Hollywood at War

With America at war, Hollywood follows
By César G. Soriano and Ann Oldenburg, USA TODAY
Hollywood has gone to war.
Conflict in Iraq: Soldiers walk a ridgeline on the set of the TV series Over There. It airs this summer on FX.
FX Networks
In a reflection of America's conflict in Iraq, a proliferation of TV and film projects is focusing on the U.S. military, the war or both.
Big-screen ventures in the works range from dramas (No True Glory: The Battle for Fallujah, set to star Harrison Ford; and Jarhead, about the Gulf War and starring Jamie Foxx and Jake Gyllenhaal, opening Nov. 11) to comedies (The Tiger and the Snow, starring Roberto Benigni) and documentaries (Gunner Palace, opening March 4).
Television is even more emboldened:
• Three cable channels are solely devoted to all things military.
• Award-winning producer Steven Bochco is creating Over There, a drama series about an Army unit serving in Iraq, set to air this summer on FX.
• Even NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives has a plotline about a Marine who is deployed in the war on terror.
Not since World War II has Hollywood so embraced an ongoing conflict. It took years for pop culture to tackle the Korean and Vietnam wars, and it took time before the country was ready to be entertained by those politically charged conflicts.
With Iraq, however, and after 9/11, "all bets are off," says film historian Leonard Maltin. "Whatever happens in real life inspires and affects our storytellers."
With no resolution in sight, Iraq remains a timely backdrop. Audiences are hungry for glimpses of history in the making. March 19 is the war's second anniversary.
But not any and every angle of war is being depicted. One aspect is glaringly absent from most projects: negativity. The U.S. soldier is the hero; his cause is just. Storylines featuring the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or war protests are no-nos.
"That gets you into arenas of policy," says Bochco, who has written four episodes of Over There, which is filming in Santa Clarita, Calif. "We'll be telling the story about young people's experience in war. I've always tried to stay off a soap box. I don't think proselytizing is good storytelling."
The show will focus on the men and women in uniform and the families who are left behind. The opening scene of the pilot: Bo Rider, a 20-year-old soldier, and his wife, Terry, in a tract house somewhere in California, are "having sex and loving it," as the script puts it, before he ships out.
"Our aim is to humanize soldiers and their families and to tell stories about the trials and tribulations," Bochco says.
And because it is on cable, there will be no glossing over of gory images or expletives.
FX's John Landgraf, who came up with the idea of setting a show in Iraq, says it's surprising there haven't been more projects about recent military conflicts.
"The best purpose of television and film is to tell stories that are truthful and of the moment and dig into the human experience," Landgraf says. The Iraq war "is such a grand natural human drama."
But it's also an explosive issue that can alienate viewers and advertisers. Criticize the war, and you could be accused of criticizing the warriors, Maltin says. Even Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's scathing documentary of the Iraq conflict and the war on terror, was careful not to attack the troops, he says.
"In Vietnam, the anti-war movement gradually became an anti-military, anti-soldier attitude," a concept that was reflected in pop culture, says Bing West, 62, who is writing the Battle for Fallujah screenplay with his son, Owen, a Marine infantry officer.
"The films coming out now are pro-soldier. I think it genuinely says that Americans across the political spectrum have a strong degree of admiration for the military" despite how they might feel about the war in Iraq, West says.
"Books and movies like No True Glory will focus on the bravery of our soldiers and point out why our military can be relied upon to do the right thing."
Days of Our Lives took a similar approach when a main character, Philip Kiriakis (Kyle Brandt), joined the Marines. "We will always be patriotic in our representations and will never take a political stand," executive producer Ken Corday says.
Hollywood needs the military
That makes the Pentagon brass happy.
"These days, there is an unwillingness to criticize individual servicemen and women, which was quite common in the Vietnam era," says Phil Strub, who heads the Pentagon's film liaison office. "Americans are very disinclined to do that now, and we're very glad this attitude tends to pervade all entertainment."
Hollywood always has relied on the U.S. military for assistance. That includes access to tanks, aircraft carriers, helicopters and troops that would be too expensive to re-create. The Pentagon, in return, gets to approve the script to ensure the military is portrayed in a positive light (though many of the current projects aren't being made under Pentagon rules, creators say).
