Al Jazeera English

I recently did an interview for Al Jazeera English regarding the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon. It's showing on The Listening Post beginning Friday, August 3 and runs twice daily for a week. Here's a schedule. You can watch it online. They also post Listening Post clips on YouTube, so I will probably link that later.

One commenter on this blog wondered where he/she could find a more journalistic discussion of Hollywood's relationship with the Pentagon and/or the executive:

I just found this site and some of the info about your new movie. I remember noticing years ago that for some reason Hollywood began making military-friendly movies again. This was ramped up a good bit during the Clinton years. Your postings seem to be heavily academic. I would like to see something a bit more journalistic such as: who were the persons who drove the making of all the key military-friendly movies since, say, Tom Cruise's "Top Gun." Do these persons have any obvious, or less than obvious, connections to national right-wing and GOP political organizations, think tanks, etc.? My recollection is that the ball really got going in Hollywood after that flick.

I hope to address some of these questions in my upcoming book, and I do so to some extent in my film. There are a number of other resources out there, however. I would first suggest picking up David Robb's book, Operation Hollywood. Robb is a journalist, and this book is written for a general audience. To my knowledge, it is the only comprehensive treatment of its kind. Robb also did a short documentary by the same name for the BBC, which you can watch on google video. If you would like to sample the book, I make a reading available to my class online. You can download the 8MB pdf file if you like.

A number of producers and directors regularly step through Washington's revolving door. Jerry Bruckheimer is high on the list, as is Tony Scott. The commenter above is correct that Top Gun (1986) was a turning point in military-Hollywood cooperation. Both Bruckheimer and Scott were involved with it. The case of Lionel Chetwynd is interesting. I've excerpted a slice of my book below that traces his biography.

Indeed, the Pentagon and NBC collaborated immediately after the Persian Gulf War on a made-for-TV film called The Heroes of Desert Storm (1991). Disregarding reality altogether, the film intercut news footage with scripted material read by both professional actors and actual Gulf War veterans. The effect of the film is to annihilate the viewer’s capacity to distinguish between fact and fiction. Moreover, this appears to have been the intended consequence. A disclaimer notes up front that, in the interest of something called “realism,” “no distinction is made among these elements.” The decision to air a made-for-TV movie was a natural one given that the Gulf War had already aired in made-for-TV form.

The brain behind Heroes, writer Lionel Chetwynd, was perhaps one of the main authors of the support-the-troops fervor that eventually eclipsed public debate during the Persian Gulf War. Chetwynd penned the high profile film The Hanoi Hilton (1987), which helped burn the POW/MIA mythology permanently into the public memory as the prime motive of the American ravishing of Vietnam. Chetwynd also wrote and produced a television series for the A&E Network called To Heal a Nation, another Vietnam tale of the trials of U.S. soldiers, this time on the home front. These depictions of Vietnam dovetailed precisely with Reagan administration attempts to reverse the Vietnam Syndrome by appealing to the “cult of the soldier.” In fact, Chetwynd had served on Reagan’s campaign team in 1980. Naturally, he was the man best positioned to later direct a celebration of the Persian Gulf War in cooperation with the George H.W. Bush administration. The Heroes of Desert Storm even opens with a special address tailored for the movie from President Bush, who urges us to think not of the Generals who make history, but of the average soldiers who are the real heroes of Desert Storm. Some years later, after President George W. Bush appointed him to serve on the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Chetwynd went on to direct DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003) for Showtime. This film focused on the heroism of President George W. Bush and his cabinet, what the Independent called “a piece of myth-making to put the propagandists of every tin-pot totalitarian regime to shame.” Following this film, Chetwynd wrote the straight-to-video Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at which the Brain … Begins to Die (2004), a rejoinder to Michael Moore’s 2003 theatrical release critical of the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11. Chetwynd’s biography captures two distinct trajectories of the spectacular war: a collapse of screen power into military power and a post-ideological refocusing of public attention onto the war machine itself.

As far as think tanks, Karl Rove met with Hollywood brass immediately after 9/11 to discuss ways that the industry could assist with the "war on terror." Here's a snippet from the Washington Post, November 12, 2001. Jack Valenti, former president of the MPAA, has been a long-term supporter of neo-con politics.

HEADLINE: Hollywood's White House War Council;
A Bicoastal Meeting of Minds Is Bipartisan, Too

BYLINE: Rene Sanchez, Washington Post Staff Writer

Top executives from every major Hollywood studio and other titans in the entertainment industry emerged from a private discussion with senior White House adviser Karl Rove this afternoon vowing to play a broad, but still vague, role in the nation's fight against terrorism.

But Rove did come with a seven-point agenda of broad themes for Hollywood to ponder, suggesting that the industry find creative ways to urge Americans to support the war with volunteerism, to raise the morale of U.S. troops, and to illustrate that "this is a war against terrorism, not Islam."

Sherry Lansing, chairwoman of Paramount Pictures, called the meeting "the beginning of the beginning" and said industry executives would meet again soon to work on specific plans. She and other executives said they stressed to Rove that they were not interested in producing propaganda, but wanted to help.

Participants in today's meeting, which ended slightly earlier than had been planned, also said that at no point were any political deals suggested for enlisting the help of Hollywood, which has been under fire in Congress for the violent content it produces in films and television and fears new regulation.

"Nothing was discussed that in any way touched a nerve," said Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co.'s president.

But today's gathering, which Rove initiated, drew more than 20 Hollywood heavyweights -- top power brokers in film and television as well as the leaders of the industry's creative unions. Afterward, they stood side by side and said they were determined, for once, to work together to help the country during wartime.

Valenti, for one, expressed interest in developing movies or public-service announcements to be shown here and overseas that emphasize that the war on terrorism is not an attack on Muslims as well as films that have themes about "how America has been the most generous country in the world."

If we want to look at where the rubber really meets the road, in my opinion, we have to look at what kinds of stories are being told. From there we can work backward through the political economy of the story production. While it's interesting to search out individuals, cabals, and think tanks, I think it's more productive to look at organizations and how they benefit from certain depictions. Clearly, there is a symbiotic benefit between Pentagon PR and Hollywood's need for authentic props in war films. But these public relations pairings stretch far beyond Hollywood into a number of entertainment venues and the news. War can be an extremely profitable venture for those who would spend taxpayer money for, say, securing the corporate rights to fossil fuel supplies. The entertainment industries have increasingly become handmaidens for getting the taxpayer (and the taxpayer's conscience) to go along with these ventures. The trick for military PR is releasing the right kinds of stories - those that will both deliver the entertaining war and "stay on message." Someone like Walt Disney's Bob Iger is ultimately looking out for his company and the interests of shareholders. Disney's access to the Pentagon public relations machine, unless publicly denounced, is more likely than not going to be a profitable one. It makes business sense to keep these channels open. And of course the Pentagon is more than happy to oblige.

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