Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies (review)

Editor's Note: We are pleased to share this exchange between book reviewer Lawrence Suid and the book's author, David L. Robb.

Operation Hollywood: An Exercise in Futility

If Dave Robb had written his book during the Vietnam War, his anti-military screed might have been explicable. However, his errors of fact and procedure destroy any value the book might have provided, whatever the period in which it appeared. Historians and journalists share one requirement, the need for accuracy. When the facts are wrong, the author's credibility comes into immediate question. I am not talking about one or two minor mistakes, such as misspelling a name, although they create warning flags. In fact, even a single major error or misstatement of facts should render the narrative invalid since it shows a lack of rigor in research and writing or worse, the deliberate misrepresentation to support a particular point of view. Moreover, since facts themselves serve as the basis for interpretations and conclusions, the old maxim still has value: garbage in, garbage out.

For the record, this reviewer has researched and written about Hollywood's symbiotic relationship with the U.S. armed services for more than 30 years. He has interviewed more than 500 filmmakers, military personnel, and government officials. He has shared his documents with Mr. Robb and discussed his findings at some length. Unfortunately when Robb could not find anything incriminating in the material to support his thesis, he still demanded to know where the dirt was. Not finding it in the sources did not deter Mr. Robb. As a result, he has filled his narrative with egregious errors of fact that destroy any value his book might have.

Perhaps the most obvious misstatement comes when Mr. Robb claims the relationship between the film industry and the armed services is Hollywood's "dirtiest little secret." A reader can only wonder if the author has ever read the reviewer's Guts & Glory or Sailing on the Silver Screen both of which describe in detail the almost 100 years of cooperation between filmmakers and the military. Apart from these narratives, the truth is self-evident to anyone who grew up watching war movies of the 1930s to early 1960s. Virtually every military movie during these years contained a title expressing the filmmakers' thanks for the assistance they had received from the armed services and acknowledged that the motion pictures could not have been made without the assistance. So where is the secret?

To be sure, Mr. Robb is more interested with the recent military films, many of which served to rehabilitate the positive images of the armed services which the Vietnam War had savaged. But even with access to the files of the major military films of the 1980s and 1990s, Robb still could not get the story right. In particular, he attacked Phil Strub, the DoD liaison with Hollywood. Ultimately, he claimed that Strub is one of the most "powerful" people in the film industry who uses this power to determine which scripts receive DoD assistance.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Like his predecessor, Donald Baruch, Strub simply reads the scripts and sends them to the appropriate public affairs offices of each service for consideration. Strub has no authority to decide whether a service should cooperate or refuse to cooperate on a project. He only conveys the decisions back to the filmmakers and then becomes a facilitator during subsequent negotiations to produce a script which a service will find acceptable for cooperation. Unlike Baruch, Strub does go to Hollywood on occasion to help ensure a filmmaker is shooting the approved script. However, he has no ability to influence a service's decision on whether to provide assistance. And he definitely cannot tell filmmakers how to create their military stories.

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