Files on government involvement in popular culture, from the CIA in Hollywood to the Pentagon and reality TV. I obtained these documents via FOIA requests and from various archives.
75 years ago this week, President Harry Truman signed into law the National Security Act, which brought into being the…
In September 2018 the US Air Force ran a tour of Special Operations Command for a dozen Hollywood bigshots. The…
In 2015, legendary TV producer Dick Wolf approached the FBI about developing scripted and unscripted products based around the Bureau. …
While digging into the production of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent I contacted the Croatian Ministry of Culture for…
Among the numerous agencies who vetted and reviewed the script for the 1994 film adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Clear and…
One of the recurring propaganda techniques identified by Roger Stahl in Theaters of War is that you can remediate military…
Three years ago, when the third and final season of Designated Survivor came out on Netflix, I said the show…
In my latest piece for Shadowproof I outline the production history of Top Gun: Maverick, using documents from the Pentagon,…
The 1995 nuclear submarine mutiny thriller Crimson Tide was rejected by the US Navy, for fairly obvious reasons (the whole…
In the first of a series of releases, the FBI sent me some of their historical files on working with…
Something I recently stumbled on while researching the 2011 terrorism sci-fi thriller Source Code is a batch of contracts between…
All the waves made by Don’t Look Up have missed one key landmark – the Pentagon supported the movie. Unlike…
