The CIA is pitching stories to screenwriters and studios.
You have to wonder how dense the people are at Langley not to have figured this out before. The FBI crawled into bed with Hollywood decades ago. Nearly fifty years back, the FBI even had its own TV series. Ol' Jedgar Hoover worked hard to ensure that Hollywood glorified the FBI. As a result, the FBI brand commands respect, even to this day, despite their long history of flouting the Constitution and opposition to the civil rights movement.
The Department of Defense figured this out years ago. "Top Gun was, for years, a terrific recruiting tool for the Navy.* If you want to use government hardware for your movie, figure that the movie is going to be good for recruiting.
(Or you can do your movie in such a way that you only need small arms and shit like that, so you can make the movie you want without the Pentagon quibbling over the script.**)
Maybe the CIA has figured out that Covert Affairs has been a good puff-piece of a series for the CIA, though all of that icky "Thou Shalt Not Operate on American Soil" stuff seems to have gone by the boards.*** And this way, they get to transform themselves into "the fluffy friendly people who spy on your shit", as opposed to "the cabal of torturers."
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* Before that movie came out, the Navy was so hurting for aviators that they were trying to get junior officers in other specialties to volunteer for flight training.
** MASH, Apocalypse Now, Catch-22, Three Kings and so on.
*** Whether that is just dramatic license or a covert move by the CIA to desensitize the nation to CIA operations within the country is open to speculation.
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1 comment:
I suspect in our lifetimes their unwritten philosophy went from "We'll commit almost any evil to safeguard America" to "We'll commit any evil... what was the rest? Never mind. Couldn't have been important."
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