NATO’s ‘Intimate Conversations’ With Film Industry Execs Mirror Hollywood’s Sanitizing of America’s Wars

The Guardian’s recent revelation about government efforts to inject pro-war rhetoric into European shows and movies is raising eyebrows. US studios have been playing this game for decades.

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Western filmmakers do not revere the military as much as the movies they make may suggest, but constructing narratives that recycle patriotic tropes makes finishing projects a heck of a lot easier. For many years, the government used this willingness to play ball to sell its wars, while shielding audiences from the horrors these wars produced.

According to an article by The Guardian, a series of recent meetings indicates that NATO is currently angling to continue this longstanding tactic.

On May 3, the outlet reported the following:

The alliance has held three meetings with film and TV professionals in Los Angeles, Brussels and Paris and is due to continue its “series of intimate conversations” next month in London, meeting with screenwriter members of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain (WGGB), which represents professional writers in the UK.

According to the report, the purpose of the scheduled meeting in London will be to discuss the “evolving security situation in Europe and beyond.” A WGGB email viewed by the paper suggested that “three separate projects” which are already in development were at least partly “inspired” by these talks. The Guardian quoted individuals invited to these upcoming discussions who said that they’re having some concerns about what they said feels like being asked to “contribute towards propaganda for NATO.”

This is, of course, nothing new. Earlier this month, The Grayzone penned an in-depth breakdown of the British government’s extensive history of using the arts to manipulate the public into supporting the UK’s foreign policy agenda.

These practices echo how American film studios and the Pentagon have been collaborating for decades.

To put it plainly, the ultra-patriotic depictions of the US military that Americans are used to seeing onscreen aren’t an accident. Rather, the rapid shift from late-70s classics like The Deer Hunter to more establishment-friendly films like Top Gun was the result of literal, coordinated, government-sponsored propaganda.

Via several in-depth reports from a number of years ago, MintPress News reporter Alan MacLeod showed that there’s been absolutely nothing organic about the mainstream film industry’s overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the military. In what MacLeod has referred to as “an explicit quid pro quo,” the Pentagon has spent years providing its facilities, equipment, and personnel to the country’s top film studios in exchange for final approval of their scripts. It’s an agreement which has benefited both parties. Hollywood is able to save millions on the costs of procuring pricey military-grade equipment, while the government ensures that content which paints the military, its global operations, or its history, in a negative light never makes it to the screen.

Perhaps the most central figure in this decades-long arrangement was Phil Strub, the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison between 1988 and 2018. Often credited with little more than “Special Thanks,” Strub has contributed significantly to films like “Iron Man,” “I Am Legend,” “Apollo 13,” and “Black Hawk Down,” and was instrumental in orchestrating changes to many others to reflect the Pentagon’s preferred messaging and objectives. Strub died in 2023.

As MacLeod has written about the film “Top Gun: Maverick,” “documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the movie was made only after an agreement was signed between Hollywood and the Pentagon, “... with the Navy insisting on “weav[ing] in” their “key talking points” in exchange for granting the production company extensive access to military hardware.”

In his article, Macleod cites National Security Cinema, a 2017 book about this process, which notes that the Department of Defense has supported more than 800 films and 1,100 TV shows. [Of course, this number has only grown larger in the years that have since passed].

The past 40 or so years have been littered with Hollywood blockbusters whose scripts were trimmed or altered to ensure that unfavorable storylines were left on the cutting room floor.

In GoldenEye, the 1995 James Bond flick, the script included a storyline in which a US Navy Admiral is seduced and killed by a female assassin. The Pentagon agreed to provide the military helicopters the production requested only after the filmmakers agreed to make this character a Canadian.

A couple of years later, the Pentagon successfully lobbied the producers of Tomorrow Never Dies to remove dialogue which correctly referenced the US military losing the war in Vietnam. While contemplating ending up in Vietnamese waters James Bond’s CIA ally, Jack Wade, was supposed to say that “it’ll be war, and maybe this time we’ll win,” but the line was scrubbed from the script.

In her 2011 thesis for Lehigh University entitled Strange Bedfellows: Cooperation between Hollywood and the Pentagon, Olga Zhakova covers the US government’s influence on a number of films, including Clear and Present Danger.

Zhakova writes the following about the backroom negotiations that took place to produce the thriller based on Tom Clancy’s novel:

The process of negotiating on Clear and Present Danger consisted of several stages. In the first stage the armed services involved in the project were given the script for review. All of them recommended disapproving the project for some similar and some varied reasons. However, some people in the DoD thought that the film would be beneficial to the military and insisted on finding a compromise for support. All objections were discussed between the DoD and the filmmakers. The script was rewritten several times to meet all the objections, and then the final script was given to all the services involved for the second and final review. This entire expedited review process took five months.

The paper details the numerous complaints that the DoD had with the script, as it depicted the US conducting a covert war against drug traffickers in Colombia. Among these issues, as Zhakova writes, “was that the script did not portray Marines “as heroes.””

She also notes that the government took issue with “the President and National Security advisor starting an illegal war and the military knowingly participating in it,” a rather hilarious objection given the US government’s documented history of covert operations and regime change throughout Latin America.

Zhakova’s paper also includes the following:

As for the comments on specific scenes, the Marine Corps Public Affairs Office objected to the scene showing the Navy bombing and killing civilians, even though it was not depicting Marines. The Office commented that this scene “portrays the military’s reactions to the death of the civilians as ‘that’s collateral damage and it’s just a fact of war that civilians will be killed.’” Major Jerry Broeckert, writing the memo for the OASD/PA, pointed out in this respect the following: “I don’t think we need to reinforce that stereotype.” This scene with the Navy jet fighter bombing a civilian target would become one of the main changes made to the script.

David Robb, a journalist who published a book called Operation Hollywood about the film industry’s willingness to accommodate the Pentagon, told Mother Jones the following for a 2004 article:

As far as reaching children, I think one of the best examples — and they’re very candid in these documents, because I don’t think they ever expected anybody to be looking at this stuff — there was this movie “The Right Stuff” about the early days of the space program. The original script was filled with vulgarity and cussing, and the military sent the producers a letter. It reads, “The obscene language used seems to guarantee an ‘R’ rating. If distributed as an ‘R’, it cuts down on the teenage audience, which is a prime one to the military services when our recruiting bills are considered.” Of course, an ‘R’ rating means children under 17 have to be accompanied by a parent, so a lot of 16- and 17-year-olds couldn’t see this picture. And the Air Force wanted young people to see this so they’d get a good, positive image of the military and join up. So they changed it.

It’s not just action movies and thrillers that are influenced in these ways by the US government. In the family comedy Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller’s character was supposed to find torture manuals in the study of his future father-in-law, a former CIA operative played by Robert DeNiro. At the request of the CIA, the script was changed so that all he finds are photographs of DeNiro with a variety of international figures.

This is a system that runs much deeper than the handful of examples cited above. Interference in these films, along with more infamous collaborations between Hollywood and the Pentagon on projects like Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty, is just the beginning.

Theaters of War, the 2022 documentary, notes that “thousands upon thousands upon thousands of products [films and TV episodes] have been affected and are often rewritten at script level by the national security state in the United States.”

American film producers are free to make films [and sometimes do] that are highly critical of the military and US foreign policy. The US government attempts to censor freedom of expression in many different ways, but it would be inaccurate to label this as such because the studios are under no obligation to comply with these requests. However, they often do comply and are helping the Pentagon propagandize the American people just to save a buck.