MEDIA – “Act of Valor” and Military Support to Hollywood Operations

Act Of Valor’ And The Military’s Long Hollywood Mission (Huffington Post):

A crack team of highly skilled warriors, outfitted with the most advanced weapons of the world’s most powerful military force, storms an enemy compound, firing round after round of ammunition through concrete walls and the skulls of their terrorist adversaries.The good guys have yet to suffer a single casualty until, suddenly, one of its leaders takes a rocket to the chest. The audience cringes, but the bang never comes — the rocket clangs to the ground, unexploded, and the battle rages on. The upcoming film “Act of Valor” is replete with that kind of action, but there are a few things it doesn’t have: There are no corrupt officers, no damaged heroes, no queasy doubts about the value of the mission or the virtue of the cause. That’s because “Act of Valor” was born not in Hollywood, but in the Pentagon. It was commissioned by the Navy’s Special Warfare Command and its success will be measured not in box-office receipts, but in the number of new recruits it attracts to the Navy SEALs. “Early on, we were pretty honored and humbled to be asked to take a look at potentially telling their story,” said “Valor” producer and former stuntman Scott Waugh, “to take a look at what telling their story would even look like.” This may be the U.S. armed forces’ first feature-length recruiting film, but it’s far from the first time unsuspecting audiences have been treated to Pentagon propaganda at the movies. As early as 1927, when military assistance on the film “Wings” helped it win Best Picture at the first Oscars ceremony, the Department of Defense has long maintained its own production office that offers filmmakers the latest in arms and high-tech vehicles at cut-rate prices — as long as their scripts are deemed worthy. … The battle scenes were shot during live SEAL training missions, plotted out and blocked by the troops themselves, with cameras placed atop their helmets for a video game-like first-person view of the action. To a generation well-accustomed to guiding digital soldiers through combat zones, all that’s missing is a PlayStation controller in a theater seat.The filmmakers said they were unconcerned with the recruitment angle of the film, focusing principally on the sacrifices made by the SEALs. They also stressed their full creative control of the film during its four-year production process, asserting that the only edits made by the Navy Special Warfare Command were designed to scrub military secrets from the final cut. The Banditos, of course, were carefully pre-screened. Their final product is a mix of trying acting and “Call of Duty”-style action, earnest and visually impressive but unlikely to garner the kind of praise “The Hurt Locker” and Hollywood’s grittier takes on combat have received. Then again, the military has never had Oscar in its sights — he’s far too old to enlist. Even McCoy admits that the picture is about changing perception and breaking away from the cynicism still pervasive in Hollywood, not winning gold. “I’d like to see the legacy of Vietnam put to bed. Vietnam was 40 years ago, and I think arts and entertainment is still suffering from that hangover,” he said. “It was a really bad time in American history, absolutely, but it’s time to sort of forget that and forget those sensibilities and don’t associate our troops and our men and women to that conflict anymore, and time to really open our eyes to say, ‘What’s going on in this world? What are our men and women in uniform really doing right now for us?’” Will “Act of Valor” accomplish that? Relativity Media, which won a bidding war to distribute the film following the SEAL-executed death of Osama bin Laden, has been aggressively pursuing publicity, airing multiple trailer spots during the Super Bowl and holding big premieres on each coast — the New York City opening was held on the USS Intrepid, while SEALs parachuted down to the theater for the Los Angeles bow. Every ad for the film touts the participation of real Navy SEALs; whether that is appealing to young audiences or smacks of propaganda, may help determine how it performs.

‘Act of Valor’ must balance publicity, secrecy with Navy SEALs (Los Angeles Times):

“Act of Valor” is a hybrid of fiction and documentary-style storytelling — the film tracks an eight-man SEAL squad that undertakes a fabricated mission to recover a captured CIA operative and discovers a plot to sneak suicide bombers into the U.S. across the Mexican border. In addition to its cast — led by a couple of especially telegenic warriors named Chief Dave and Lt. Rorke (their real first names) — the movie features live grenades, free-falling parachuters, high-speed boats, helicopters, an aircraft carrier and a nuclear submarine. It’s a level of production that would make blockbuster filmmakers such as Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer drool, obtained by two first-time feature directors and former stuntmen, Mike “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh, for roughly $12 million.The story of the small project, first conceived as a training film, then later embraced by the Navy and given a huge unexpected boost by the Bin Laden raid, is a dramatic yarn in its own right. Because it was begun as a recruitment video, the movie proceeded outside the normal Department of Defense channels for working with Hollywood, in which production companies submit a script for the department’s approval in order to gain access to personnel or materials. How the military initially understood the project — as a documentary, a fictional film, a recruitment video — is unclear. “That’s like ‘Rashomon,’” said one DOD official who works regularly with Hollywood and was not authorized to speak publicly about the project. “Ask a different person, get a different story.” Officially, “Act of Valor” “did not follow the normal DOD approval process for major motion pictures,” according to Rear Adm. Dennis J. Moynihan, the Navy’s chief of information. But the Navy has publicly embraced the film, which was overseen by the Naval Special Warfare unit, and determined that it poses no threats to the security of the U.S. or its stars, some of whom are now deployed overseas. “We think it accurately represents a number of the acts of valor that have occurred over the last 10 years with respect to the SEAL teams,” said Adm. William McRaven, the head of Special Operations Command and a SEAL himself, answering a question at an industry conference in Washington, D.C., last week. . “We’re conscious of the fact that there are active-duty Navy SEALs here. I can tell you they all volunteered. There’s no concern on their part about their individual or the security of their families…. The film company that produced this had a very collaborative effort with the Navy and with U.S. Special Operations Command. So nothing displayed in there tips our sensitive tactics, techniques and procedures.”

