Chase Brandon was the CIA's first entertainment liaison officer, working in the entertainment industry for over a decade from 1996 onwards. Brandon helped produce over a dozen major films and a similar number of TV shows and more than any other individual helped set up a permanent CIA network within Hollywood and the rest of the industry.
Tom Clancy was one of the best selling spy authors of all time, known not only for his technical accuracy - gleaned through extensive government contacts - but also for an uncanny ability to predict the future. Part of his FBI file was released in 2014 but in recent weeks another section has been made available.
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.
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.
