Author and publicist Richard Condon is best remembered for writing The Manchurian Candidate - a biting futuristic satire in which a Medal of Honor winning soldier is brainwashed by the Soviets to try to assassinate the US president. The FBI files on Condon and his most famous book draw numerous connections between the JFK assassination and The Manchurian Candidate (particularly the film adaptation).
Headphone hoax, a taste of honeypots and watching 'Spectacles' + this day in history w/Cliff Burton and our song of the day by Temples on your Morning Monarchy for September 27, 2016.
Tron is a classic piece of transhumanist cinema and the first of a string of films where someone is sucked into a digital realm and has to battle it out with computer programs in order to save the day (the Matrix trilogy being the most popular examples). It was also a curious departure for Disney from working primarily on animations and other fantasy films explicitly aimed at children into more teen- or adult-oriented science fiction.
The International Spy Museum is a privately owned museum that hosts exhibits and other events on the history of spies, spying, intelligence tradecraft and so on. Conceived in 1996 - coincidentally just as the CIA adopted a more overt approach to domestic propaganda - and opened in 2002 - coincidentally a crucial year for CIA domestic propaganda - it has grown a strong reputation for itself in the years since then.
In February 1975 the director of conspiracy classic Three Days of the Condor Sidney Pollack invited Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, to visit the set while they were shooting in New York. Helms went along for a day and acted as a consultant to Robert Redford, as depicted in this infamous picture. Though Helms had left the Agency, three documents from the CIA's open source monitoring of media coverage show they were keeping an eye on developments.
(ZHE) Last Thursday, as Bloomberg was gingerly setting the stage, and the preemptive damage control for what was about to be a historic leak, it did everything in its power to deflect attention from the key topic, namely that prominent liberal billionaire and Hillary supporter, George Soros had been hacked and countless documents were
Adding to the British government departments who have provided assistance to the James Bond franchise, the now defunct Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) have released documents on the filming of a scene for Skyfall at their headquarters in Whitehall. The Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and MI6 themselves have all aided the Bond film series in one way or another over the decades, and though it only existed for 8 years the DECC can now be added to that illustrious list.
The Battle of Algiers was a groundbreaking film when it came out in 1966, not just for its depiction of the Algerian War against French occupation but for its quasi-documentary realism and its morally neutral approach, showing both sides committing atrocities. Because of this realism it is a cinematic training manual in guerilla warfare including terrorist tactics and in state repression including torture.
Author and the creator of gonzo journalism Hunter S Thompson could be expected to have an FBI file, and he does. When it was released the FBI admitted that they had destroyed parts of it during the 1990s, and what remains is a smattering of amusing irrelevances. They began their investigations into Thompson in 1967 and continued until at least 1971, but the most interesting aspect of this is that they had an investigation into him at all.
The Department of Defense maintains a database summarising its collaboration with Hollywood productions. The master list for this database was released to me two years ago as the DOD Film List and since then I have obtained a handful of entries. Getting a little more creative I asked for entries on over a dozen films and today got a response with details on Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Contact, Tears of the Sun, Indiana Jones, Deja Vu and others.
