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Panel 1: Phil Strub (special assistant for audiovisual at the Pentagon). He was a 1974 University of Southern California film graduate school before moving to the Pentagon. This is the guy who ultimately approves every script submitted to the Pentagon for assistance. The military will approve a lot of movies even though they're not keen on the themes but he mentioned there were several examples that they just couldn't do it. One of these was "Crimson Tide" which featured a mutiny on a nuclear submarine and the other was "Broken Arrow" which features the theft of a nuclear weapon. Neither scenario had occurred in real life and they didn't want to encourage them so they didn't support the movies. Also, if the movie universally portrays their people in a bad light, they don't get approval ("Dr Strangelove", for example, was not provided assistance). But the military has been helping movies as far back as DW Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). In 1927's "Wings", basically the entire army air corps was provided to help some of the scenes. In the original "King Kong", the army refused to have its aircraft involved and the producers ended up essentially bribing a lot of flight crews doing training flights to get them to do the scenes. Some movies like "Air Force One" received full support while "Outbreak" only received courtesy assistance (in this case, because the military was hiding its culpability in cultivating the deadly virus). |