[R-G] Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Pentagon-Style

[Anthony Fenton]

The Golden Age of the Military-Entertainment Complex
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, Pentagon-Style
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16937
March 21, 2008 By Nick Turse
Source: TomDispatch

In the late 1990s, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon -- a game in which the  
goal was to connect the actor Kevin Bacon to any other actor, living  
or dead, through films or television shows in no more than six steps  
-- became something of a phenomenon. Spread via the Internet (before  
becoming a board game and a book), Six Degrees has taken its place in  
America's pop culture pantheon among favorite late-night drunken  
pursuits.



Here is a new variant of the game: The goal is to connect Kevin Bacon  
to the Pentagon. A commonsense approach would be to consider Bacon's  
military roles -- the ROTC cadet in his first feature film, the 1978  
comedy classic Animal House, for example, or the Marine Corps  
prosecutor, Captain Jack Ross, in the 1992 film A Few Good Men. But  
the game isn't as easy as it looks. Animal House was hardly a pro- 
military project and the Department of Defense actually denied A Few  
Good Men access to its facilities. The script, the Pentagon claimed,  
reinforced "the conclusion that not only is criminal harassment a  
commonplace and accepted practice within the Marine Corps, but that it  
requires a sister military service to uncover the wrongdoings..." A  
spokesman for the film understood why: "It is certainly not a  
recruiting film," he commented.



So does that mean game over? Perish the thought. In reality, there are  
no degrees of separation between Bacon and the Pentagon because the  
actor began his career in a "recruiting film" -- a real one. As Bacon  
recalled: "After the [Vietnam] war was over in [19]75, I was already  
thinking about becoming an actor and I got sent out on this Army  
recruiting film. It was a soft-sell kind of thing. I was a guy getting  
out of high school who didn't know what he wanted to do with his life,  
so I took the gig. It was my very first paying acting job."



As it happens, however, the military puts Bacon to shame when it comes  
to connections in Tinseltown. The Pentagon might, in fact, be thought  
of as the ultimate Hollywood insider -- a direct result of the ever- 
expanding military-corporate complex or "The Complex" as I call it in  
my new book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.



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...



Thirty Seconds Over Hollywood



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.)



Syd Chaplin later starred in the non-military A Little Bit of Fluff  
(1928) with Edmund Breon, who appeared in the 1930 World War I  
aviation epic The Dawn Patrol. That film was written by John Monk  
Saunders, who penned another World War I drama, Wings (1927),  
featuring Gary Cooper. Wings received major support from the War  
Department (back in the days before it was called the Defense  
Department) and won the first Academy Award for Best Picture.



Gary Cooper provides the link to Sergeant York, a 1941 film directed  
by World War I Army Air Corps veteran (and The Dawn Patrol director)  
Howard Hawks that was denounced by many as war-mongering propaganda.  
Hawks went on to direct actor Ray Montgomery in Air Force (1943), a  
Warner Brothers film about a bomber crew serving in the Pacific, which  
received assistance from the Army Air Corps. In fact, the War  
Department even fast-tracked a review of the script because the film  
was deemed "a special Air Corps recruiting job."



That same year, Montgomery also played a bit part, alongside Humphrey  
Bogart, in Warner Brothers' Action in the North Atlantic (assistance  
from the Navy). Bogart additionally starred with Lloyd Bridges in  
Columbia Pictures' 1943 Sahara, a World War II epic made with the full  
cooperation of the U.S. Army. Bridges would go on to appear with both  
Van Johnson and Spencer Tracy in the non-military Plymouth Adventures  
(1952). But long before that, both Johnson and Tracy took off in Metro- 
Goldwyn-Mayer's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a film celebrating the 1942  
"Doolittle Raid" -- a U.S. terror-bombing effort that decimated  
civilian sites including factories, schools and even a hospital in  
Japan -- made, of course, with the assistance of the War Department.



Van Johnson fought his way through another MGM production,  
Battleground (1949), which not only featured tanks and trucks loaned  
by the Army, but, as extras, twenty members of the 101st Airborne  
Division. Battleground co-starred John Hodiak, who, that same year,  
played alongside Jimmy Stewart in the World War II adventure film  
Malaya. Stewart actually enlisted in the Air Force in World War II,  
then served in the Air Force Reserve, and retired as a brigadier  
general. While in the Reserves, he flew high in Strategic Air Command  
(1955), a film conceived at the urging of Curtis LeMay, the actual  
commander of the Air Force's actual Strategic Air Command (SAC). Even  
with Cold War–era demands on its equipment, SAC provided Paramount  
with B-36 bombers, B-47 jet bombers and a full colonel as a technical  
adviser.



But that was just one of SAC's (and LeMay's) connections to Hollywood.  
The 1963 film A Gathering of Eagles, for example, received SAC's  
wholehearted support. Written by Battleground screenwriter Robert  
Pirosh and featuring matinee idol Rock Hudson, it was praised for its  
realism by none other than LeMay.



