Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

Abstract

Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies David L. Robb. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004. Decades ago, I submitted a manuscript to a publisher whose editor explained to me the categories of the trade book. Adapting the word screamer used for sensational newspaper headlines, she said, This book could be a real screamer-but you would have to take out the footnotes. The trade market doesn't have the patience for things that break the flow of exposition. David Robb's Operation Hollywood ranks as a full-throated, uncompromising screamer book sans footnotes: its forty-eight interview-based, anecdote-filled chapters angrily portray how the US Department of Defense works at scripting the portrayal of its component services. Robb calls it censorship and has enlisted Professor Jonathan Turley as public interest theorist to assist him in raising constitutional issues associated with the Pentagon's controls on collaboratively produced films, which are legion. (Turley has written the foreword, and his comments are inserted at several points in the book.) Despite the C-word's troublesome fit and the haze of vitriolic spray that Robb directs toward individual administrators in the Pentagon - he nominates several of them as Best Villains in his Academy Awards-inspired conclusion-the book does raise an important issue about Hollywood's subservience to the US military script requests. The reasons for Hollywood's trips to the Pentagon are obvious. For creating the surface looks and sounds of war, the US government's personnel, uniforms, expensive weapons, explosions, and technical advisers define the ultimate in authenticity. Cost savings are enormous as well. On the military side, there is an awareness that profit-oriented entertainments can valorize the services, helping them gam recruits and congressional support. Thanks to the tenacious digging of military historian Lawrence H. Suid, we have precise details for all services in Guts and Glory (1978/2002), and with stronger focus on the Navy in Sailing on the Silver Screen (1996). Robb does not reflect Suid's work, nor that of Koppes and Black's Hollywood Goes to War (1987) or Doherty's Projections of War (1993/1999), yet there is agreement that the US government relishes the control of its military image and enters into a mutually exploitative relationship with filmmakers. But what gets compromised when the military-entertainment complex shapes a fantasy product for the public? Anecdotes based on interviews are the principal contribution of this book. In his account of the DOD-assisted film Windtalkers (2002), Robb recounts the DOD's compulsion to change its script contrary to publicly recognized historical fact. For example, the understanding that the Windtalkers would be killed by the United States if captured could not be mentioned. second, Robb deals with films, such as Thirteen Days (2000), that seek cooperation without obtaining it. One sticking point there, according to Robb's allegation, was the inclusion of Major Rudolf Anderson's downing and death during a U-2 surveillance flight during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Anderson received the Air Force Cross as a posthumous citation, and despite being recognized by an elementary school named for him at Eielson AFB in Arkansas, including him in a film receiving DOD cooperation was unacceptable. (The question of evidence supporting this accusation will be dealt with later.) Thirteen Days thus had to be made m total independence. And to cap that rejection, its screening was forbidden at Ramstem Air Base in Germany, where Kevin Costner had offered a special showing (56-57). While it may be questionable to call such cases censorship, Robb offers enough interview and DOD memoranda examples of this kind to evidence a conception of historical truth shaped by advertising's convention of omitting facts adverse to the Pentagon's public relations goals. Assuming that these accounts of script rejection, script coercion, and factual eradication are largely authentic, Robb and Jonathan Turley do succeed in raising the issue of favored speech based on content, which the Supreme Court held to be presumptively invalid in Turner Broadcast System, Inc. …