[For the Pentagon, films like Top Gun: Maverick are more than just
a movie. They are a recruitment bonanza. ] [[link removed]]

THE LOVE AFFAIR BETWEEN HOLLYWOOD AND THE PENTAGON  
[[link removed]]


 

Alissa Wilkinson
May 27, 2022
Vox
[[link removed]]

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_ For the Pentagon, films like Top Gun: Maverick are more than just a
movie. They are a recruitment bonanza. _

When Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun in 1986, it wasn’t just a box
office bonanza — it was a boon to the US military, photo: Paramount
Pictures

 

It came like a bolt from the blue, a gift from the heavens. In 1986,
audiences flocked to theaters to see Tony Scott’s _Top Gun_,
starring a fresh-faced Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a
hotshot Navy aviator bent on stardom. They kept coming for seven
months. When the dust settled, the film had brought in over $176
million. Unlike its protagonist, who came in second at the eponymous
elite flight academy, the film ended 1986 the top earner of the year.

But for the Navy, _Top Gun_ was more than just a movie. It was a
recruitment bonanza.

Military recruiting stations were set up outside movie theaters,
catching wannabe flyboys hopped up on adrenaline and vibes. Others
enlisted on their own. Interest in the armed forces, primarily the
Navy and the Air Force, rose
[[link removed]] that
year, though it’s unclear just how much
[[link removed]].
Naval aviator applications were claimed to have increased
[[link removed]] by
a staggering 500 percent.

Hollywood knows how to sell the life of a soldier. _Top Gun_ paints
the life of an elite pilot as mostly a real-life video game, with
young men competing to top the charts at the academy. (The rankings
were a fiction invented for the film, though the school is real.) In a
sort of coda to the story, the pilots do engage in real combat — but
we never know who the enemy is, barely get an explanation as to the
mission, and mostly see them pulling off daring maneuvers to great
acclaim. And in 1986, the US wasn’t engaged in a real-life war.
Vietnam was becoming a more distant memory for young people. Who
wouldn’t want to be a hero?

So _Top Gun_ was more than a gangbusters earner for Paramount; it
was a coup for the Pentagon. In exchange for the enlistment bounce and
a sexy, exciting perspective on the pilot’s life being presented to
the general public, the military lent considerable aid to the
production, from locations and equipment to personnel. Producer Jerry
Bruckheimer has said that _Top Gun_ would not have been made without
the military’s assistance.

This is far from an anomaly.

[Tom Cruise on a motorcycle; Jennifer Connelly sitting behind him.]

Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly in _Top Gun: Maverick_.

 Paramount Pictures

The American movie industry and the American military have had a long,
well-documented, and, on the whole, mutually beneficial relationship
since before World War II. Certainly, movies about war and its effects
have been made without the aid of the military. But the military has
often seen opportunity in the movies: for boosting the morale of the
public, altering the popular image of wars and soldiers, and
encouraging young people to enlist. In a film industry concerned
primarily with profits and technology rather than ideology — which
is to say, one essentially conservative in orientation — the
partnership has often been an ideal match.

But the nature of the collaboration has changed over time, with shifts
in the US military’s role in the world as well as Hollywood’s
aims. A movie like _Top Gun: Maverick_ enters a very different world
from its predecessor, and comes from an industry that has set its
sights on raking in profit from not just America, but the whole world.
It’s not just entertainment. It’s the apex of a lengthy and
complicated history.

The Pentagon and Hollywood go way, way back

What happens when a large group of people immerse themselves in the
same metanarrative over time? They begin to be directed by its
implications, to see what it tells them as, essentially, true. In the
case of the movies — for decades _the_ mode of entertainment in
America — that means there was a reality to cinema’s implications
about the heroism of soldiers, the reasons for the struggle, the
rightness of their cause. That has made Hollywood an attractive and
powerful resource to the American military — and vice versa.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A LARGE GROUP OF PEOPLE IMMERSE THEMSELVES IN THE
SAME METANARRATIVE OVER TIME? THEY BEGIN TO SEE WHAT IT TELLS THEM AS,
ESSENTIALLY, TRUE.

The first Academy Award for Best Picture was awarded in 1929
to _Wings_, a silent war drama directed by World War I combat pilot
veteran William Wellman and made with substantial support from the War
Department (the Pentagon of its time). Wellman dedicated the film
[[link removed]] “to those young
warriors of the sky whose wings are folded about them forever.” It
was a massive hit.