Rock Hudson later starred with John Wayne in The Undefeated (1969),  
but not before "the Duke" made his military-entertainment masterpiece  
The Green Berets (1968), which enjoyed the full backing of the Vietnam- 
embattled Department of Defense. With loads of military input, The  
Green Berets proved to be, said Variety, a "whammo" and "boffo" box- 
office success. Critics, however, almost universally panned it. 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."



Wayne's Green Berets costar, George Takei (better known as Mr. Sulu on  
TV's Star Trek), was no stranger to the military-entertainment  
complex, having appeared in the 1960 Marines Corps-assisted Hell to  
Eternity and the 1963 film version of John F. Kennedy's PT 109 (for  
which the Navy provided a destroyer, six other ships, and a few  
sailors). Takei, who would be "beamed up" in the Navy-supported 1986  
film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, also once starred with Grant  
Williams, an actor who later showed up in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), a  
then-unbelievably big-budget (at least $25 million) Twentieth Century  
Fox film. For that movie, the Department of Defense provided research  
assistance, stock footage, a technical adviser, an old airplane hangar  
(which the film blew up), and the use of Navy ships at Pearl Harbor.  
Demonstrating a new willingness to go above and beyond for Hollywood,  
the Navy even loaded thirty "Japanese" airplanes onto the aircraft  
carrier USS Yorktown for the attack.



In Rehab Mode, the Military Goes Civilian



Military-Tinseltown cooperation obviously goes back a long way. But in  
the 1970s, a new, amped-up relationship was launched, largely in  
response to a growing negative impression of the U.S. military brought  
on by the Vietnam War -- and by the daunting prospect of having to  
field an all-volunteer military. The Pentagon was hungry for help in  
rehabilitating its image -- even lending support to "civilian" flicks  
-- and the film industry was happy to oblige.



Take Twentieth Century Fox's 1974 collaboration with the Navy on the  
non-military The Towering Inferno (1974). The Navy lent helicopters,  
and the studio said thanks in the form of an acknowledgment in the  
credits. The film featured longtime military-entertainment stalwart  
William Holden, who had already appeared in I Wanted Wings (an army- 
aided 1941 propaganda flick) and The Bridges at Toko-Ri (made with  
Navy assistance in 1955). He had also co-starred in 1948's Man From  
Colorado with Glenn Ford, who acted alongside Charlton Heston in  
Midway (1976), a production that was allowed to use the USS Lexington  
aircraft carrier for two weeks of filming. Heston, in turn, went on to  
star in Gray Lady Down -- a 1978 submarine thriller that benefited  
from the use of a real submarine, ships, and sailors, all courtesy of  
the Navy.



Gray Lady Down featured actor Stacey Keach, who starred in 1980's TV  
movie-adaptation of Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War. The Marine Corps  
provided an adviser (who tempered some of the more disturbing portions  
of Caputo's memoir), the use of military facilities, and 30 marines.  
Brian Dennehy, who also starred in A Rumor of War, would act alongside  
Scott Glenn in the 1985 western Silverado. But before he became a  
cowboy, Glenn played the part of Navy test pilot and NASA spaceman  
Alan B. Shepard in The Right Stuff (1983). That film was partially  
shot at Edwards Air Force Base and used various types of aircraft and  
equipment as well as Air Force personnel as extras.



Ed Harris, who blasted into orbit as astronaut John Glenn in The Right  
Stuff moved from the space capsule to the NASA control room in the  
1995 blockbuster drama Apollo 13 (Air Force extras and equipment  
loaned by Vandenberg Air Force Base). Beside him in the co-pilot seat  
was none other than... Kevin Bacon. Apollo 13 also featured Bill  
Paxton, who, a year earlier, had been in the Arnold Schwarzenegger  
blockbuster, True Lies, which benefited from Marine Corps assistance.  
Paxton had also acted in 1990's Navy Seals (helped by the Navy) and,  
in 2000, would dive below the surface in the Navy-supported submarine  
action-drama U-571.



True Lies was but another link in the military-entertainment matrix.  
The film's co-star, Tom Arnold, shared billing in Exit Wounds (2001)  
with Steven Seagal (whose 1992 film Under Siege and 1996 film  
Executive Decision received, respectively, Navy and Army cooperation)  
and Bruce McGill, who would appear with Morgan Freeman in 2002's The  
Sum of All Fears. Shot on location at Whiteman Air Force Base and  
Offutt Air Force Base, The Sum of All Fears featured numerous USAF  
aircraft and enjoyed the input of multiple Air Force technical advisers.



Freeman's costar in The Sum of All Fears, Ben Affleck, had a lead role  
in the 2001 historical drama Pearl Harbor. Produced with the backing  
of the Navy, the film had its premiere on the deck of a nuclear- 
powered aircraft carrier. Affleck was joined in Pearl Harbor by Cuba  
Gooding Jr. (who also starred in 2000's Navy-aided Men of Honor), Tom  
Sizemore (from 1991's Navy-aided Flight of the Intruder) and Josh  
Hartnett. That same year, Hartnett and Sizemore appeared in Ridley  
Scott's blockbuster Black Hawk Down, made with the full cooperation of  
the Army. The Pentagon sent the film eight helicopters and 100  
soldiers, including members of the 160th Special Operations Aviation  
Regiment.



