Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (37 page)

Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies

by David L. Robb

Prometheus, 384 pages, hardback, 2004

This is an important book, and thoroughly to be recommended. It is also, unfortunately, a flawed one in terms of its presentation, filled with clumsy writing and egregious repetition: it reads like a collection of essays written, rather hurriedly, at different times, and it's somewhat shameful that neither the author nor his editor made the least effort to knit these into a coherent text.

The appeal to moviemakers of enlisting the cooperation of the military is obvious. For a fraction of the outlay that would otherwise be incurred, the military can lay on helicopters, battleships, nuclear subs and a cast of thousands. The peril of accepting such a huge cash savings – which may very well represent the difference between a movie being made and not made – is equally obvious. The non-cash price the military demands is script-approval, more usually euphemized as "technical advice." In
Operation Hollywood
Robb draws up an almost mind-numbingly wide-ranging roster of movies that have been substantially – often absurdly – compromised by the military's refusal to support enterprises that they feel fail to convey "the right message."

The ethical core of the book is summed up in a few lines about two-thirds of the way through:

And to get an idea of what's been lost by the sanitizing of hundreds of movies that the Pentagon has assisted, imagine what the films that the Pentagon refused to assist might have been like if they'd been subjected to the military's approval process. Imagine a "toned down" Jack D. Ripper, the mad army general obsessed with the purity of bodily fluids in Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove
; or a "more positive" Colonel Kurtz, the insane renegade army officer in Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now
; or a less bitter Ron Kovic, the paralyzed hero-turned-war resister in Oliver Stone's
Born on the Fourth of July
; or a less goofy, more soldierlike
Forrest Gump
[italics
sic
]. How would we have known if the producers of these films had toned down their characters in order to get the military's cooperation? And how would we have known that our movie-memories had been tampered with?

The answer, of course, is that we wouldn't, without the help of assiduous researchers like Robb. A case in point is the relatively recent movie
Windtalkers
, concerning the so-called Code Talkers, Navajos enlisted to serve alongside Marines in World War II because their language was totally incomprehensible to the Japanese and, as an evolved rather than a created "code", was invulnerable to decryption techniques. I saw this movie after I'd read Robb's book; the person I was with had not. My companion assumed the historical underpinning of the movie was, aside from the obvious Hollywood-blockbuster conventions, fairly accurate, and was quite horrified to find this wasn't the case. In particular, among countless smaller changes, institutionalized racism toward the Navajos was downplayed (there is a single violently racist Marine, and even he "learns better" as the movie progresses), and, most specific of all, the instruction given to each Marine teamed with a Navajo that, should his charge fall into enemy hands, his imperative duty was to kill him, in case the "code" could be tortured out of him, was almost completely written out of the script: it's still there in tacit form, but it's no longer an important dynamic of the plot.

The list of movies that have been similarly tampered with is a long one, as noted, and it spans decades up to the present. Even a listing of the more famous titles would be too long to reproduce here. I can guarantee, though, that many of your illusions about the integrity of your favorite movies will be shattered.

Also of interest are the tales Robb recounts of directors and producers who simply refused to be cowed by the military "script advisers" and who either scrapped their projects altogether or had confidence enough in their own box-office draw to be able to eschew the Pentagon's cooperation. Most such moviemakers have been well established figures, for obvious reasons, but not all. I was particularly struck by the story of Cy Roth, widely regarded as one of the worst low-budget moviemakers of all time, the qualities of whose three completed movies can be judged by the title of one of them:
Fire Maidens from Outer Space
. In 1953 he wanted to make a serious movie called
Air Strike
about racism aboard a World War II aircraft carrier. The Pentagon not only refused all cooperation – how preposterous to countenance that there might be racism in the military! – but also went out of their way to try to insure the movie never saw the light of day: at one point they even enlisted the FBI to see if charges of Communism against Roth might be made to stick. Despite such persecution, Roth refused to lie down and shut up, and finally he made his movie. By all accounts it's a rotten movie – and not just because of the lack of cooperation – but one cannot help admiring his courage and gumption in managing to make it against all the very considerable odds.

An additional point of interest in
Operation Hollywood
is that Robb has managed to obtain copies of various bits of correspondence between moviemakers and the military censors, and these he reproduces in facsimile form. He also presents a convincing counter-argument to the defense of the Pentagon's attitude that refusing cooperation is different from censorship in that no one would accuse (say) Exxon of censorship if it refused to assist a movie fiercely critical of the company's approach to clearing up oil spills. Robb points out forcefully that, unlike Exxon, the Pentagon is not a private company: it is in fact the property of the US public, and thus has no moral license whatsoever to rewrite its own and US history for the purpose of keeping that public in the dark.

Despite the irritation – even exasperation – generated by the total dereliction of auctorial and editorial duty in the preparation of its text,
Operation Hollywood
is one of those must-read books: no understanding of movie history is remotely complete without it. It certainly deserves far more attention than it so far seems to have received.

—Crescent Blues

Scorched Earth

by David L. Robbins

Bantam, 352 pages, paperback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in 2002

Elijah and Clare Waddell, inhabitants of Good Hope, Virginia, have a child, Nora Carol. However, Nora Carol is born deformed and dies within minutes. So that the parents' grief may be minimized, Clare's mother arranges with the Rev. Thomas Derby that the burial take place as promptly as possible in the graveyard of her family church, the Victory Baptist Church. No sooner is the child interred, however, than the deacons object, for Elijah Waddell is black: this is the "white folks' church". It's not that they're racists, you understand, but Nora Carol must be dug up and reburied at the nearby "black folks' church".

The night of the reburial, the Victory Baptist Church is burned to the ground, and Elijah is found next to it, drunk, dancing for joy ... but adamantly denying that he set the blaze.

