Hollywood and the war machine (VIDEO 46 minutes)
Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.
Empire Last Modified: 16 Dec 2010 15:12 GMT
War is hell, but for Hollywood it has been a Godsend, providing the perfect dramatic setting against which courageous heroes win the hearts and minds of the movie going public.
The Pentagon recognises the power of these celluloid dreams and encourages Hollywood to create heroic myths; to rewrite history to suit its own strategy and as a recruiting tool to provide a steady flow of willing young patriots for its wars.
What does Hollywood get out of this 'deal with the devil'? Access to billions of dollars worth of military kit, from helicopters to aircraft carriers, enabling filmmakers to make bigger and more spectacular battle scenes, which in turn generate more box office revenue. Providing they accept the Pentagon's advice, even toe the party line and show the US military in a positive light.
So is it a case of art imitating life, or a sinister force using art to influence life and death - and the public perception of both?
Empire will examine Hollywood, the Pentagon, and war.
Joining us as guests: Oliver Stone, the eight times Academy Award-winning filmmaker; Michael Moore, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker; and Christopher Hedges, an author and the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times.
Our interviewees this week are: Phil Strub, US Department of Defense Film Liaison Unit; Julian Barnes, Pentagon correspondent, LA Times; David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood; Prof Klaus Dodds, the author of Screening Terror; Matthew Alford, the author of Reel Power; Prof Melani McAlister, the author of Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East.
This episode of Empire can be seen from Wednesday, December 22 at the follwing times GMT: Wednesday: 1900; Thursday: 1400; Friday: 0300; Saturday: 1900.
Source: Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes ... 63793.html
Hollywood Hitmen; the Gary Devore incident
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29844
Spielberg: 'I knew something must be happening'
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=29317
Close Encounters with the Pentagon
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=24313
Lights, Camera… Covert Action: Deep Politics of Hollywood
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22528
An offer they couldn't refuse: Hollywood and the CIA
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21484
Hollywood - Weaponised Dream Factory: an Interview with Matthew Alford
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/10/466515.html
HOLLYWOOD - WEAPONISED DREAM FACTORY
AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW ALFORD, AUTHOR OF REEL POWER
Where They Have Holes In Their Souls
http://www.medialens.org/index.php?opti ... icle&id=60
'Reel Power' reviewed in Lobster Magazine
http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/ ... ster60.pdf
Review of 'Reel Power' by Morning Star
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/inde ... full/97424
Matthew Alford on "The Real Deal" with George Galloway
http://www.presstv.ir/program/145148.html
Autopsy Suggests Former Carp Screenwriter Was Murdered
http://www.independent.com/news/2010/au ... s-murdere/
Hollywood Propaganda: New Left Project talks to Matthew Alford, author of “Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy”, about the myth of liberal Hollywood and the power of entertainment as propaganda.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php ... ropaganda/
elfismiles wrote:...The Lies Are Out There: Is Hollywood's love affair with aliens based simply on its desire to make money, or has it been used by the US government and military for their own mysterious ends?
[aka "The Deep Politics of Hollywood: Close Encounters with the Pentagon"]
by Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford / July 2009
http://www.forteantimes.com/features/ar ... there.html
Perception Management: Past and Present
Bizarrely – and for reasons not entirely clear – the U.S. government has taken a keen interest in Hollywood’s flying saucer movies since the early days of the phenomenon. Official efforts to debunk UFOs through media channels originated with the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel which, in 1953, decided that public excitement about flying saucers should be actively discouraged. The panel recommended “That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the… aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired,” and that this should “be accomplished by mass media such as television [and] motion pictures...” with specific reference to Walt Disney.i
Unambiguous evidence for the Robertson Panel's covert impact on media representations of UFOs is found in the CBS TV broadcast of UFOs: Friend, Foe, or Fantasy? (1966), a documentary narrated by Walter Cronkite. In a personal letter addressed to former Robertson Panel Secretary Frederick C. Durant, Dr Thornton Page confides that he “helped organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel conclusions,”ii even though this was thirteen years later and despite the fact that he was personally sympathetic to the existence of flying saucers.
Government concern over, or involvement in, UFO movies continues to be evidenced in more modern Hollywood productions. Take, for example, the 1996 alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day, which, despite its proud championing of American values and leadership, was denied cooperation from the Department of Defense (DoD) due in large part to a plotline concerning Area 51 (a super-secret military facility in the Nevada desert long rumoured to be the testing ground for captured extraterrestrial technologies) and the so-called ‘Roswell Incident.’ The Pentagon specifically requested that “any government connection” to Area 51 or to Roswell be eliminated from the film – a request apparently based on the ridiculous assumption that both the Roswell Incident and Area 51 were not already known to half of America.iii
...
Holloman Air Base and the Alien Carrot
Interestingly, echoes of Emenegger’s deal with the Department of Defense would resound decades later in the production of the aforementioned Transformers (2007) when director Michael Bay was granted the rare privilege of shooting scenes of his alien movie at the Pentagon. The DoD even threw open the gates to Holloman Air Force Base – the highly sensitive location of the alleged alien landing described to Emenegger (and it would do so again for the Transformers sequel). To this day, the only two Hollywood filmmakers to have been granted access to Holloman are Emenegger and Bay – both of whose films dealt with the subject of alien visitation – and this in flat contradiction to the DoD’s policy as stated to other filmmakers that it will not work with UFO-related productions because “UFOs do not exist.”