Thus a pattern was set, with filmmakers concerned about authenticity
— and hoping to use some authentic equipment — soliciting help
from the military.

The relationship became even tighter when World War II began. The War
Department needed to sell the war to the public, boost morale, and
make the Allies’ case. They realized that Hollywood represented what
might be an untapped resource. Mark Harris, a critic and film
historian, wrote the book _Five Came Back_ about the contributions
that five legendary directors — Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston,
George Stevens, and William Wyler — made to the WWII propaganda
effort at the government’s behest. The work ranged from those
intended for troops (like Capra’s _Why We Fight_ series, which was
eventually shown to the general public as well) to documentaries made
for the general public with the intention of influencing public
opinion. It was effective.

That the government was the driving force behind these films — which
were called propaganda briefly, before the word took on a pejorative
sense — seems, to our ears, pretty sinister. But, as Harris
explains, things were a little more complex during that time. The
military saw the opportunity to support “morale films” or
“educational films” that would help the American public understand
what we were fighting for and against. Capra’s _Why We
Fight_ “makes the point over and over again that these three
entities, Germany, Japan, and Italy, have people in the thrall of
lunatic dictators, and that those guys were trying to create a slave
world and what we were fighting for was a free world,” Harris
explained. So this was an ideological aim, one on which Hollywood and
the War Department were largely aligned.

Yet the War Department rarely dictated the exact message they wished
the filmmakers to convey — they weren’t “stenographers,” as
Harris puts it. That means military support in this era was mostly a
handing over of the reins, with relatively little input into the final
results. “What they had the ability to do was say to John Ford,
‘We’re going to send you to Midway and we want you to film this
battle,’” Harris said. “But they didn’t say, ‘This is
exactly what we want you to do. This is the message we want you to get
across.’”

That doesn’t mean the military had _no_ interest in the message
they were sending. Huston’s documentary _Let There Be Light_ —
shot in 1946 and showing soldiers in a hospital living with the trauma
of war — was banned by the Army, who feared it would have a
demoralizing effect on post-war recruitment. _Let There Be
Light_ was suppressed until a belated release in 1980.

[A black-and-white image of young veterans in a hospital.]

Faces of men in _Let There Be Light_, John Huston’s 1946
documentary, which was suppressed by the US military until 1980.

 U.S. Army Pictorial Services

In the post-War decades, however, ideological harmony between much of
Hollywood and the military disappeared. So, you see a pivot, Harris
says. “After Vietnam, the Pentagon would never say to Hollywood,
‘We’re all in the same business,’ which was basically the
argument that was made during World War II. That came to an end with
Vietnam, and what replaced it was this more transactional
relationship.”

It’s not that things got bad. They just became about business rather
than ideals. The situation, Harris says, went “from the military
saying to Hollywood, ‘We need you to help us,’ to the military
saying _to_ Hollywood, ‘We’ll help _you_. We’ll give you
access.’”

That transactional relationship is highly evident in the string of
Reagan-era blockbusters that aimed to not just turn out audiences, but
— implicitly or not — rehabilitate the image of the military in a
post-Vietnam time of mistrust. _Top Gun_ might be the most
successful in that attempt.

So you want to make a movie

Say you’re a Hollywood filmmaker (or TV creator) who wants to tell a
story that involves the military in some manner, even if your movie is
about aliens or zombies or superheroes. In some countries, you’d
have to submit your script or your movie for approval to the
government before it could get made or distributed. But this is
America. You can exercise your First Amendment right and tell any
story you want.

Except, hang on. Making a movie or a TV show is _expensive_. One way
to get a studio to agree to produce your script is to trim the budget,
and you can do that by cutting down on paying for equipment or extras.
Maybe you’re concerned with making sure everything looks authentic,
or with getting the Army’s response to disciplinary matters correct.
Or maybe you just want to make sure you’ve got rank details
straight.

So you decide to ask for help. Depending on what you need, you might
liaise with the designated entertainment coordinator in a particular
branch of the military, or with the Pentagon generally. A tiny number
of military personnel spend years, even decades, in the liaison role
— reading scripts, working with directors, giving notes, and
ultimately deciding if the military will lend its aid to the project.

[A scene from Independence Day.]

The US military withdrew support of _Independence Day _when the
producers refused to remove references to Area 51
[[link removed]].

