The FBI’s entertainment liaison office has supported a wide range of Hollywood productions, from conspiracy thrillers like Shooter to comedy adventures like So Undercover to action dramas including Captain Phillips. But they also rejected a large proportion of the requests they receive for production assistance, with reasons ranging from the film depicting an FBI agent […](
Rules of Engagement is notable for being possibly the most violent, racist, colonialist film Hollywood has made since the end of the Cold War. It pre-empted two real life terrorist attacks in Yemen including one on the US embassy. The film was produced with close co-operation from the DOD, particularly the Marine Corps, in exchange […](Read more...
The Weather Underground were the most successful Leftist militant group in history, a radical offshoot of the SDS and the anti-Vietnam War movement. As a result, Hollywood has almost no interest in telling stories about them and the only recent film on the Weathermen was Robert Redford’s low budget thriller The Company You Keep. The […](Read more...)
Alfred Hitchcock virtually invented the spy movie genre, and made a career making films about murder, intrigue, cover-ups, suspense and spies. He suspected that he was under FBI surveillance during the production of Notorious, but the release file only covers a later period. Rather than being concerned with Hitchcock himself, it tells the story of […](Read more...)
A recently-released syllabus for the US Naval Academy’s course FP130: American Government and Constitutional Development includes a section that advises students to watch and learn from the 1995 romantic comedy The American President. Bizarrely, the scene does not involve the military or foreign or security policy in any way, but is about the President trying […](Read more...)
Recently released files show that Denis Thatcher – the oil baron husband of British PM Margaret Thatcher – personally vetted a list of celebrities to be invited for a glitzy reception at Number 10. While the likes of Ronnie Corbett, Judi Dench and Andrew Lloyd-Webber were considered friends of the government others such as Paul […](Read more...)
Julia Kristeva is one of the 20th century’s most famous female intellectuals who has won numerous gongs and awards for her contributions to linguistics, philosophy, psychoanalytics and semiotics. She was part of the top-level French philosophical clique that included Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. She was also, it is alleged, a spy for the Bulgarian […](Read more...)
For the last few weeks I’ve been working a research project on how the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison offices deal with the subjects of military mental health and suicide. Today the fruits of that research were published by Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform run by Nafeez Ahmed, who also published an exclusive on National Security […](Read more...)
Information recently obtained under FOIA has revealed that up to 200 Home Office staff have liaised with TV and Film producers about the content of their products, usually without any kind of contract in place governing their behaviour. While they are refusing to release exact details, this is confirmation that the British government has a […](Read more...)