...
Disney and the Aliens
Intriguing testimony along these lines came from Oscar-winning Disney animator Ward Kimball. Kimball was best known for bringing to life beloved Disney characters such as Jiminy Cricket, The Cheshire Cat and The Mad Hatter, and for redesigning Mickey Mouse in 1938. He also worked as Directing Animator on the Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940).
In 1979, Kimball claimed that in the mid-1950s the USAF had approached Walt Disney himself to request his cooperation on a documentary about UFOs that would help acclimatise the American public to the reality of extraterrestrials. Even more intriguing was that, in exchange for his cooperation, the USAF would apparently supply Disney with real UFO footage for exclusive use in his documentary. According to Kimball, Disney accepted the deal and began work immediately on the USAF project, which would not have been unusual considering Disney’s established relationship with the U.S. government (during WWII Disney made approximately 80 propaganda shorts for the military).
While Disney waited patiently for the USAF to provide the UFO footage, his animators produced conceptual designs of what an alien might look like. Predictably, the offer of the UFO footage was eventually withdrawn, provoking Kimball to challenge the official military liaison for the project, a USAF Colonel who told Kimball that “there was indeed plenty of UFO footage, but that neither [he], nor anyone else was going to get access to it.”xii Needless to say, the project was abandoned and forgotten by all but the few who had worked on it.
The Glittering Robes of Entertainment
In connection with research she was conducting for a UFO documentary in 1983, Emmy award winning filmmaker and journalist Linda Moulton Howe was told by government sources that the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, which depicted an alien landing in Washington D.C., was, in her words, “inspired by the CIA,” and “one of the first government tests of public reaction to such an event.”xiii As farfetched as this may seem, the screenwriter for The Day the Earth Stood Still, Edmund H. North, was actively serving as a Major in the Army Signal Corps just months before being selected by 20th Century Fox to pen the script. During his time in the Corps, North had been in charge of “training and educational” documentaries, and later established himself as a Hollywood scribe of patriotic war films including Sink the Bismark! (1960) and Submarine X-1 (1968), as well as Patton (1970), for which he received an Oscar – all of which raises the possibility that he maintained an official or quasi-official role in the government’s cinematic propaganda campaigns throughout his career.
The man responsible for overseeing the production of The Day the Earth Stood Still – 20th Century Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck – was himself in charge of an Army Signal Corps documentary unit during the Second World Warxiv and said that, “If you have something worth while to say, dress it up in the glittering robes of entertainment and you will find a ready market… without entertainment, no propaganda film is worth a dime.”xv
Matthew Alford is a lecturer in the department of Drama: Theatre, Film, and Television at the University of Bristol. He is writing a book about propaganda in Hollywood called "Projecting Power: American Foreign Policy and the Hollywood Propaganda System"Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, Pluto Press, 2010.
http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745329826&
PART ONE: CONTROLLING THE DREAM FACTORY
1 Hollywood Screened
2 Hollywood Deactivated
PART TWO: POWER PROJECTED
3 War Films
4 Comedies
5 Action Adventure
6 Science Fiction
7 Political Drama
8 The Low Budget Battlefield
PART THREE: REEL VIOLENCE
9 Conclusions
Endnotes
Filmography
Index
Matthew Alford MPhil, PhD has taught at the Universities of Bath and Bristol and is now an independent scholar working on issues of American cinema, power and politics.
Robbie Graham is associate lecturer in film at Stafford College
Body of Lies: The CIA's involvement with US film-making
Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham / The Guardian, Nov 14, 2008
... Body of Lies ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov ... dley-scott
Lights, Camera… Covert Action: The Deep Politics of Hollywood
by Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham / Global Research, January 21, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=11921
The Deep Politics of Hollywood: In the Parents` Best Interests
by Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham / Global Research, February 26, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=12465
"A Propaganda Model for Hollywood", Westminster Papers for Communication and Culture, Vol 6(2), 2009.
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/__data/ass ... Alford.pdf
* Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford, "Spielberg's Saucer Secrets", Filmfax: The Magazine of Unusual Film and Television, July 2010.
* Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford, "District 9 is lucky to have avoided a close encounter with the Pentagon" Guardian online, September 4th 2009.
* Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford, "The Lies Are Out There", Fortean Times, July 2009.
* Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford, "The Power Behind the Screen", New Statesman, January 29th, 2009.
* Matthew Alford and Robbie Graham, "An Offer They Couldn't Refuse", Guardian, November 14, 2008.
* Matthew Alford, "Noam Chomsky, Comedian?", Chortle, January 21st 2008.
* Scott Lucas interviewed by Matthew Alford, "Celebrating Dissent: Scholarship and Politics in the New American Century", 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, Issue 13, Spring 2004.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... Journalism
[b]Primary sources for the keyword hijacking theory
viewtopic.php?p=354068#p354068
