Entertainment Liaison Offices

The US Space Force took one step closer to becoming a hyperreality when nearly 40 major Hollywood players went on an 'Industry Leader Tour' of US Space Command.

The FBI’s entertainment liaison office has supported a wide range of Hollywood productions, from conspiracy thrillers like Shooter to comedy adventures like So Undercover to action dramas including Captain Phillips.  But they also rejected a large proportion of the requests they receive for production assistance, with reasons ranging from the film depicting an FBI agent […](

The military legal drama Rules of Engagement is perhaps the greatest modern example of racist, warmongering propaganda. Unsurprisingly, it benefited from full Pentagon support, in exchange for numerous script changes. The film was eerily prescient, foreshadowing two terrorist attacks in Yemen, and in some ways the entire post-9/11 war on terror. In this episode I […](Read more...)

Rules of Engagement is notable for being possibly the most violent, racist, colonialist film Hollywood has made since the end of the Cold War.  It pre-empted two real life terrorist attacks in Yemen including one on the US embassy.  The film was produced with close co-operation from the DOD, particularly the Marine Corps, in exchange […](Read more...

The Weather Underground were the most active and successful militant left-wing group in US history. As part of their anti-Vietnam war operations they bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, corporate headquarters and other high-profile targets. In this episode I examine whether they were a lethal terrorist organisation, or a non-lethal militant anti-war gang. I look […](Read more...)

The Weather Underground were the most successful Leftist militant group in history, a radical offshoot of the SDS and the anti-Vietnam War movement.  As a result, Hollywood has almost no interest in telling stories about them and the only recent film on the Weathermen was Robert Redford’s low budget thriller The Company You Keep.  The […](Read more...)

In March 2016 I submitted a request to the US Navy for copies of entertainment liaison office reports, script notes and production assistance agreements. Over a hundred emails and three appeals later they have finally released some script notes to me, but the document is almost entirely redacted.

For movie censors, crime is perhaps the most complex issue to make decisions about. They want the public to be alert to the possibility of crimes happening, and respectful of law enforcement institutions. But entertainers and audiences want dramatic, ambiguous villains and stories of institutional corruption and hubris.

For the last few weeks I’ve been working a research project on how the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison offices deal with the subjects of military mental health and suicide.  Today the fruits of that research were published by Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded journalism platform run by Nafeez Ahmed, who also published an exclusive on National Security […](Read more...)

David Sirota invited me onto his podcast to talk about National Security Cinema and how the DOD and CIA secretly shape pop culture. This was a rapid-fire conversation where we got into examples of political censorship by government agencies, the operations of the entertainment liaison offices, the scale of this phenomenon and whether this constitutes a government limitation on free speech. (Read more...)