 20th Century Studios

Todd Breasseale
[[link removed]] was
one of them, a career Army officer who worked as the Army’s motion
picture and television entertainment industry liaison for about six
years beginning in 2002. He retired from the Army to join the Obama
administration in 2014, and is now deputy assistant to the Secretary
for Public Affairs at the Pentagon. In his liaison capacity, he told
me by phone, his duties ranged from reading scripts for accuracy at
the request of filmmakers to determining whether the Army would lend
equipment, location, or personnel support to productions.

“Sometimes it was entire scene rewrites that they needed help
with,” he said. Other times, he might advise Steven Spielberg on
technical details for a sequence in _War of the Worlds_, or work with
the _Transformers_ production to access locations that the Army
owns.

Often the role of the military comes in making equipment not currently
in use available to production companies at cost — “every time you
see a piece of military hardware that is not created through CGI, that
cost is borne out by the production company,” he said. The company
pays about how much it costs to keep a plane in the air hourly, far
cheaper than renting commercial aircraft. “Unless a specific
training mission was prescheduled and planned to be flown anyway, the
production company would pay the hourly rate for that aircraft.”

Soldiers are sometimes used as extras or pilots, too — perhaps if a
filmmaker wants to shoot footage of a flyby. “Soldiers are paid
anyway,” Breasseale said, because active duty service members
receive a 24/7 salary. So the cost to the production company isn’t
the union-mandated salary of a professional actor, stunt pilot, or
extra; it’s just a per diem. “For instance, we shot a picture up
in Canada and we brought in actual soldiers because they needed to be
able to fly the Blackhawk helicopters. So they paid for the
soldiers’ transportation up there, they paid a rate field cost for
the Blackhawks, they paid the hourly rate for the Blackhawks, and then
they paid the per diem and hotel expenses for the service members who
are on set.”

In other words, the taxpayer isn’t directly paying for the
production costs, since the equipment and personnel would be getting
paid for either way. The studio, however, gains a huge benefit if a
deal is struck.

That said, the trade-offs can be high. Frequently, notes are returned
to filmmakers, asking them to change plot points in ways that make the
film more palatable to the military, and specifically to the liaison
who is working with the production. And the issues with this have been
well-documented, perhaps most notably in reporter David L. Robb’s
2004 book _Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors
the Movies_. Robb documents cases in which prominent filmmakers agreed
to substantial rewrites to paint military personnel in a more positive
light, or, at times, excise material in historical films that don’t
fit the military’s official narrative. As he puts it:

Millions of dollars can be shaved off a film’s budget if the
military agrees to lend its equipment and assistance. And all a
producer has to do to get that assistance is submit five copies of the
script to the Pentagon for approval; make whatever script changes the
Pentagon suggests; film the script exactly as approved by the
Pentagon; and prescreen the finished product for Pentagon officials
before it’s shown to the public.

Some filmmakers refuse to comply with the notes, and they usually end
up going their separate ways. But in many prominent cases, they agree,
incorporating the military’s suggested changes into the script.

For instance, as Robb writes in his book, the Navy agreed to let the
original _Top Gun_ production shoot on a naval base near San Diego,
but that meant making some changes. Maverick’s love interest, played
in the movie by Kelly McGillis, was originally written as a fellow
soldier. But the navy forbids officers and enlisted personnel from
fraternizing, so the script was changed in order to gain access to the
naval base.

Robb also writes (from 2004) that a sequel to _Top Gun_ was thought
to be impossible to make because the Navy feared it
might _hurt_ recruiting. The massive Tailhook scandal in 1991, in
which navy pilots molested women at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, cast
the movie’s womanizing and drinking in a new light. The new film
was, of course, eventually made, with considerable involvement from
the military
[[link removed]] —
and both drinking and sexual relationships (and the homophobic slurs
of the original) are handled _far_ differently. (It’s also very
good, the rare and exhilarating sequel that transcends its original
and doesn’t seem purely invented to build up excitement for the next
installment.)

So is the Pentagon censoring cinema?

Even if you take a dim view, as many do, of the process of adopting
military notes into scripts in return for support, it’s part of a
long history of Hollywood self-censorship
[[link removed]],
often aimed at keeping the government from censoring them directly. In
1934, for instance, the major Hollywood studios voluntarily adopted a
“Production Code” that banned, among other things, showing
interracial marriage, or story lines in which clergy are disparaged or
criminals are shown not being punished for their actions. Conformity
to the Code lasted into the 1960s, when it was eventually replaced by
an early version of the MPA ratings system we’re familiar with
today.

