![]() ![]() Suid coined the phrase “mutual exploitation” when he first stumbled onto the U.S. The last shot is of people on the aircraft carrier, and everyone is cheering.” ![]() You had all the ingredients of the typical Hollywood movie,” said Lawrence Suid, the author of “Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film,” who has been writing about the military and Hollywood since 1975. “What’s interesting about ‘Top Gun’ is it’s a typical 1930s movie: boy chases girl, gets a few flight scenes. “But it was also the single biggest boost to the Navy fighters ever.” “The public doesn’t always discern the difference on the outside between the Navy and the Air Force,” Coons explained. Ironically, the Air Force received a massive boost in recruitment, even though it had nothing to do with the film. “Top Gun,” for example, the 1986 film about a cocky young pilot made good, starring Tom Cruise, used Navy crewmen as its pilot and aircrew onboard at least two aircraft carriers, one in San Diego and one in the Pacific Ocean. military values that the Pentagon wants to promote: honor, courage and commitment. Generally, the Navy, like the other service branches, will only endorse scripts or productions that showcase U.S. “We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way.” “Because in most cases it doesn’t represent our core values,” Coons said. Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, said that his office turns down 95 percent of what comes in. The Pentagon liaison officers in Los Angeles primarily provide expertise for films, but they also lend their expertise to television shows, documentaries, and video games. “The Army’s been there since Hollywood was first built from the Los Angeles canyons and desert.” “It’s not like they’re some surreptitious, hidden, secret-propaganda arm,” said Todd Breasseale, a retired Army liaison officer who did a tour in the L.A. military has had a presence in Hollywood since the early 1900s. They serve tours of duty for several years, just like their fellow troops, but their task is singularly different: to study film and television scripts producers have sent them in the hope the Department of Defense will help them with their project. military - Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines. They work in a nondescript office block along downtown Wilshire Boulevard, in departments belonging to the different service branches of the U.S. While Strub is the point man for Hollywood in the Pentagon, usually the scripts come to his colleagues on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles. If based on a historical event, it also needs to pass muster with the Pentagon’s historians. military offices usually ask to see the entire script, not just the parts that relate to military involvement and, based on the entire script and the portrayal of the troops, will move it forward in the approval process. You don’t know where the hell the Marines came from, but there they are.” So at the end, you see these Marines come and belatedly rescue the scientist and his family. “And I said, ‘… at the end you want to have a nice military rescue?’ They called back and said yes. “But tell me this: You’ve got this major running around the world with the authority that the president can only dream about, so if you don’t care, would you change his character, make him like the president’s science adviser or something like that? Just get him out of the uniform.” It would only cause the audience to feel pity for the dinosaur,’” Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s entertainment-liaison officer, said in an interview. A flying dinosaur is no match for an A-10. I called him back, ‘They’re tank killers. The A-10, the military aircraft known as the Thunderbolt, or as the Air Force affectionately calls it, the Warthog, is “designed to fire armor-piercing depleted uranium and high explosive incendiary rounds.” Remember “Jurassic Park III”? The one Steven Spielberg didn’t direct? The film’s producers contacted the Pentagon to see if they could get some A-10s for scenes in which the actors would have to battle out-of-control Pteranodon. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |