Theaters of War

“Top Gun: Maverick” was the biggest hit of 2022, but audiences were largely unaware that a behind-the-scenes contract with Paramount gave the military the right to “weave in key talking points,” edit the script, and screen the film before its release. This was not the first time, of course. Internal documents from the Pentagon’s Entertainment Media Office praised its work with “Top Gun” (1986) as having “rehabilitated the military’s image, which had been savaged by the Vietnam War.” Naturally, the upper echelons of the military see Hollywood as a PR opportunity, but questions arise: How deep does this PR campaign go? How many films? What’s the extent of script doctoring?Roger Stahl, a professor of communication at the University of Georgia, has studied the “military-entertainment complex” for a decade. He’s aware that the military housed an office for doing business with Hollywood and TV, but the scholarly consensus was that it was a small-time operation that perhaps influenced a couple hundred films. Then he learns of two British researchers, Matthew Alford (University of Bath) and Tom Secker (freelance journalist), who obtained tens of thousands of pages of internal U.S. Defense Department and CIA documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The documents confirm that the security state has exercised direct editorial control over at least 1,000 feature films and another 1,000 television shows.The DealProducers who want access to military hardware, personnel, and installations must visit the Pentagon offices in Los Angeles whose “entertainment liaison” in turn asks to review the entire script. Typically, producers receive several pages of line-by-line script change requests. If the producer makes the changes, they sign a contract, get the military goods to use as set pieces, and begin production with military oversight. If the military is unsatisfied with the script changes, or the producer refuses to make them, then there is no deal, and the producer walks away with what amounts to a competitive disadvantage in the movie business.