No one believes him, of course. His situation worsens when a body is discovered among the ashes. Worse, the body is of the brutish local sheriff's daughter, who, the postmortem reveals, experienced both a broken jaw and sex not long before death. Elijah stands accused of arson, rape and murder.

Nat Deeds, a lawyer who fled Good Hope and his job when his marriage fell apart, is called back to defend Elijah. Nat has difficulties of his own believing Elijah's story, and his ability to concentrate on the case is hampered by his emotional turmoil in the presence of his estranged wife Maeve. Yet slowly his opinions shift. As, with Maeve's encouragement and sometimes help, he unravels a tangle of corruption, hypocrisy, racism and deceit that long predates Nora Carol's birth, he realizes both the truth of that fatal night and the possibility of at least rapprochement between himself and Maeve.

That might possibly all sound standard enough stuff. But what's truly outstanding is that in no way can this be described as a legal thriller, as a crime novel, or as belonging in any other neat genre category – any more than, say,
To Kill a Mockingbird
could be so dismissed (and I was constantly reminded of that novel while reading
Scorched Earth
, even though the books aren't markedly similar). The overtly dramatic elements are played down in favour of an extremely complex plot of which they are merely a part, with characters, their interplay and the corruption of human weakness being portrayed to extraordinary depth – all this done in a writing style that has the richness and smoothness of a vintage port.

Yet don't get the idea that this is one of those novels you
ought
to read only because it's a "worthy literary achievement" or something equally dull. In fact, it's riveting: the bedroom lights burned late despite grumpy comments from the other side of the bed.

And, even before I'd finished reading the paperback
CB
's editor had sent me, I went out and bought the hardback.

—Crescent Blues

Any Time At All

by Chris Roberson

Clockwork Storybook, 213 pages, paperback, 2002

Eleven-year-old Roxanne Bonaventure, a difficult child, encounters a dying woman in the woods, and is given an amulet. By use of the amulet Roxanne is able to travel through the many worlds and times of the Myriad (rather like Moorcock's multiverse or my own polycosmos), although aging only at the speed of her own internal bodyclock. Recursive elements abound during her various adventures; the author's appendix gives brief details about such varied cultural icons as H.G. Wells, Sexton Blake and The Beatles.

No prizes for guessing the identity of the old woman who gives the 11-year-old Roxanne the amulet, but that's not the kind of game Roberson is playing in this highly enjoyable book.

I've had to choose that phrase, "highly enjoyable book", with some care. First, the word "book", because
Any Time At All
isn't really a novel in the accepted sense. It's not a collection of linked stories, either, or even a fixup (whereby pre-existing stories are cobbled together with additional plot elements to create the appearance of a novel). Rather, it's a pseudo-novel which takes the
form
of a fixup, the tales that comprise it not having the status of independent short stories.

This is a useful form for novelists to exploit, but one of its drawbacks is that, unless the segments together build towards some kind of conceptual or emotional resolution, the expectations of the reader, whatever the intentions of the author, do
demand
that they can indeed stand alone: that each bears its own resolution. This is where
Any Time At All
tends to fall down; a few of its chapters are individually strong enough to satisfy, but too many of them have the status of "build-up" chapters – and, as they do not in fact build up
to
anything, the reader is left with the feeling of having been stranded.

Even so, the book is, to return to the other part of my phrase, highly enjoyable in that for the most part the prose – frothy and dancing, often delightfully elegant – a joy to read. Chris Roberson is obviously an author to watch, and this book is an ideal companion for a train journey, even if at its end one wishes it could have been something a little more.

Oh, and
Any Time At All
has a very nice John Picacio cover.

—Infinity Plus

Salt

by Adam Roberts

Gollancz, 256 pages, paperback, 2000

A string of almost-generation starships, each bearing a different dissident culture, goes to colonize the habitable-but-only-just planet called Salt – so-named because that is what the land is largely made up of, with a consequent lack of vegetation. The two cultures upon which the story focuses are diametrically opposed: one is a sort of US market-oriented pseudo-democracy taken to manic extremes (its spokesman produces an eloquent justification for regarding the straightforward, legalized buying of votes as the purest form of democracy) while the other is a benevolent cashless communism/anarchism. There are social difficulties between the cultures through misunderstanding of conventions: one person's expression of common courtesy is another's deadly insult. Despite the fact that there are virtually no resources on Salt to squabble over, so that the only sane option is for the cultures to cooperate, the crazed pseudo-democracy declares war for ideological reasons.

The book was first published in 2000, but the power of its satire could hardly be more relevant today,* with a pseudo-democratic US

[* 2011 note: The review was written at the height of the Bush/Cheney imperium.]

administration using every doublethink technique to proclaim its adoration for freedom on the one hand while introducing increasingly anti-democratic legislation on the other, all the time pumping up public fear of external foes as a way of papering over the cracks. This is not to say that Roberts's satire, while obviously political, is directed at specific political targets; just as Orwell satirized not communism but totalitarianism in (particularly)
Nineteen Eighty-four
(1949), Roberts is really dissecting human stupidity, as expressed through political insanity, rather than any particular political ideology, be it capitalism or anarcho-communism. The problem with his capitalist culture is not that it is capitalist
per se
but that its movers and shakers are, at a fundamental level, intellectually and morally corrupt, justifying their most despicable actions through the abuse of such terms as "peace" and "freedom".

In many ways this is a brilliant piece of work, and it lives long in the mind; as a novel, however, it is less successful, in that the scenarios it sets up are, perhaps inevitably, artificial-seeming. Or, at least, one would hope they are; looking around today, one sees whole bevies of real-life scenarios that would have seemed artificial if novelized just a few years ago. This is a book I'd strongly advise you to read: almost certainly you'll hugely enjoy it.