The Iraq war movie: Military hopes to shape genre

[spanone]

more history rewritten



There's a war going on, and Army Lt. Col. J. Todd Breasseale has a mission.

But it's far removed from the captured Iraqi palace where he was once stationed. He fights his war now from an office on Wilshire Boulevard lined with movie posters chronicling conflicts real and imagined, from "Patton" to "War of the Worlds."

Breasseale's desk is piled high with scripts, each marked with his name and stamped "confidential." It's his job to help decide which movies should get Army help.

The mission is both harder and more important than it might appear.

After the Vietnam War, movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "Born on the Fourth of July" helped cement an image of psychologically damaged Vietnam veterans.

"In the '80s and early '90s, the Vietnam War vet was the 'other,' " Breasseale said. "Hollywood had created the crazy Nam vet."

For the Army, it was a bitter lesson.

With the country now enmeshed in another long, unpopular war, Breasseale is hoping to influence a new generation of filmmakers in order to avoid repeating the experience.

So far, Breasseale feels, most of the movies made about Iraq have really been about Vietnam.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-armyfilms7-2008jul07,0,2137731,print.story

[gratuitous]

1. Hollywood did not create the crazy Vietnam vet

That was Richard Nixon's doing, vigorously aided and abetted by the likes of William Westmoreland, J. Edgar Hoover and other domino theorists. But the Army doesn't want a repeat of the Vietnam experience, even though they've obediently followed the exact same path they trod in the 1960s and 1970s. At least they're going to make sure the movies don't tell anything approximating the real story, so maybe they did learn something once.

[hendo]

2. Well, its a judgement call

If they accept the military's help they often have free access to military equipment like Michael Bay often has. If not they get to front the cost. It's a pretty sweet deal that Bay has. He even got free access to equipment when he filmed Transformers. its amazing what a film like Pearl Harbor did to his relation with the armed forces.

[Echo In Light]

3. There's an author, forget his name, who has researched the military's hidden hand in Hollywood

Interesting stuff re how the military oversees what does and what does not make it into certain films. I've seen him interviewed on CSPAN before, and he may also be in that recent doc film, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, about the fascist MPAA rating's board {all fundies/conservatives abiding a sociopolitical agenda}