Case Study 14.2: Hollywood and U.S. Military Cooperation

From the Office of War Information to the Pentagon Entertainment Media Office

Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion: A Critical Study of Influence, Disinformation, and Resistance

"The easiest way for the government to shape what Hollywood says about the military is to give Hollywood what it needs to tell the story the government wants told — and then call it commercial entertainment." — David Robb, Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (2004)

Overview

The relationship between the United States Department of Defense and the American film and television industry is one of the most consequential and least publicly understood propaganda arrangements in the history of democratic governance. It is not secret — the Defense Department's entertainment liaison offices operate openly, their functions are described in Department guidelines, and researchers have used FOIA requests to document specific script changes and production decisions. What it is, rather, is structurally invisible: embedded in the commercial entertainment environment in ways that make it effectively indistinguishable from independent production to the audiences who consume the product.

This case study traces the arrangement from its formal origins in the Second World War through its current operation, documents the deal structure and its scale through available evidence, examines several specific cases of documented content influence, and assesses the propaganda implications of an arrangement that affects over 800 feature films and 1,100 television productions.

Part I: The WWII Foundation — The Office of War Information

Establishment and Mandate

The Office of War Information (OWI) was established by Executive Order 9182 on June 13, 1942, consolidating multiple existing government information functions under a single agency. Its stated purpose was to coordinate "war information" across all government agencies and to communicate with both domestic and foreign audiences through all available channels.

The OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) established a Hollywood liaison office at 1780 N. Vine Street in Los Angeles, where its staff reviewed scripts, consulted with studios on productions in progress, and provided guidance on how to portray various elements of the war effort. The BMP produced its own "Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry," which provided studios with guidance on how to handle topics from the depiction of Allied nations to the portrayal of the enemy, from race relations to labor disputes.

The BMP's Hollywood liaison was not a censorship office in the strict sense — it lacked enforcement power over the content of privately financed and produced films. Its power was partly advisory, partly based on the leverage that came from controlling the allocation of resources (film stock, for example, was rationed, and BMP cooperation could affect a production's access), and partly based on the general climate of patriotic voluntarism in which studios and filmmakers cooperated with government guidance as a matter of wartime commitment.

The Manual's guidelines included explicit language about what war films should accomplish: "The motion picture is one of our most important weapons of war. In using it, we must be guided by the consideration of how it will affect the war effort." Films were evaluated against a "will this hurt the war effort?" standard that in practice gave BMP staff significant influence over how American life, the Allied cause, American allies, and the enemy were depicted.

Frank Capra and Why We Fight

The most explicit government film propaganda product of the WWII era was the Why We Fight documentary series, directed primarily by Frank Capra and his collaborators under the auspices of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Capra, already one of Hollywood's most celebrated directors, was commissioned as a Major when he reported for duty in 1942 and was given the assignment of producing a series of orientation films for newly enlisted troops — films that would explain why the war was being fought.

The resulting seven films — Prelude to War (1942), The Nazi Strike (1943), Divide and Conquer (1943), The Battle of Britain (1943), The Battle of Russia (1943), The Battle of China (1944), and War Comes to America (1945) — were originally intended for military audiences but were subsequently cleared for civilian theatrical exhibition. Prelude to War won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1943.

The Why We Fight series is frequently cited as an example of effective wartime propaganda for several reasons. It made sophisticated use of existing footage — newsreel material, captured enemy film, graphic animation — to construct a narrative of the war's origins and stakes. It employed the full resources of Hollywood's technical personnel. It used the full range of cinematic rhetoric: dramatic narration (Walter Huston voiced several films), orchestral score, montage sequencing, and graphic visualizations of geopolitical argument.

What is particularly significant about the series from a propaganda analysis standpoint is that it was overt propaganda in the full sense: it was government-produced, government-distributed, and explicitly designed to build support for a specific government military policy. The audience knew, or could easily have known, that they were watching government-produced films. This distinguishes it analytically from the subsequent evolution of the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship, in which government influence operates inside commercial productions that present themselves as independent.

Post-WWII: The Transition to Commercial Partnership

The transition from the OWI model to the contemporary entertainment liaison model did not happen all at once. In the immediate post-war period, the institutional apparatus was dismantled — the OWI was dissolved in September 1945. But the relationship between the military and Hollywood that had been institutionalized during the war did not disappear; it evolved.

The Korean War and early Cold War period saw ad hoc arrangements between specific productions and the military services. As television emerged as a mass medium in the 1950s, the Pentagon extended its cooperation framework to include television productions. By the mid-1950s, each service branch had its own entertainment liaison office in Los Angeles, coordinating separately with productions seeking military cooperation.

In 1989, the Department of Defense reorganized its entertainment liaison activities under a unified structure, the DoD's Public Affairs office, coordinated with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and National Guard, each maintaining their own entertainment liaison offices. The Pentagon's overarching framework document — the DoD Instruction 5410.16, "DoD Assistance to Non-Government Entertainment-Oriented Media Productions," updated periodically — describes the criteria under which cooperation is appropriate and the review process that governs it.

