spy films

John Harrison of Sputnik radio's Level Talk invited Matt and I on to talk about National Security Cinema and the relationship between Hollywood and Washington.

This week I am joined by Robbie Martin and Pearse Redmond to review and analyse the low budget conspiracy thriller Operation Terror. We analyse the plot – where a member of the Council on Foreign Relations recruits a CIA officer to prepare and carry out the 9/11 attacks – and why this is unrealistic.

I recently obtained a copy of the notorious 2004 CIA recruitment video featuring Alias star Jennifer Garner. This is not available anywhere else online, and the CIA did not release it in response to my FOIA request (they claimed to be unable to find a copy). Basically, after a lot of screwing around I managed to download a version from an archive of the page on the CIA's web site.

After numerous requests I have uploaded (most of) the documents we used to write National Security Cinema in one handy zip file so that people don't have to search around all over this site to find them.

A few weeks ago Matt and I were invited to Portsmouth University to give a presentation on our research and analysis for National Security Cinema.

Good friend Pearse Redmond invited Matt and I on his radio show to talk about our new book National Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Go

Executive Action is perhaps the most famous conspiracy thriller about the John Kennedy assassination, with the exception of Oliver Stone's JFK. Recently released CIA records in the CREST database show that they were keeping an eye the production and how it was being received. The articles even detail how the CIA may have threatened or tried to stop the production of the film.

Goldeneye is possibly the best of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films, but like two others in the Brosnan period it relied on US military support. This entailed the Pentagon reviewing the script and demanding two changes - one political, one promotional - in exchange for helping to shoot one brief scene with uniformed soldiers and military vehicles.

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It is with some pride that I can announce that the American Journal of Economics and Sociology has today published an edition featuring not just one, not just one and a half but two articles that I wrote.

While I have written about 1973 thriller Scorpio before, documents made available on the CIA CREST database shed new light on this, the first movie to film at Langley. The CIA were not just spying on media coverage of the film as it developed but also had assets within the MPAA keeping an eye on things.

Pearse and I were recently invited onto Black Op Radio with Len Osanic to talk about The CIA and Hollywood. We mostly discussed Ed Lansdale's involvement in The Quiet American (1958), which butchered the original book in part as a result of Lansdale's influence on writer/director Joseph Mankiewicz.

Die Another Day is widely considered to be one of the worst James Bond films ever made. It's the one with the invisible car in the ice cave and Halle Berry. The production got limited supported from the US Marine Corps, who recently released a short folder to me from their entertainment liaison office archive.

Paranoid thriller Enemy of the State provoked such a reaction within the NSA that they instigated a large PR campaign to counter public perceptions of a surveillance agency running wild. NSA emails show that even while the movie was being made, agency employees were unhappy about the producers filming from the skies over Fort Meade. They also show that the NSA were asked to provide help on the production, but refused.

The CIA'>

In 1969 the CIA obtained a copy of The CIA, a screenplay being developed at Universal Studios, written by William Woodfield and Allan Balter. Woodfield and Balter were perhaps best known for writing the TV series of Mission: Impossible, until they had a well-publicised falling out with series creator Bruce Geller.

I triumphantly returned to my favourite comedy show Uncle the Podcast to review the film Central Intelligence.

In this month's podcast for patreon subscribers I review Rogue One: A Star Wars Cash-In. The film is a spy movie/war movie about the rebellion stealing the plans for the Death Star and has a much darker tone and grittier visuals than most Star Wars films.

Charlie Wilson's War reduces nearly 10 years of the Soviet-Afghan War into an hour and forty minutes of Sorkin-scribed witty dialogue focusing almost entirely on how one alcoholic, womanising congressman helped to raise the billions of dollars that were given to the mujahideen to fight the godless Commie invaders.

Scorpio holds the dubious distinction of being the first film to be allowed to shoot at the CIA headquarters in Langley. Since then the likes of Patriot Games and Argo are among a very small number to have been granted that privilege.

Author and publicist Richard Condon is best remembered for writing The Manchurian Candidate - a biting futuristic satire in which a Medal of Honor winning soldier is brainwashed by the Soviets to try to assassinate the US president.

Adding to the British government departments who have provided assistance to the James Bond franchise, the now defunct Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have released documents on the filming of a scene for Skyfall at their headquarters in Whitehall.

Richard Klein is one of the most important people in the entertainment industry that you have never heard of - a former State Department employee who now works for McLarty Associates - an elite Washington DC law firm - as their liaison to Hollywood.

Rounding off this second season we take a look at SALT, the 2010 action thriller starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA officer accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. SALT is one of the less well known CIA-assisted productions, but along with technical advice from former CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle the producers also consulted with the CIA themselves in a video conference.

Robbie Martin is our final guest for this season as we dissect the 2012 docudrama Zero Dark Thirty. We discussed the difficulty in defining what kind of film this is - somewhere between a spy thriller, a documentary and a dry European art house movie.

The Department of Defense maintains a database summarising its collaboration with Hollywood productions. The master list for this database was released to me two years ago as the DOD Film List and since then I have obtained a handful of entries.

James Evan Pilato is our latest guest as we dissect the 2009 Disney UFO adventure Race to Witch Mountain. We start off looking at Disney as a corporation - its long standing interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials, the connections to government agencies and their recent takeover of the fantasy genre.

Pearse and I recently appeared on The Opperman Report to chat about The Writer with No Hands, Matthew Alford's book into the disappearance and probable murder of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore.

Adam from Themes and Memes is our guest to talk about the 2015 action comedy American Ultra. We start by trying to define this film, which is an intense mixture of cartoonish ultra violence, CIA covert operations, romance, comedy and horror, looking at the dissociating nature of this blend.

In this first episode of the new season Pearse and I discuss the 1958 spy drama The Quiet American, adapted from the novel by Graham Greene. We focus in on the role of Air Force and CIA officer Ed Lansdale's relationship with the film-maker Joseph Mankiewicz, and how the CIA were involved in assisting Mankiewicz the first major American movie to be filmed in Vietnam.

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Tags: CIAHollywoodspy films

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