Hollywood and the Pentagon A Dangerous Liaison Part one of 3

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BrettonWoodsSystemII
April 12, 2009

Reality TV may be a modern-day phenomenon, but the federal government has been working with the entertainment industry for decades to help screenwriters and directors portray its spies and warriors.

The 2-year-old Department of Homeland Security is just the latest government division to hire a Hollywood liaison.

The FBI created its entertainment office in the 1930s, around the time James Cagney played a fearless FBI agent in the 1935 movie 'G' Men. The agency "realized a lot of people were getting their information from popular culture" and wanted to ensure agents were portrayed accurately, says Rex Tomb, who heads the 10-person office. Today, he works with TV's America's Most Wanted to try to catch FBI fugitives.

The Defense Department's film liaison office is as old as the Pentagon itself. Phil Strub, who has run it for the past 16 years, says it was started in 1947 and existed in some form earlier.

Chase Brandon, an undercover CIA agent for a quarter-century, started the CIA's Hollywood office nine years ago.

All three say Americans get much of their information about the inner workings of government from pop culture. In "perilous times," Brandon says, how government officials are depicted "educates and informs the public, reassures the public, entertains the public."

At the Pentagon, if screeners don't like a script, they won't allow filmmakers to use their equipment. "We can give them an authenticity that they would find difficult or impossible to do otherwise," Strub says.

One critic says that amounts to coercion, because filmmakers know it would cost them a fortune to try to produce scenes showing battleships or warplanes on their own.

David Robb, author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies, says that's why the industry puts up with Pentagon manipulation of the creative process. "The only thing Hollywood likes better than a good movie is a good deal," he says.

But Strub says a "litany" of war movies has been made without Pentagon help, belying the notion that the military has moviemakers over a barrel.

Brandon also disputes that he's a propogandist. Since taking the job, he has worked on 15 one-hour Discovery channel specials on the CIA and the TV shows JAG, 24 and Alias. He even got the Alias star, Jennifer Garner, to do recruitment videos for the agency. "Our reputation is our product, and that does not mean whitewashing," Brandon says. "Good Lord, we ... cooperated heavily with an HBO project that talked about Aldrich Ames," a CIA spy-turned-Russian mole.

Bobbie Faye Ferguson, the Homeland Security Department's new entertainment-industry liaison, says "people in Hollywood or New York or London are going to make movies and TV programs with us or without us. But by participating, we have an opportunity to at least assist them to make their product better."

She started NASA's liaison office in 1997. There, she worked on movies such as Space Cowboys, Armageddon and the IMAX version of Apollo 13 starring Tom Hanks. She knows the industry from both sides: Earlier in her career, she had roles in several TV shows and movies, including Remington Steele, Designing Women and Superman.

Paramount Pictures Co-President Tom Jacobson says being able to get technical help from the government is very helpful: "With space travel, an FBI investigation or a counterterrorist operation, the facts make the story better, the reality makes the story better."

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