Does art imitate life or life imitate art?
Well the CIA does review some movie scripts, so...
CIA influence on public opinion - Wikipedia
Assistance to entertainment
In the mid-1990s, the CIA named Chase Brandon, an operations officer who was assigned to South America, as liaison to Hollywood.
[18] Brandon's film credits include
The Recruit,
The Sum of All Fears,
Enemy of the State,
Bad Company and
In the Company of Spies. He has consulted for television programs including
The Agency,
Alias and JAG. He has appeared on
Discovery,
Learning Channel,
History Channel,
PBS,
A&E, and has been interviewed on
E! Entertainment,
Access Hollywood, and
Entertainment Tonight.
[19]
The Guardian journalist John Patterson criticizes the CIA assistance as being only to complimentary productions, including not running material, such as "the original pilot episode of The Agency, which was pulled. It featured the spymasters preventing a plot by a Bin Laden-backed terrorist cell to blow up a fictionalized Harrods. The airing of such an episode might have pointed up the real CIA's corresponding lack of success in foiling the
World Trade Center attacks."
[18]
According to Brandon, the agency would not endorse
Spy Game, starring
Robert Redford and
Brad Pitt. The final rewrite "showed our senior management in an insensitive light and we just wouldn't want to be a part of that kind of project", said Brandon, who also withheld approval from
24, a Fox series about a fictional intelligence agency, CTU, that also suggests all is not hunky-dory in the company's upper echelons. And
The Bourne Identity, based on the 1984 novel by
Robert Ludlum, was "so awful that I tossed it in the burn bag after page 25".
[18]
Patterson observed:
It used to be the case that if a movie explicitly condemned CIA actions - such as
Under Fire - the studios could be counted on to bury it. That was no longer true after Costa-Gavras's
Missing won Jack Lemmon an Oscar in 1982, and Iran-Contra slimed the CIA in the late 1980s. Since then, "CIA renegade" has become a dependable staple not just of big-budget movies like Enemy of the State, but also of a million straight-to-cable action-schlockfests starring Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal.
[18]
Other films that the CIA has provided assistance to include the 1992 film version of the
Tom Clancy novel
Patriot Games, and the 2003 movie,
The Recruit. According to Director
Roger Donaldson When the Agency commits to providing their support to a project, that can include letting a photographer shoot stills to help in designing sets, or, in certain instances, having the actors spend time in the building. By visiting Langley, the director says, he came to "understand how the space worked and looked. I needed a real sense of how a new person would feel when they saw the place for the first time."
[20]
In 2012, Tricia Jenkins released a book, The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film and Television,
[21] which further documents the CIA's efforts at manipulating its public image through entertainment media from the 1990s to the present. The book explains that the CIA has used motion pictures to boost recruitment, mitigate public affairs disasters (like
Aldrich Ames), bolster its own image, and even intimidate terrorists through disinformation campaigns.