Luke and Matt of Matt and Luke’s Sci-Fi Sanctuary invited my on their podcast recently to talk about the Paul...
The post Starship Troopers – Tom Secker on the Sci-Fi Sanctuary Podcast first appeared on Spy Culture.(Read more...)
The US Navy SEALs are known as the ‘quiet professionals’, but in recent times they have become the highest-profile of...
The US Navy SEALs are known as the ‘quiet professionals’, but in recent times they have become the highest-profile of...
The James Bond films, like the books on which they are based, have always pushed the boundaries of acceptable portraits of sex and violence. Documents from the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) show how for Thunderball they reviewed the script, recommending many changes if the film was to achieve the 'A' certificate that the producers wanted.
Richard Klein is one of the most important people in the entertainment industry that you have never heard of - a former State Department employee who now works for McLarty Associates - an elite Washington DC law firm - as their liaison to Hollywood. Klein has worked with most of the major studios on some of the biggest film series, from Transformers to James Bond to Fast & Furious, alongside government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic including the CIA.
Rounding off this second season we take a look at SALT, the 2010 action thriller starring Angelina Jolie as a CIA officer accused of being a Russian sleeper agent. SALT is one of the less well known CIA-assisted productions, but along with technical advice from former CIA officer Melissa Boyle Mahle the producers also consulted with the CIA themselves in a video conference. There is also a very weird story involving one of the extras in the opening sequence in North Korea.
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.
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.
In the wake of the scandal over the CIA giving classified information to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty the Agency's Office of the Inspector General carried out an audit into their involvement in the entertainment industry. The report heavily criticises the CIA's entertainment liaison office for terrible record keeping and a very casual culture.
