Robbie Martin is our final guest for this season as we dissect the 2012 docudrama Zero Dark Thirty. We discussed the difficulty in defining what kind of film this is - somewhere between a spy thriller, a documentary and a dry European art house movie. We get into the well-documented CIA support for the film and ask why this is the only major movie about the Abbottabad raid to get 'Bin Laden' and why it wasn't particularly successful.
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.
My good friend Pearse has been given the opportunity to do his show on the radio so he invited me on as his guest for the very first episode. We took on an old favourite – Chase Brandon – and discussed his relevance to the world of state-sponsored entertainment before engaging in a multi-faceted conversation going into the reports from the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison offices, the expansion of the DOD’s role in the entertainment industry, the total lack of accountability.
NASA's Multimedia Liaison Office was founded in the 1990s but they have recently become more aggressively involved in the entertainment industry. In particular they have replaced the Pentagon as the most prominent government agency working on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the world's biggest film franchise, working on The Avengers, Captain America: Winter Soldier, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Guardians of the Galaxy.
Recently released documents on former White House consultant and MPAA capo Jack Valenti strongly suggest that his appointment as president of the MPAA in some way involved the CIA. The new documents on Valenti come from the CIA and the State Department. Though they are tiny fragments in themselves the details they do contain are eye-opening. Valenti was a State Department consultant with a Top Secret clearance in the early months of taking over at the MPAA.
James Evan Pilato is our latest guest as we dissect the 2009 Disney UFO adventure Race to Witch Mountain. We start off looking at Disney as a corporation - its long standing interest in UFOs and extraterrestrials, the connections to government agencies and their recent takeover of the fantasy genre. We then get into Race to Witch Mountain itself - a strange blend of a kids' movie, a love letter to the UFO culture and an homage to spy thrillers especially Enemy of the State.
The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) recently published its annual report, which details complaints against various movies including Spectre, Kingsman and Minions. As is so often the case, sex and violence were the focus of the complaints, leading the BBFC to explain why they had allowed these scenes into films aimed at young people.
Pearse and I recently appeared on The Opperman Report to chat about The Writer with No Hands, Matthew Alford's book into the disappearance and probable murder of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore. We get into Devore's connections with the government, the CIA and DOD presence in Hollywood and how that might explain what happened to him.
Adam from Themes and Memes is our guest to talk about the 2015 action comedy American Ultra. We start by trying to define this film, which is an intense mixture of cartoonish ultra violence, CIA covert operations, romance, comedy and horror, looking at the dissociating nature of this blend.