Part II: The Current Deal Structure

What Studios Get

The value proposition for production companies seeking military cooperation is straightforward and substantial. Military hardware — aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, fighter aircraft, main battle tanks, helicopters, specialized vehicles — represents capital costs in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. Production companies cannot purchase or rent this equipment from commercial sources because it does not exist in the commercial market.

Access to military equipment, personnel, and facilities at production-friendly cooperation rates provides productions with assets that cannot be replicated through practical production at any cost and that are difficult to replicate convincingly through digital visual effects — particularly for close-up or interactive sequences in which the equipment and uniformed personnel must be physically present.

Beyond equipment, military cooperation provides: use of military installations (bases, training facilities, carriers, flight decks) as filming locations; uniformed military extras at no cost to the production; active-duty personnel as technical advisors; and in some cases formal endorsement or cooperation that is itself a marketing asset.

A production shooting a film about Navy fighter pilots that has cooperation from the Navy can advertise that cooperation — "filmed with the cooperation of the United States Navy" — as a credibility marker. The endorsement has production value beyond the equipment access.

What the Pentagon Gets

In exchange, the Department of Defense receives:

Script review and content influence: Productions seeking DoD cooperation must submit their scripts to the relevant entertainment liaison office. A DoD official reviews the script against criteria set out in the governing instruction, which include whether the production "will present the military in an honest and accurate manner," whether it "provide[s] a benefit to the DoD," and whether it is "not otherwise harmful to the national interest."

These criteria are subjective and broad. "Harmful to the national interest" can cover a wide range of content. In practice, documented script review processes have resulted in requests for changes to: portrayals of military personnel engaging in illegal or unethical conduct; depictions of specific military operations in ways the relevant service finds inaccurate or unflattering; characters whose conduct reflects poorly on military culture; plot elements that involve military equipment being used against American citizens or in ways inconsistent with military law; and thematic content that frames military service or military action negatively.

Productions that agree to requested changes receive cooperation. Productions that decline do not.

Favorable portrayal in mass entertainment: The net effect of this arrangement, across hundreds of productions over decades, is a systematic skew in how military institutions, military personnel, military culture, and military operations are depicted in American entertainment. The military that appears in Pentagon-cooperated productions is generally competent, well-led, ethically serious, effective, and sympathetic. Portrayals that contradict this picture either require negotiation or are made without military cooperation — which means they look different.

Part III: Documented Cases

Top Gun (1986) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

The Top Gun franchise is the most publicly discussed case of the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship, partly because the arrangement was extensive and partly because its effects were measurable.

The original Top Gun was produced with active Navy cooperation, including access to carriers, fighter aircraft, and the Naval Fighter Weapons School (the real "Top Gun" at NAS Miramar). The film's depiction of naval aviation — the visual vocabulary of carrier life, flight operations, and pilot culture — was substantially shaped by this access. It could not have been made as it was without Navy cooperation, and the Navy's agreement to provide that cooperation was contingent on script review and content management.

The Navy stationed recruitment tables in theaters showing Top Gun. An internal Navy study, cited in multiple secondary sources including Robb's Operation Hollywood, documented a measurable increase in Navy recruitment applications and enlistment following the film's release. This documented recruitment effect — a behavioral change in a direction that served the Navy's institutional interests — is the closest thing available to a measured propaganda outcome.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) generated one of the most publicly documented cases of Pentagon-Hollywood content influence when an early version of the film's official trailer showed the main character's jacket with patches including what appeared to include a Taiwanese flag and a Japanese flag — consistent with the character's backstory in the original film, which referenced a classified mission in an unnamed country widely understood to be Taiwan. Reports circulated that Tencent, a Chinese company, had been involved in the film's financing, and that the flags had been altered in the trailer in response to concerns about the film's reception in the Chinese market.

The actual production history is more complex: the patches were altered in the trailer, the alteration generated public controversy, the flags were eventually restored in the final released film, and the Tencent financial involvement was apparently not sustained through the film's completion. What the episode illustrates is the multi-party character of contemporary Hollywood content management: the government's interests (represented by Navy cooperation and script review), commercial interests (the Chinese theatrical market), and creative interests (the director's and producers' preferences about continuity with the original film) are all simultaneously in play, and the film that audiences see is the product of negotiations among all three.

Behind Enemy Lines (2001)

Behind Enemy Lines was produced with Air Force cooperation and depicts an incident loosely based on the 1995 shootdown of an F/A-18 over Bosnia. The film's production was documented by David Robb as involving Air Force requests for changes that softened the depiction of a military leadership character who, in earlier script versions, had made decisions that endangered the downed pilot for political rather than tactical reasons. The Air Force's concern, per Robb's account, was that the depiction of a superior officer sacrificing a subordinate for political considerations would reflect poorly on Air Force leadership culture. The character was revised.

The propaganda significance of this change is not primarily about the specific revision but about the category of change: the military's review process systematically removes or softens depictions of internal ethical failures, leadership failures, and structural military misconduct. Over time and across productions, this creates a represented military culture from which certain kinds of institutional failure — the kind that actually occur and that audiences would benefit from understanding — are systematically absent.