HOLLYWOOD HAS A LONG HISTORY OF SELF-CENSORSHIP, OFTEN AIMED AT
KEEPING THE GOVERNMENT FROM CENSORING THEM DIRECTLY

You could see productions’ willingness to bend on these matters as a
continuation of that tradition. Breasseale, for his part, sees this as
a reasonable accommodation to request for productions seeking not just
accuracy in storytelling, but an economic advantage. “The rules that
I operated when I was out there is that it needed to
be _plausible_,” he said. “So if you’re going to show a soldier
committing a war crime, then you’re going to also need to show how
the uniform code of military justice deals with that, and the
punishment that they would suffer.”

You might reasonably ask why the military even bothers getting
involved when they just as reasonably could refuse to ever participate
in a film production. Breasseale cited several reasons. The first is
recruitment. “If you see positive representations of your military
— well, frankly, it doesn’t even have to be positive,” he said.
Seeing the military in action, sometimes portrayed as heroes and
sometimes portrayed as members of an organization with a strict code
of military justice, can be immensely appealing. It sure was for those
who saw _Top Gun_.

There’s another reason, particularly in our time, when despite
having been at war for two decades, Breasseale pointed out, a sizable
number of Americans haven’t had much contact with the military in
real life. “There’s a lot to be said about the necessity to
educate the American public about the military they’re paying
for,” he said.

In Breasseale’s view, the reason to participate in a production was
that it would help provide a “substantive military portrayal.” If,
during negotiations with a production, he felt that the studio “just
wanted cheap props, essentially, that would typically get rejected out
of turn.” He might tell them to work with unions, rather than just
trying to get nearly-free soldiers. He’d also reject a production
that was asking for the kind of equipment that could imperil “the
believability of a picture” if not shown the way the military would
use it — that they wanted to “bring a knife to a gun fight.”

The whole process, he says, is reasonable and humane. He started
working as the Army liaison in 2002, when “we were just starting a
new era of war by politicians who had failed to find other
alternatives,” as he puts it. “A lot of the scripts I was
receiving at the time, even if they were set in contemporary settings
in Iraq or Afghanistan or on a contemporary time period, were really
movies about Vietnam. There were no substantive, decent, high-quality
movies [about the military] between eras. There was an aura of the
broken, crazy military vet who’s just one argument away from
snapping and losing his shit.”

“So,” he says, “a lot of what I did was help humanize a military
that people have no touch with.”

Robb sees this through a different lens; after all, both
Hollywood _and_ the military are selling something. He writes that
“in the movies, when companies pay producers to show their products
on screen, it’s called ‘product placement.’ But when the
government provides incentives to producers to make the military look
good in their movies, it’s known by a different name. It’s called
‘propaganda.’”

[Brie Larson in uniform.]

Brie Larson in _Captain Marvel_. Her character is an Air Force
fighter pilot.

 Disney

Furthermore, he argues, “the military’s approval process …
isn’t about making movies more authentic, it’s about creating
positive images; it’s about making the military look better than it
really is; it’s about making the military more attractive to
potential recruits, taxpayers, and Congress.”

You can see the point. The most popular movies on the planet currently
are those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, produced by Marvel
Studios, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 2009. Disney
has a long, long history of working with the Pentagon
[[link removed]],
stretching back to public information and training cartoons as well as
insignia produced during World War II.

From the launch of the MCU, even before its Disney days, the same has
often been true
[[link removed]]. All
three _Iron Man_ movies received military support. So did _Captain
America: The First Avenger_. When _Captain Marvel_ arrived in
theaters in 2019, featuring a main character who is an Air Force
pilot, it had been preceded by a flurry of cross-promotional materials
with the Air Force, including an ad in which filmmakers and stars
praised their collaboration:

Though the US military plays a prominent role in many MCU films, they
haven’t always worked together. Conflict arose, for instance,
during production of _The Avengers_, in which the Pentagon found
S.H.I.E.L.D., the shadowy fictional espionage organization that works
closely with the Avengers, to be too “unrealistic.” _The
Avengers_ went ahead without Pentagon support.

Should we be worried about this partnership? Depends on who you ask.

Whether you agree more with Breasseale’s perspective or Robb’s
depends on your answer to a fundamental question. From TV and movies
to video games and more, the entertainment industry and the military
have long seen one another as partners, ideologically and economically
— but _should_ they?