That relationship is blinding Hollywood into whitewashing the Iraq conflict, says David Robb, author of the 2004 book Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies.
"In many ways, Hollywood is embedded with the military," Robb says. The military "know that when positive images are portrayed in movies and television shows, they see huge spikes in recruitment. The military is really pressing to get into these pictures. ... These films (that receive Pentagon assistance) should have a disclaimer: 'This film has been shaped and censored by the military to meet recruiting goals.'"
Viewers are either unaware of the relationship or don't mind. Military culture is hotter than ever.
"It's always been a popular genre for our viewers," says David Karp, general manager for the Military Channel, which launched in January. Previously called Discovery Wings, the channel is one of three competing for military enthusiasts. The others are the Pentagon Channel and the Military History Channel — a spinoff of A&E's History Channel, which has used the military as a staple for years.
"The fact there's front-page news daily about military matters and events heightens interest right now, but military subjects are timeless and universal," Karp says. One of the show's biggest specials in January was Delta Company, in which cameras were with Marines of Delta Company 1st Tank Battalion on their push to Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
War games — literally
Video games have jumped on board, too. Today's combat games, among the top sellers in the $10 billion-a-year video game industry, are akin to interactive movies. In them, gamers often take the role of soldiers, including:
• A sergeant coordinating realistic squad-based missions in a fictional Middle East urban war zone (Full Spectrum Warrior).
• A contracted professional soldier acting covertly in North Korea (Mercenaries).
• A soldier in battle during World War II (Battlefield 1942 and Call of Duty: Finest Hour) or Vietnam (VietcongPurple Haze and Men of Valor: Vietnam).
"They have increased in realism dramatically and militarily. You work together with your team, you set up lines of fire so you're not injuring your troops," says Douglas Gentile, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University and director of research for the National Institute on Media and the Family.
Games with scenarios ripped from the headlines, Gentile says, could have a "profoundly different effect ... for a generation now growing up under the threat of terrorism and at war. It's not going to be an exercise in nostalgia."
In February 2004, one company, Kuma Reality Games, began offering downloadable games based on actual U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A retail version of War on Terror hit stores last fall. The U.S. Army's own computer game, America's Army, has been downloaded more than 17 million times. A version for Microsoft's Xbox and other consoles will be released this summer.
On the anti-war side
In the middle of the entertainment industry's obsession with military culture, a few anti-war projects can be found.
Why We Fight, director Eugene Jarecki's critical study of the American military-industrial complex, won the American Documentary Grand Jury Prize at January's Sundance Film Festival.
Embedded, a satire on the madness of the war, premieres on the Sundance Channel March 20. It is written by and stars Tim Robbins, who is well known for his anti-war stance, and was first performed in July 2003 on stage in Los Angeles.
Still, Robbins says, "about the only thing we don't poke fun of is soldiers."
Iranian filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi's Turtles Can Fly, the first movie made in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, is a tragic look at the lives of Kurdish Iraqi children during wartime. He believes that the film's anti-war message is the reason TurtlesCan Fly was not nominated for a foreign-language Oscar.
"In Hollywood, politics and the moviemaking industry are so intertwined that it's difficult for (filmmakers) to see the realities," Ghobadi says. The film opens Feb. 18 in New York and Los Angeles.
For documentary filmmaker Mike Tucker, who co-directed Gunner Palace with wife Petra Epperlein, the experience of capturing the war on camera was intense.
"If I had an opinion when the war started, it has mutated into total confusion," Tucker says. The documentary follows an Army artillery unit based in a palace that belonged to Uday Hussein, Saddam's son. Four soldiers from the unit were killed.
"Unless you've actually been there — people are just so detached from it — you don't understand what the reality is," says Tucker, an Army veteran. "There will always be a fascination with war, but who is going to define that experience? Hollywood's tendency is to sugarcoat it."
In his film, a poignant scene features Army Spc. Richmond Shaw, a young soldier and poet. Standing in the bombed-out remains of Gunner Palace, a stoic Shaw locks-and-loads his rifle, looks straight into the camera and raps: "For y'all, this is just a show, but we live in this movie."