Nick Turse’s Six Degrees of Pentagon-Hollywood Separation
by Andre Soares
Nick Turse’s "The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex: Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Pentagon-Style" at TomDispatch.com:
"So let’s play a new version of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, with the military standing in for Bacon. The object is to follow a few of the thousands of linkages and connections between Hollywood and the military that have made the Department of Defense a genuine legend of the silver screen, from the Silent Era to the ramped-up military-movie complex of today, ending with — who else? — Kevin Bacon. Just sit back with a big bucket of popcorn and enjoy the show…"
…
"Let’s go back to 1915, when, in response to a request for assistance, U.S. Secretary of War John Weeks ordered the army to provide every reasonable courtesy to D. W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan epic Birth of a Nation. The Army came through with more than 1,000 cavalry troops and a military band. The film featured George Beranger, who would go on to star with Humphrey Bogart and Glen Cavender in San Quentin (1937) — in which a former Army officer is hired to impose military discipline on the infamous prison. Cavender had also appeared alongside actor/director Syd Chaplin, Charlie’s brother, in A Submarine Pirate (1915), for which the Navy provided a submarine, a gunboat, and the use of the San Diego Navy Yard. (The film was even approved to be shown in Navy recruiting stations.)"
***
Turse proceeds to detail numerous degrees of Pentagon-Hollywood separation — or rather, closeness — by finding links between the likes of, among others, William Holden, Gary Cooper, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Takei (!), and, gasp, John Wayne and his 1968 pro-Vietnam War The Green Berets which was "almost universally panned [...]. One New York Times film reviewer went so far as to call it ’so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail… vile and insane.’"
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I haven’t read his text yet but I hope he mentions This Is the Army. What a bizarre musical!