Pearl Harbor co-star Tom Everett appeared in Air Force One (1997),  
starring Harrison Ford, which used USAF aircraft, Air Force personnel  
as extras, and was filmed at both the Rickenbacker and Channel Islands  
Air National Guard bases. Its director, Wolfgang Petersen, also  
directed the George Clooney/Mark Wahlberg Air Force-aided weather  
drama The Perfect Storm (partially filmed at the Channel Islands base  
as well).



Wahlberg had a bit part in the 1994 Danny DeVito comedy Renaissance  
Man (made with Army involvement). In fact, the Oscar-winning, military- 
themed Forrest Gump received only limited help from the Army, in part  
because Renaissance Man and another 1994 comedy, In the Army Now,  
starring Pauly Shore and David Alan Grier, sucked up so much military  
attention that year. Grier went on to appear in the non-military The  
Woodsman (2004) with Benjamin Bratt, who had previously been cast in  
the 1994 Army-aided thriller Clear and Present Danger and would star  
in the ABC TV series E-Ring, a self-proclaimed "pulsating drama set  
inside the nation's ultimate fortress: the Pentagon." Its producer and  
co-creator Ken Robinson had worked in the actual Pentagon over "a  
couple decades." At Bratt's side in the non-military The Woodsman was  
not only Grier but -- you guessed it -- Kevin Bacon.



The Pentagon, the Sequel



In fact, one could take many (if not all) of Bacon's non-military  
roles and quickly find connections that lead directly to the Pentagon.  
For instance, have a look at Bacon's distinctly unmilitary Wild Things  
(1998) and you'll find movie veteran Robert Wagner, who was featured  
not only in such Navy-supported fare as The Frogmen (1951) and Midway  
(1976), but also in the Marine Corps–aided Halls of Montezuma (1950),  
Stars and Stripes Forever (1952), and In Love and War (1958); the Army- 
assisted Between Heaven and Hell (1956); the Air Force-supported The  
Hunters (1958); and finally The Longest Day (1962), an epic about  
World War II's D-Day landings made with the cooperation of the Army,  
Navy, and Marine Corps.



When it comes to military-entertainment connections, the point is:  
Bacon isn't special. Almost any current actor -- from Academy Award- 
winner Gwyneth Paltrow (in 2008's upcoming Air Force-aided Iron Man)  
to young actress Dakota Fanning (at the side of top-gunner Tom Cruise  
in the Army-aided, Steven Spielberg-directed 2005 remake of War of the  
Worlds) -- could be linked to the military. The reasons are simple. As  
David Robb, the author of Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes  
and Censors the Movies, observed:

"Hollywood and the Pentagon have... a collaboration that works well  
for both sides. Hollywood producers get what they want -- access to  
billions of dollars worth of military hardware and equipment -- tanks,  
jet fighters, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers -- and the  
military gets what it wants -- films that portray the military in a  
positive light; films that help the services in their recruiting  
efforts."

But recruiting is just part of the equation, and the phrase "a  
positive light" is even a little soft. At the movies, the military  
gets sold -- at least in those legions of Pentagon-aided films -- as  
heroic, admirable, and morally correct. Often, it can literally do no  
wrong. This, of course, is no accident. Something must be exchanged  
for the millions of dollars in otherwise unavailable high-tech weapons  
systems and equipment, not to speak of personnel and military  
advisors, necessary to make the sort of "realistic," eye-catching war,  
action, and sci-fi movies that Hollywood (and assumedly its audiences)  
demand.



Speaking about the big-budget, live-action blockbuster Transformers  
(2007), Ian Bryce, one of its producers, characterized the  
relationship this way, "Without the superb military support we've  
gotten... it would be an entirely different-looking film... Once you  
get Pentagon approval, you've created a win-win situation. We want to  
cooperate with the Pentagon to show them off in the most positive  
light, and the Pentagon likewise wants to give us the resources to be  
able to do that."



On the military side, Air Force master sergeant Larry Belen spoke of  
similar motivations for aiding the production of Iron Man: "I want  
people to walk away from this movie with a really good impression of  
the Air Force, like they got about the Navy seeing Top Gun." But Air  
Force captain Christian Hodge, the Defense Department's project  
officer for Iron Man, may have said it best when he unabashedly  
predicted, "The Air Force is going to come off looking like rock stars."



On the Silver Screen, you can be sure of three things: the Complex is  
forever; the Pentagon has no equal (sorry Kevin!); and there will,  
most definitely, be a sequel...





Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of  
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for Los Angeles Times, the San  
Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, The Nation, the Village Voice and  
regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the  
Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in  
Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project series. For a video  
interview with Nick Turse, click here.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the  
Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources,  
news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing,  
co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of  
Victory Culture (University of Massachusetts Press), which has just  
been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with  
victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.]