If you’ve ever seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered does all that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script?
Find out in an award-winning film documentary co-produced by Associate Professor Sebastian Kaempf from The University of Queensland’s School of Political Science and International Studies airing on SBS Viceland on Monday, 11 November 2024.
‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood’ explores the U.S. military's editorial control over thousands of Hollywood's films and television programs.
Dr Kaempf said the documentary digs deep into a vast new trove of recently released internal government documents to bring unanswered questions into sharp focus.
“Through successful Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we obtained over 60,000 internal Pentagon and CIA documents which – for the first time – allows us to understand the sheer scale and scope of their involvement in the world’s largest entertainment industry,” Dr Kaempf said.
“It is the story of these declassified documents and what they reveal that led us to turn this into a film documentary.”
In unsettling and riveting detail, filmmaker and media scholar Roger Stahl travelled across America engaging an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk about this alternative ‘cinematic universe’ and how it managed to fly under the radar for so long.
"He discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture," Dr Kaempf said.
From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, ‘Theaters of War’ uncovers one of the great Pentagon PR coups of our time.
As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise.
Dr Kaempf said what ultimately became quite striking is how these activities have gone uncovered for so long.
“Part of the answer has to do with the Pentagon’s and CIA’s lack of transparency, they simply don’t like for people to know about these systematic script changes, but the successful FOIA requests now allow us to look at them.
“And they show – and that’s the other part of the answer – how the most detailed book on this topic, the one written by the only person who had previously been given access to these files by the Pentagon, was essentially an in-house historian whose account whitewashed of their role in Hollywood films,” he said.
So tune into SBS Viceland on 11 November at 7.30pm (Brisbane time) when ‘Theaters of War: How the Pentagon and CIA Took Hollywood’ will answer questions you had never even thought to ask. If you miss it, you can always tune in later with SBS On Demand.