Iron Man (2008)

Iron Man was produced with Air Force cooperation, which provided access to Edwards Air Force Base, A-10 Thunderbolt aircraft, and uniformed personnel. The script review process for Iron Man is documented in research by Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, who note that the Air Force's involvement extended to casting input — specifically, requests that the Air Force characters in the film be depicted as professionally competent and ethically serious, contributing to the positive institutional portrayal that the cooperation arrangement is designed to produce.

The Iron Man case is analytically interesting because it is a superhero film — a genre whose relationship to realism is explicitly fantastic. Yet even in this context, the Pentagon sought and received cooperation from the production, and the Air Force characters in the film function as reliable, competent partners for the protagonist. The arrangement's reach extends to genres where its influence is perhaps least expected.

Act of Valor (2012)

Act of Valor is the most extreme case of the Pentagon-Hollywood arrangement: a feature film released theatrically in which the central cast consists entirely of active-duty U.S. Navy SEALs, playing fictionalized versions of SEAL operations. The film was originally commissioned as a recruitment video and subsequently expanded into a theatrical release.

The use of active-duty military personnel as actors in a theatrical film distributed commercially without disclosure — beyond the general public knowledge that the cast were SEALs — collapses the distinction between state-produced content and commercial entertainment entirely. Act of Valor is, without significant qualification, a government-produced recruitment film distributed through commercial channels as entertainment. Its theatrical release without the labeling that would apply to explicit military advertising represents the institutional end-state of the Pentagon-Hollywood relationship: government content produced and distributed as commercial entertainment with no functional distinction between the two.

Part IV: The Scale of the Arrangement

Researchers Tom Secker and Matthew Alford published an analysis in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (2017) based on FOIA requests and research into available production records. Their documented count was over 800 feature films and over 1,100 television productions receiving DoD cooperation between 1911 and the time of their research — a figure they acknowledge is likely an undercount given the incompleteness of available records.

The scope of productions across this count encompasses every genre, every budget level, and every era of American entertainment production. Military-cooperated productions are not concentrated in the war film genre; they include action films, science fiction, animation, sports films, and family entertainment. The Pentagon's visual presence in American cultural life is not limited to films that are explicitly about military subjects; it extends to the general representational environment in which American audiences develop their understanding of what military institutions are, what military service means, and what military power is for.

This scale matters for cultivation theory: if heavy media consumption shapes beliefs about social reality, and if a significant proportion of the media environment has been shaped by a government agency with specific institutional interests, the cultivation effect is not a diffuse result of commercial decisions — it is partly a result of systematic institutional influence across decades of production.

Part V: Is This Propaganda? The Definitional Question

The question of whether the Pentagon-Hollywood arrangement constitutes propaganda requires definitional clarity that the term alone does not provide.

By the definition used in this course — systematic, intentional communication designed to shape beliefs or behavior in the interests of a power center, operating through the management of information and emotion rather than transparent reasoned argument — the arrangement qualifies. It is systematic (institutionalized, ongoing, with formal procedures); it is intentional (the Defense Department explicitly states its goals); it is designed to shape beliefs and behavior (the documented recruitment effects confirm this); it operates in the interests of a specific institutional power center (the U.S. military and its funding and mandate); and it operates through concealment rather than transparency (audiences do not know that the films they are watching have been subject to government content review).

The counter-arguments are available and not trivial: participation is technically voluntary; the arrangement produces some genuinely useful access to authentic production resources; and military-positive cultural representation may, in some cases, reflect genuine cultural values rather than manufactured ones.

But the transparency test — the question of whether audiences, if they knew about the arrangement, would evaluate the content differently — is the most diagnostic. The military-entertainment cooperation is not disclosed to audiences in the way that paid political advertising is required to disclose its sponsor. Audiences watching Top Gun: Maverick do not know that the Navy reviewed and influenced the script. If they did know, they would have information material to their evaluation of what they are watching. The fact that this information is withheld is not an accident; it is the condition that makes the arrangement commercially viable and propagandistically effective simultaneously.

Analytical Questions for Discussion

1. Frank Capra's Why We Fight series and Act of Valor are both government-produced military content. Why We Fight was overt propaganda; Act of Valor was theatrical entertainment. What is analytically significant about this difference? Is the shift toward concealment of government authorship a matter of audience sophistication, changing propaganda strategy, or changing legal and political constraints?

2. The DoD's review criteria include whether a production "will present the military in an honest and accurate manner." Can a government agency be an impartial judge of what constitutes an honest and accurate portrayal of itself? What institutions, processes, or standards would be needed to make such a judgment credible?

3. The Pentagon-Hollywood arrangement has been criticized from the political left (as a mechanism of militarism and imperial legitimation) and occasionally from the political right (as a mechanism of government influence over private industry). What does this range of criticism suggest about the issue's relationship to conventional political categories?

4. If Congress passed legislation requiring all films that received DoD production cooperation to disclose that cooperation in their opening credits, what effects would you predict? Consider effects on studio decision-making, on audience reception, and on the military's communication strategy.

Case Study 14.2 | Chapter 14 | Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion