Airdate: Theatres Of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood
Are there strings attached? Does the US military actually get a say in Hollywood scripts?
- Published by David Knox
- on
- Filed under Programming
If you’ve seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a say in the script?
Theatres Of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood screens on SBS VICELAND on Monday.
Theatres of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood digs deep into a vast new trove of recently released internal government documents to bring the answers to these questions into sharp focus. Travelling across America, filmmaker and media scholar Roger Stahl engages an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk. In unsettling and riveting detail, he discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture.
From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, Theatres of War uncovers an alternative “cinematic universe” that stands as one of the great Pentagon PR coups of our time. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: how have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?
Monday, 11 November at 8.30pm
One Response
It’s not just the Pentagon that gets in on the act-for instance ‘Braveheart’ used the Irish army for the extras in the numerous large scale battle scenes-and we have also seen what can happen if the Pentagon is displeased-‘Crimson Tide’ was refused Navy support as they disliked the plot of a mutiny on board an SSN.