We will begin releasing season 2 of The CIA and Hollywood this weekend, and to give you a taste of what's to come we have produced a linkchart combining data and connections from both season 1 and the forthcoming season 2. New additions include The Rock, Angelina Jolie and former Sony executive Amy Pascal, along with self-confessed (though officially denied) CIA agent Chuck Barris.
Following the raid in Abbottabad in May 2011 the body of 'Osama Bin Laden' was flown to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, where Admiral William McRaven did not initially recognise him. From there the body was flown to the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, where an autopsy was performed before a burial at sea. This is the same aircraft carrier that 25 years earlier featured in the film Top Gun. (Read more...)
The Foreigner stars Jackie Chan and former James Bond Pierce Brosnan, and is directed by two-time Bond director Martin Campbell. In February the film-makers blew up a bus in central London in a sequence that was spookily reminiscent of the 7/7 London bombings of 2005. To see if this similarity was a concern for the government agencies who approved and assisted The Foreigner filming in London, I filed a series of FOIA requests.
In this bonus episode we welcome special guests Aaron and Uncle of Uncle the Podcast, a new real-life comedy podcast which is one of my favourite shows. We chat about Uncle and Aaron's hopes and dreams for the show and why they started the Uncle the Podcast. We take a look at two spy films - XXX starring Vin Diesel and The Accidental Spy starring Jackie Chan - before wrapping up looking at Aaron and Uncle's social media experiments and what the future has in store.
Graham Greene was one of the most important novelists of the 20th century, and one of the greatest spy novelists of all time. He also holds the dubious honour of having worked for MI6 during WW2 but being spied on by the FBI as a suspected Communist. Few spies have FBI files, so Greene is in a very small and distinct club. The FBI records cover over a decade during the early Cold War, and Greene himself wrote a response to them. (Read more...)
Blazing Saddles is one of the greatest American spoofs of all time, satirising not just Westerns and the whole cowboy archetype but also the racism prevalent in much of Western society. It remains one of my favourite comedies, and possibly Mel Brooks' best film. While the film itself was not sponsored by the state (at least as far as I know) it did turn up in a recent Navy investigation into misconduct by a senior officer. The exact nature of the complaint involving Blazing Saddles has to be seen to be believed.
The Kentucky primary saw HR Clinton win by a slender margin, and one controversy has persisted - the matter of Bernie Sanders suddenly losing 5,000 votes. This has become a youtube video and a social media meme, based on video taken from rolling news coverage of the vote. This has been claimed to be definitive proof of voter fraud and evidence that 'they' (the great evil 'they' who are about as well defined as the Bush administration defined 'Al Qaeda') don't want #FeeltheBern to win.
Sometimes the support of the DOD can improve a film. When the Pentagon provided Michael Bay with script notes and suggestions on Transformers III he 'was very receptive to our notes and expressed his desire for us to “help (him) make it better.”' However, Man of Steel was not so lucky. Whether in spite of or because of the Pentagon's support it was hands down the worst Superman film of all time.
Tricia Jenkins' The CIA in Hollywood was one of the books that inspired me to start this site, and the recently published second edition expands considerably on the original. Because the CIA is resistant to FOIA requests and other forms of inquiry, Jenkins amassed a wide range of open source materials and interviewed various people both from the CIA (or formerly of the CIA) and from the entertainment industry.
