James Webb was a Marine's Marine: Vietnam War veteran; recipient of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts; former assistant secretary of defense. He was also the author of Fields of Fire, an unflinching-but-gung-ho 1978 account of his Vietnam experience so beloved by leathernecks it's mandatory reading in Marine Corps classrooms. So Webb expected full cooperation when he asked Pentagon brass in 1993 for technical support in adapting Fields of Fire into a feature film.
Webb should've known better. While assistant secretary of defense, he refused to help the producers of a CBS Vietnam War-era movie in 1987 because it dared suggest Agent Orange was a carcinogen. “There was no conclusive linkage between defoliation and . . . cancer,” Webb told David L. Robb in Robb's new book, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies. “So I said it would be inappropriate for the government to give its blessings to a film whose conclusions were not along the lines of the scientific evidence of the time.”
Chalk it up to karma, then, that Pentagon officials declined to assist Webb's Fields of Fire project. They informed Webb that if he wanted to use authentic Army tanks, jets and missiles, he would have to cut incidents from the script that involved fragging, drug use or pillaging Vietnamese villages, incidents Webb experienced while serving in Vietnam. “That these kinds of criminal activities actually took place is a matter of record,” wrote Phil Straub, head of the Pentagon's film office, in a Dec. 15, 1993, letter to Webb. “But by providing official support to the film, the Marines and the Department of Defense would be tacitly accepting them as everyday yet regrettable aspects of combat.”
Upon reading this assessment, Webb went ballistic. “It appears that what you are really saying,” he fired back, “is that when it comes to Vietnam, [the Department of Defense] will support only sterile documentaries, or feature films that amount to nothing more than dishonest propaganda.”
This sobering anecdote is but one of a volley of similar cases cited in Operation Hollywood. Robb, a former labor and legal reporter for the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety, does a tremendous job of documenting how far film producers and television shows bend their vision to the military line for assistance or, conversely, how the military pressures studios to add pro-military scenes into films that have nothing to do with war. Such a close relationship, Robb argues convincingly, is a conscious effort by the American government, like their peers in North Korea, “to make sure the people [are] more accustomed to being constantly on a war footing.”
Operation Hollywood examines dozens of films from the past 50 years, and you'll retch in disgust after a while at the wantonness of these silver-screen sluts. Director John Woo, for instance, went as far as altering history for his 2002 World War II yawner Windtalkersby obfuscating any reference to the fact that the Navajo code talkers prominently featured in the film faced execution by their fellow soldiers if captured by the Japanese. Other filmmakers tweaked their products for the most hilariously minute of military objections: the producers of the James Bond vehicle Goldeneyechanged the nationality of a treacherous admiral from French to Canadian because the French navy objected to one of its own being cast as evil (Canada apparently had no problems).
By quoting from letters, memos and other primary documents, Robb advances his thesis quite nicely—most of the time, he just quotes verbatim. One of the most laughable letters involved mega-producer Dean Devlin, who in 1995 wrote Straub proposing a partnership with the Pentagon for his Independence Daybecause the film would “enhance recruiting and retention” of military personnel. “We're going to make Star Warsand Top Gun look like paper airplanes,” Devlin wrote. “Just wait. There has never been any aerial footage like this before. If this doesn't make every boy in the country want to fly a fighter jet, I'll eat this script.” Despite this offer of coprophaghy, the Pentagon refused to help.
But because the subject matter that Operation Hollywood addresses is so important in our current climate, where the government desperately needs artists to spin the War on Terror entertainingly for the masses, there are some cardinal problems with the book. For one, Robb divides up the book into separate chapters detailing each movie—understandable given the breadth and scale of his intention, but one that leads to a lack of narrative and maddening re-introduction of main characters (you'll want to chuck the book again when Robb refers to Straub by his full name and as “head of the Pentagon's film office” for the umpteenth time). More unpardonable is a serious, fatal bout of historical amnesia. Nearly every film studied in Operation Hollywoodcame after World War II, meaning Robb makes absolutely no mention of the mandated partnership between Hollywood studios and the Armed Forces during that war, the closest historical parallel to our War on Terror. To ignore this particular era, especially when Robb argues that “being saturated with military propaganda in films and TV shows over the last 50 years” transformed the United States into a nation that is “willing to go to war at the drop of a hat” is the alteration of history by omission. In his own way, then, Robb is unfortunately no different than Woo.
Operation Hollywood: How The Pentagon Shapes and Censors The Movies. By David L. Robb; Prometheus. Hardcover, 384 pages, $28.