And if your view of the military is generally positive — as it is
for most Americans — does this still count as propaganda?

In his foreword to Robb’s book, Jonathan Turley, a public interest
law professor at George Washington University Law School, notes that
“propaganda denotes a certain product; a packaged news account or
film developed by a government or an organization to shape opinion …
yet this is not traditional propaganda since the military does not
generate the product itself and does not compel others to produce it.
Rather, it achieves the same result through indirect influence;
securing tailored historical accounts by withholding important
resources.”

_WHAT DOES IT MEAN IF THE MILITARY HAS THE FINANCIAL POWER TO SAY WHAT
VERSION OF HISTORY GETS MADE?_

It’s that “tailored historical accounts” part that troubles me,
at least in principle. For many people, movies are their most direct
access point to the tales of war and heroism and history; think about
World War II, and the images that spring to your mind are almost
certainly culled from films. In the future, when those involved have
passed away and our cultural relationship to truth has only gotten
more corrupted, how will we access the truth about the ethically murky
wars of the past several decades? Even if we know the facts and the
films differ, will we care?

What does it mean if the military has the financial power to say what
version of history gets made?

I ask Breasseale about this. “If I am party to a picture being made
that I know presents only the wrong side, but an unfactual version of
demonstrably provable events, then that’s propaganda. And so, if you
can stay on the right side of those topics, to me, that is simply
recruiting, or education. But it’s not propaganda.”

“There have been academics, very serious academics, who’ve written
books about this sort of thing, who believe that any support
whatsoever to the motion picture industry is necessarily
propaganda,” he concludes. “I just can’t get there. I can’t
get my head around it, because it is not a black-and-white issue.”

He’s right that it’s not a black-and-white issue — not at all.
For one, Turley and Robb both note that some legal minds argue this
use of military equipment, even if it’s not at taxpayer expense, is
unconstitutional.

Furthermore, at times (as in the case of the 2002 film _Windtalkers_
[[link removed]])
the military requires a film about an otherwise marginalized group to
run against the established historical record. If a few military
officers (who may have variable political agendas) hold that much
power with relatively low accountability, how dangerous is the whole
collaboration in the long run?

[Tom Cruise stands on the wings of a fighter jet, watching two jets
streak by in the sky.]

Tom Cruise in _Top Gun: Maverick_.

 Paramount Pictures

Ironically, we may not be asking this question all that much longer.
The development of high-quality computer-generated effects and even
performers could eventually eliminate or greatly reduce the need on
Hollywood’s side to strike a deal with the military to get a picture
made. Lower-budget films may find themselves more readily in a place
to tell all kinds of stories about history.

Meanwhile, a film like _Top Gun: Maverick_’s charm comes, in part,
from its almost nostalgic feeling, a film about heroism and military
prowess that isn’t tethered to a particular war or enemy. But it
also feels like the natural endpoint of that military-movie marriage,
one that’s graduated from the Reagan-era, post-Vietnam rah-rah
of _Top Gun_ and into a geopolitically sticky world in which
Hollywood wants to make movies for the whole globe.

The film’s nearly three-year delay between production and
distribution gave journalists plenty of time to dig into the ways the
military and Paramount had cooperated
[[link removed]].
We still don’t know who they’re fighting in _Top Gun: Maverick_,
and early reporting noted that the Japanese and Taiwanese flags
[[link removed]] on
Tom Cruise’s iconic leather aviator jacket had been shifted to more
generic symbols.

It may just be that Hollywood has moved beyond its desire to work with
the US military at all. It’s not that they’re no longer on
America’s side; it’s just that they have to be on everyone’s
side. And the transactional partnerships that come from that need are
what will shape the future of Hollywood.

Top Gun: Maverick _premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and opens in
the US on May 27._

Alissa Wilkinson covers film and culture for Vox. Since 2006, her work
has appeared at Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Vulture,
RogerEbert.com, The Atlantic, Books & Culture, The Los Angeles Review
of Books, Paste, Pacific Standard, and others. Alissa is a member of
the New York Film Critics Circle [[link removed]] and
the National Society of Film Critics
[[link removed]], and was a
2017-18 Art of Nonfiction writing fellow
[[link removed]] with
the Sundance Institute. Before joining Vox, she was the chief film
critic at Christianity Today. 
 

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