SITE

Pearse invited me on his radio show to discuss the 1964 TV movie A Carol for Another Christmas. This was the first in a series of TV films designed to promote the United Nations and sponsored by the Xerox corporation.

The CIA finally jumped on the cooking-themed reality TV propaganda bandwagon in 2010 when they hosted an episode of Top Chef. This week we take a look at the episode in question, how it flattered the CIA, and how Top Chef has involved numerous government agencies and departments. We round off looking at some of the reasons why cooking programmes make for effective propaganda.(Read more...)

I recently talked to Ricky Varandas for his podcast The Ripple Effect. We were supposed to be discussing government involvement in entertainment but got distracted and ended up talking about: whether popularity matters; Trump and Brexit and why people voted for them; the differences and similarities between American and British politics and a whole load more.(Read more...)

United 93 was the first and - to date - the only major movie to depict what happened in the skies over the US on the morning of the 9/11 attacks. The film-makers intended it to be as accurate and realistic as possible, so they reached out to the Pentagon and the US Air Force in particular for assistance.

The Department of Defense is the government agency with the largest and most influential operations in Hollywood. But to how many films have they provided production assistance? How many movies have they supported? In this episode we explore the answer to this question, why it is so difficult to answer conclusively and why this matters.(Read more...)

In this subscriber-only podcast I talk about the new book I am working on, the fake news hype of recent weeks and review nuclear war sitcom The Brink. This podcast is only available to supporters of my patreon campaign. Click the link below to go to my patreon page and sign up so you can get this and future subscriber-only podcasts.

Despite only producing 4 films so far the Transformers series is already one of the top 10 movie series of all time. In a paradox that encapsulates much of Hollywood, it appears that the worse the Transformers films get the better they do at the box office.

In less than 10 years Marvel has created the biggest money-making film franchise of all time with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, this probably wouldn't have been possible without the help of the Pentagon. In this episode we examine the rise of the MCU, the Pentagon's involvement, and the fallout of their disagreements when making The Avengers.

With the death of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro I felt this would be a good time to provide a copy of an important but seldom-read CIA memo from 1959 where they discuss and approve the 'elimination' of Castro. Shortly after the Cuban revolution Castro visited the United States, speaking with then Vice President Richard Nixon on friendly terms. Castro then went home to Cuba while Nixon wrote a memo where he declared that the new Cuban leader was a dangerous Communist.

Sometimes the Freedom of Information Act is a strange beast and you receive something you didn't ask for, but are still happy to get. That happened to me recently when in response to a request about the Pentagon's Hollywood database I received an updated list of DOD Films - movies that were assisted by the DOD.