Over-sensitive American military fiddle with James Bond movie scripts

11-Dec-2004 • Bond News

The Pentagon has been altering movie scripts for decades, and David Robb's new expose, "Operation Hollywood" (Prometheus Books), dishes details by the dozens - repors SFGate.

In the original script for the James Bond film "Die Another Day," a sarcastic comment about the Vietnam War was purged at the Army's insistence.

An earlier Bond movie, "GoldenEye," initially depicted an American admiral being seduced by a sexy Russian spy, who grabs his ID badge. The U.S. Navy objected, so the admiral became French in the next draft. When the French Navy objected, the writers came up with the final onscreen version: The duped admiral is Canadian.

"I'd laugh out loud when I was going through these documents," says Robb, who spent two weeks plowing through Pentagon script notes archived at Georgetown University's special collections department. "It is sometimes hilarious how petty the Pentagon could be."

But for Robb, a former Hollywood Reporter investigative journalist, the quid pro quo between movie producers and the military is no laughing matter.

"Hollywood (producers) are selling out their audience by turning movies into recruiting posters in exchange for access to military hardware," Robb says. "The bottom line is, it saves (the studios) money. That's why the filmmakers do it. For the military, anything that isn't pro military isn't authentic. That's their spin."

Swapping jets, tanks, helicopters and aircraft carriers for flattering PR results in a symbiotic relationship that Robb found "shocking."

"The military people were so blunt, so casual about telling producers to take this out, put this in," he says. "The military people want to control everything."

He wrote "Operation Hollywood," he says, because "the people have to be informed and vigilant. At least I tried to inform them. If they don't want to be vigilant, there's nothing I can do about that."

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.