Hollywood Tries a New Battle Plan (Wall Street Journal):

In 2008, Navy Special Warfare invited a handful of production companies to submit proposals for a film project, possibly a documentary, that would flesh out the role of the SEALs. The goals: bolster recruiting efforts, honor fallen team members and offer a corrective to misleading fare such as “Navy Seals,” the 1990 shoot-em-up starring Charlie Sheen as a cocky lone wolf. “In the SEAL ethos, the superman myth does not apply. It’s a lifestyle of teamwork, hard work and academic discipline,” said Capt. Duncan Smith, a SEAL who initiated the project and essentially served as producer within the military.The project offered filmmakers access to SEALs as well as military assets, but no funding. A production company called the Bandito Brothers, which had previously worked with Navy Special Warfare on a series of recruiting videos, got the assignment. Co-founded by Mr. McCoy, a former off-road racing champion and stuntman, and Scott Waugh, who had run a stunt company, the Bandito Brothers specialized in shooting action-driven viral ads for brands such as BMW and Mountain Dew. The Los Angeles-based Bandito Brothers began shuttling back and forth to Coronado, Calif., the SEALs training base near San Diego, to conduct on-camera interviews. They initially planned to work the research into a script, then hire actors to play the lead SEALs. The filmmakers’ calling card within the military was a 2005 documentary called “Dust to Glory,” for which they positioned about 55 cameras on dirt bikes, trucks and dune buggies in the bone-jarring Baja 1000, an annual off-road race in Mexico. The gritty camaraderie depicted in the movie resonated with the SEALs, as did the on-screen tenacity of Mr. McCoy (nicknamed Mouse), who did the team-based race solo on a motorcycle. He crossed the finish line in 18 hours, nursing broken bones from a crash. … The filmmakers say the SEALs tackled their acting duties methodically, as they would a new tactical skill. In a scene where one of them discovers a female CIA operative who has been kidnapped and tortured, the directors coached him to slow down and tap into the emotion of the rescue. “For the audience, you need to get really compassionate. The women are going to need to connect,” Mr. McCoy recalled saying. By contrast, in the movie’s many battle scenes, the sailors move with a fluid precision that makes typical Hollywood action movies look bogus. When the SEALs picked off enemies and moved through buildings in a tight snaking column, some footage was captured by helmet-mounted cameras. Certain plot points were based on true stories from the field, including a scene in which a sailor takes a rocket-propelled grenade to the chest at close range and lives. By last March, the filmmakers had completed a final version of the film, following a tactical “scrub,” during which officials screened 1,800 hours of footage for scenes that could divulge sensitive tactics. For instance, a re-edit made it less obvious how a SEAL team would line up to storm a room. Sales agents at William Morris Entertainment were deciding on a plan for selling the film to a distributor when, on May 1, news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Studios immediately angled for projects that might capture some of the public fascination with the SEALs who led the strike. The most high-profile was the Bigelow and Boal script, which had been in development since 2008. Sony scooped up the movie about the bin Laden hunt within three weeks of his death. The movie is expected to be released in October 2012, a date that has drawn some political controversy. Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) called for an investigation into whether the White House gave the filmmakers access to confidential information and suggested that the film’s planned release next fall could influence the presidential election soon after. White House spokesman Jay Carney called the suggestion “ridiculous”; the filmmakers said in a statement that their film had no political angle. Bin Laden’s death found the Bandito Brothers sitting on a completed SEALs movie, but they didn’t immediately put it on the auction block. “We were nervous about seeming exploitative,” says WME agent Liesl Copland. The agency set up two “Act of Valor” screenings for potential buyers in June, four weeks after bin Laden was killed, by which time most of the related deal-making had died down in Hollywood.