Hollywood

How much responsibility does the TV crime genre have for police racism, brutality and corruption? On this month’s subscriber-only podcast...

This three-part radio documentary produced by CBC (and featuring Matt, Tanner Mirrlees and myself, among others) explores the role Hollywood...

Everyone knows truth is the first casualty of war – but in a modern world where America’s wars know no...

The third episode of CBC’s Myths on Screen – How Hollywood helped the U.S. military sell the War on Terror...

The first episode of the three-part radio documentary Myths on Screen: Hollywood’s Role in War and Propaganda has just come...

Over more than a century the US government’s entertainment liaison offices have supported over 1000 movies, along with thousands of...

One of the most harmless films to be rejected by the US military is 1996’s Sgt. Bilko, based on the...

13 Hours and Jack Ryan star John Krasinski gave another interview recently where he claimed that appearing in cryptoconservative propaganda...

In 1988, several years prior to the highly successful JAG TV show, DOD representatives met with writers and producers to...

Oddfinger: Eagle Kill is – hands down – one of the weirdest quasi-biopics I have ever seen, combining surrealism, satire...

The Pentagon did not provide production support to the movie Independence Day because it portrayed the military as ineffective against...

When you think of radical or counter-establishment films the 1998 thriller The Negotiator probably doesn’t come to mind, especially if...

Perhaps the most insidious rewriting of recent history by Hollywood is Zero Dark Thirty‘s narrative that torture helped find Bin...

The Vietnam war drama Platoon was recently inducted into the US Library of Congress’ National Film Registry, in recognition for...

The DOD’s doctrine on working with Hollywood says that assistance can only be provided to productions that offer audiences a...

Sexual assault in the U.S. military is on the rise. Internal documents reveal the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison offices have spent...

For anyone hoping that the end of phase 3 of the MCU would bring some respite from the relentless schedule...

Pearl Harbor (2001) is the perfect example of how to spend a lot of money making a terrible film.  Beset...

Just like many federal agencies the Los Angeles Police Department have a dedicated entertainment liaison office for dealing with Hollywood....

Yesterday, NPR’s podcast Marketplace released a new episode titled How Chinese censorship changed “Top Gun” (and the rest of Hollywood)....

Over the last few weeks a storm has been brewing about the Chines

Today's entertainment news features an absolute gem of political hypocrisy: Vietnam's one party 'Communist' state has banned the animated kids' movie Abominable, and the Western media are heralding the decision, claiming that Vietnam are standing up to China's censorious one party 'Communist' state.  This is perhaps the dumbest employmen

Recently, Martha Bayles of The Atlantic published a hilariously misleading essay calling for Hollywood to produce more pro-American propaganda, in the face of the Chinese government’s increased role in the entertainment industry.

This week, I welcome to the show author and friend James Oddy to discuss the JFK assassination case and its treatment in the Oliver Stone movie JFK. We look at the psychological and political consequences of the assassination, as well as the political and cultural impact of the film.

The role of the technical advisor is crucial to understanding the military-Hollywood relationship, but very few people know who these people are or what they do.  Even less well known is that a significant number of private industry techni

Walt Disney World Resort’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens this week - 14 acres of Star Wars experience for those who want to waste their money on plastic replicas of pod racers, Jar Jar Binks masks and hair dye so they can look like Vice Admiral Gender

2012's Act of Valor is widely recognised as the terrible, dull, depressing, futile piece of cinema that it surely is, but what is less well-recognised is that it was the brainchild of the US Navy's Special Warfare Recruiting Directorate, and they h

Why isn’t the ‘political film’ a genre of cinema? Hollywood puts out a consistent stream of politically-themed films, but rarely if ever promotes them as such.

I was looking forward to Godzilla: King of the Monsters, having been a fan of giant creature features since I was a young boy.  The blend of massive-scale action and affirming our need to respect nature is a winning combination for me.  Then I watched it

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush’s chief spin doctor and senior advisor Karl Rove enlisted Hollywood’s help in selling the War on Terror.

Sometimes the US military's rewriting of scripts is very specific - take out this joke about the US losing in Vietnam, swap this bottle of beer for an energy drink, remove this scene where soldiers set fire to a village and rape all

Amazon Prime's The Boys is not only the most enjoyable TV show I've seen all year, it's also the most subversive.  While it will appeal to audiences suffering from superhero fatigue after more than a decade of relentless Marvel and DC products, it is so much mo

The relationship between government liaison offices and the entertainment industry usually works well, resulting in added production value for the industry’s products and the furtherance of the government’s agendas. But sometimes things go wrong.

A story doing the rounds in the last few days claims that the producers of Top Gun: Maverick changed the decals on the back of his leather jacket in order to 'appease Communist Chin

News about this site appears to be spreading - after the flurry of articles citing Spy Culture around the release of Captain Marvel earlier this year, the Washington Business Journal put out a piece on the Top Gun: Maverick trailer using the production assistance agreement I o

Tom Cruise dropped into San Diego Comic-Con this week to premiere the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick, which is nothing short of a fan service nostalgia reel and some cheesy dialogue about how Maverick is still - you'v

The US Air Force recently released a tranche of documents on the support they provided to the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man.  This included their Rules of Engagement for companies filming on Edwa

Michael Bay is well known for working closely with government agencies when making his films, mostly the Pentagon but also NASA.  Less well known is how he worked with the CIA to vet his script for the Benghazi movie 13 Hours, and how his request to film the

The in-development film Raven Four-Two tells the story of a battle in 2005 between insurgents and a Kentucky Army National Guard Military Police Unit, during the war in Iraq.  Documents released by

The Pentagon recently released the Production Assistance Agreement they signed with the producers of Top Gun: Maverick.

The PRISM Awards are an entertainment industry ceremony that gives out gongs for accurate depictions of substance abuse and mental health problems in films and TV shows.  In 2012 the Pentagon were asked to attend and p

Today I received an email that I thought I would share with you, from the publishers of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology.  It said that the two articles I penned for the journal were among the top 20 most-downloaded arti

The Military, Movies and #MeToo(

The relationship between intelligence agencies and the entertainment industry is complex and multi-faceted.  Angles include the influence of the agencies on their own public image, the influence of entertainment on the agencies, and intelligence-gathering by those agencies on the culture industry.

Netflix recently ordered a 10-episode first series of Q-Force, the world's first animated LGBTQ spy series.  Pitched as a 'gay James Bond' the cartoon will undoubtedly contain the usual PR for the security state, wrapped up in a rainbow flag.  No doubt

Iran-Contra is in many ways the definitive government conspiracy – involving guns, drugs, anti-communism and black operations, it went all the way to the White House.

1988's The Presidio wanted to film at the real Presidio in San Francisco, an Army installation.  As per usual this required a full military script review, but the DOD responded demanding a 'complete rewrite' before they would approve access to