The Pentagon Goes Hollywood

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr

The Tom Cruise film Top Gun, about U.S. Navy pilots training to be "the best of the best," had all the ingredients for a hit: a brash beefcake hero and a gorgeous, throaty-voiced heroine (Kelly McGillis), a pop-music sound track and MTV-style visual pyrotechnics. But the truly impressive stars of the film are its sleek, roaring fighter jets. Featured in thrilling aerial sequences, they make modern-day dogfights seem like the ultimate video game.

The high-flying hardware turns Top Gun into a 110-minute commercial for the Navy -- and it was the Navy's cooperation that put the planes in the picture. The producers paid the military $1.8 million for the use of Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego, four aircraft carriers and about two dozen F-14 Tomcats, F-5 Tigers and A-4 Skyhawks, some flown by real-life top-gun pilots. Without such billion-dollar props, the producers would have spent an inordinate amount of time and money searching for substitutes, and might not have been able to make the movie at all.

The partnership has been profitable for both Hollywood and the Pentagon. Top Gun, which has raked in $160 million so far at the box office, is the year's highest-grossing film. Its glorified portrayal of Navy life spurred theater owners in such cities as Los Angeles and Detroit to ask the Navy to set up recruiting exhibits outside cinemas where Top Gun was playing to sign up the young moviegoers intoxicated by the Hollywood fantasy.

Such is the way that moviemakers and the military do business together. The combination of Top Gun's box-office success and America's current mood of gung-ho patriotism has sent studios scrambling to produce war movies: the Pentagon is currently reviewing more than 200 screenplays. Says Los Angeles- based Navy Liaison Officer Sandra Stairs: "I've seen ten times more scripts now than in the previous two years." Each of the four services, as well as the Coast Guard, maintains a liaison office in Los Angeles to handle requests for everything from old uniforms to tanks. The Pentagon, says Donald Baruch, special assistant for audiovisual media, "couldn't buy the sort of publicity films give us."

But there is a catch. Before a producer receives military assistance for a TV or movie project, the screenplay is reviewed by officials at the Department of Defense and by each of the services involved. The Pentagon ends up rejecting many projects that come its way on the grounds that they distort military life and situations. An Officer and a Gentleman, which like Top Gun dealt with naval aviation training, was turned down because of its rough language, steamy sex and, to the military mind, inaccurate view of boot camp. The Pentagon said no to WarGames because the military contends that a teenage computer hacker could never crack the U.S. strategic defense system. Even Rambo's lone-wolf heroics would have failed to pass muster, despite later praise from President Reagan. The Pentagon guidelines do not condone "activities by individuals . . . which are properly the actions of the U.S. Government."

Some services are pickier than others. The Army, for instance, blanched at Clint Eastwood's rough language and rougher manners in his upcoming film Heartbreak Ridge, about a hard-nosed sergeant named Highway who leads a platoon in the Grenada invasion. When the brass demanded script changes, Eastwood refused. "We're not doing a 'Be all that you can be' movie showing guys working computers," he told them. Instead, Eastwood took his project to the Marines, who proved to be less squeamish. Sergeant Highway was transformed from an Army paratrooper into a gyrene gunnery sergeant.

Once filmmakers win Pentagon assistance for their projects, they tend to go along with changes that the military asks for. One reason Top Gun is so flattering to the Navy may be that consultants from the service worked along with the production. In the original script, for instance, Cruise's sidekick dies in a midair collision. When the Navy complained that too many pilots were crashing, the filmmakers opted for an incident that actually occurred at Miramar: a spinout in which a copilot was killed as he tried to eject.

Military cooperation also has its limits. The brass can divert troops and equipment to moviemakers only if their loans do not inhibit operational readiness. Moreover, producers are required to reimburse the Government for expenses: Top Gun was billed for the equipment used and was charged up to $7,600 an hour for flying time. The increasing collaboration between filmmakers and the military could result in little beyond bland and blindly patriotic war pictures; Top Gun has not received the critical acclaim of, say, The Deer Hunter, which had no military support. "Movies critical of the military will be difficult to make," says former Navy Lieut. John Semcken, who served as the liaison on Top Gun. Such concerns hark back to the late 1960s, when critics of the John Wayne movie The Green Berets argued that Wayne and the Defense Department had collaborated in presenting a decep-tively glorified picture of the Viet Nam War.

In the absence of such a divisive conflict, however, a more pertinent prototype for today's films might be the hawkish but mawkish 1957 production Hellcats of the Navy, starring Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis. When patriotism is at high tide, Washington and Hollywood both benefit.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Los Angeles and Bruce van Voorst/Washington