6. Screening Our Screens: Propaganda and the Entertainment Industry An Interview with Matthew Alford. By Rebecca Fisher
Rebecca Fisher: You wrote your first book, Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, in 2010. What have you been working on lately? Matthew Alford: I have been watching recent movies that received onset production support from the US Defense Department, such as Battleship, Act of Valor, and Battle: Los Angeles. They’re terrific recruitment tools - even I now want to join the Army in Afghanistan, though only so I never have to go to the cinema again. RF: Could you discuss the rules which ensure that the content of Hollywood films fall largely within state-friendly ideological parameters? MA: Jack Valenti, the Motion Picture Association of America President used to explain it most succinctly: Washington and Hollywood are “sprung from the same DNA”. Accordingly, Hollywood follows the script, especially on foreign policy issues. More specifically, there are four factors that determine and degrade the politics of Hollywood: only half a dozen huge companies own all the movies; advertisers play a central part in most films; the CIA and Pentagon have major roles in affecting the politics of scripts (they work on at least a third of modern films depicting US foreign policy); and powerful organisations will punish professionals who challenge the system. The resultant underlying rules for movie content have remained