless blockbuster Independence Day (1996) bent over backwards
to gain access to Department of Defense heavy equipment. The Pentagon rejected
these overtures, claiming that the movie did not contain any “true military
heroes” and that Captain Steve Hiller (Will Smith) was too irresponsible
to be cast as a Marine leader (he dates a stripper). Moreover, the invading
aliens were thwarted not by the Marines, but by civilians. While Dean Devlin,
the scriptwriter, agreed to rectify these “flaws”, Independence
Day was given no assistance.
Jurassic Park III (2001), on the other hand, was given two navy Seahawk helicopters,
four amphibious assault vehicles and 80 Marines to storm the beach at the end
of the movie. These were provided after filmmakers agreed to a military “product
placement”—a clearly visible Navy logo on a helicopter which rescues
stranded protagonists, and a line of dialogue by little Eric (Trevor Morgan):
“You have to thank her now. She sent the Navy and the Marines.”
In the original script, it was not the Navy but the State Department that arranged
for a helicopter.
It is well known that overtly militaristic and patriotic films with Rambo-like
heroes boost military recruitment. According to the navy, recruitment of young
men into naval aviation increased by 500 percent after the release of Top Gun.
Such was the military’s enthusiasm for Top Gun that it even established
recruitment booths inside some of the cinemas screening the movie. “These
kids came out of the movie with eyes as big as saucers and said, ‘Where
do I sign up?’” declared Major David Georgi.
In one of the more contemptible examples cited in Operation Hollywood, Paramount
executive Jeffrey A. Coleman offered the Department of Defense (DOD) advertising
space on the video releases of two blockbusters—The Hunt for the Red October
and Flight of the Intruder—in exchange for the scrapping of several million
dollars in production costs owed to the navy.
Robb cites a March 1990 letter to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney in which
Coleman argues that military recruitment advertising in the home-video market,
with its large 15- to 19-year-old age group, would bring major gains. “[T]he
recruiting benefits for the video release will be of major significance, with
particular emphasis on the high priority targets concerning recruits for nuclear
power and aviation roles in the Navy,” Coleman wrote.
While the DOD initially warmed to the idea, it eventually rejected the “offer”
after advice from Grey Advertising, which concluded that both movies were “already
wonderful recruiting tools”. Adding a commercial at the beginning of “what
is already a two-hour recruiting commercial,” Grey Advertising suggested,
was unnecessary and “redundant”.
Political limitations
While Operation Hollywood provides numerous examples of Pentagon censorship
and the subservience of an assortment of film industry executives, directors
and writers over the past five decades, it does not examine the historical context
in which this occurred or the underlying political reasons. Most importantly,
it fails to provide any analysis of the anti-communist witch-hunts in the late
1940s and 50s and the inherent connection between these events and the Pentagon’s
“Operation Hollywood”.
As is well-known, studio chiefs, in collaboration with Washington, not only
established the notorious blacklist in 1947 to purge scores of left-wing directors,
writers and actors from the industry but also produced a string of anti-communist
films, including The Red Menace (1949), I Married a Communist (1950), I Was
a Communist for the FBI (1951) Trial (1952) and others, to promote Cold War
hysteria. This environment laid the foundations for the high-level military
interference in the American movie industry that followed.
Nor does Robb review the vast monopolisation of the entertainment and media
corporations over the past three decades, and the economic roots of their political
support for Washington’s increasingly reckless military ambitions.
Today a handful of giant companies, Disney, AOL-Time Warner, Sony, General
Electric, Murdoch’s News Corporation and Seagram, dominate all aspects
of the American film, television and entertainment industry. While their multi-billion
dollar interests are not identical to those of the Pentagon, there is a clear
recognition that their profits are bound up with Washington’s attempts
to seize control of strategic resources in the Middle East and elsewhere. As
Rupert Murdoch declared in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a successful
American occupation would lower oil prices and benefit the world economy. “This
would be bigger than any tax cut in any country,” he said.
Operation Hollywood ignores these issues and fails to even mention the highly
publicised meeting between Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political
advisor, and the film and television chiefs and the industry’s union bosses
straight after the September 11 terrorist attack on the US. Rove called on those
assembled to assist in Washington’s so-called “war on terror”.
Predictably the entertainment industry chiefs promised to do all they could
to help.
The omission of these and countless other examples of the deepening collaboration
between the entertainment and media corporations is bound up with Robb’s
underlying political perspective—that military meddling and censorship
of the movie industry can be overcome with a bit of pressure and a few minor
reforms.
Congress, Robb writes, must launch a “complete investigation into the
Pentagon’s role in the filmmaking process” while the Writers Guild
of America (WGA) should insist that the employers cannot show writers’
scripts to the military. These actions, combined with consumer boycotts and
class action lawsuits, should be initiated, he says, to force Washington to
establish a transparent tendering process and a “schedule of uniform fees”
for film producers wanting access to military equipment.
These lame appeals seriously underestimate the political power of the US military-industrial
complex and promote dangerous illusions in the very institutions that have legislated
and funded the largest expansion of the military budget in US history, and sanctioned
the most wide-ranging attacks on democratic rights, including freedom of expression.
As Operation Hollywood itself demonstrates, neither Congress nor the WGA have
ever done anything to stop Pentagon interference in the film industry. In fact,
as the book reports, in the almost 60 years since the DOD film liaison office
was established, there have been only two government hearings into Pentagon
interference in the movie industry. Both resulted in whitewashes, clearing the
military of any wrongdoing.
As for the WGA, it has never even issued a public statement opposing Pentagon
censorship of scripts. WGA West president Charles Holland, a former army officer,
told Robb: “If you want people to go into firefights, you’ve got
to romanticise it.”
Operation Hollywood contains a wealth of detailed evidence about Pentagon censorship
and makes it available to a wide audience. Access to this basic information
is certainly important in order to challenge increasing censorship and the escalating
attacks on democratic rights. But Robb’s refusal to state what is—that
the defence of freedom of expression is bound up with a political struggle against
the Bush administration and the US ruling elite as a whole—is a critical
flaw