Kingsman is perhaps the most intriguing film of the year - on the face of it a cartoonish action comedy set in the world of gentlemen spies, but underneath it is an ultra-violent, racist, eugenicist film of dubious sexual virtue. No government agencies were listed in the credits for the film but at least two were involved in the movie.
Just like most major government agencies, NASA has been involved in the entertainment industry for decades. For 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick hired several technical advisors including Frederick Ordway III, NASA astronaut Donald Slayton and the senior administrator of the Apollo project George Mueller. However, NASA did not found a formal Entertainment Liaison Office until 1997.
The EU emissions trading scheme is a multi-billion dollar fraud; the CIA teaches us how to sabotage government; and the UK Army is having trouble finding new recruits for the war machine.
The world's biggest films now regularly take over a billion dollars in revenue, and the world's biggest film franchises are multi-billion dollar businesses. What has never been reported before is that 6 of the top 10 (and 14 of the top 25) highest-grossing film franchises have been supported by government agencies, particularly the Department of Defense's Entertainment Liaison Offices.(Read more...)
The traditional model of the DOD's ELOs says that they simply wait for requests from the entertainment industry for production assistance and then review the script and decide whether or not to help. The process is reactive in nature - the DOD are supposed to wait for the entertainment industry to come to them.
Completing what has been a record-breaking year for FOIA releases from the Entertainment Liaison Offices of the US Department of Defense, the US Marine Corps recently sent me 1669 pages of reports covering the last 7 years of their activities in the entertainment industry. The documents reveal a number of major films that are not acknowledged in the already-released files, along with indications that the USMC are operating on a scale approaching that of the Army i.e.
In the wake of the scandal over the CIA giving classified information to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty the Agency's Office of the Inspector General carried out an audit into their involvement in the entertainment industry. The report heavily criticises the CIA's entertainment liaison office for terrible record keeping and a very casual culture.
