Angry Planet - The Secret History of the Pentagon's Hollywood Studio

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

At the end of World War II and deep into the Cold War, the American Military operated a strange building deep in the Hollywood Hills. It was the 1352nd Photographic Group of the United States Air Force, and for two decades it served as a nexus between the Pentagon and Hollywood. Part movie studio, part propaganda machine, and part meeting hall—it attempted to shaped American minds for a generation. And it’s story is largely untold.Here to tell us the story is Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman. Hamilton and O’Gorman are both professors at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They’ve worked together on articles and books about the American Military, the Cold War, and the role of images in the US consciousness. Their new book is Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Studio at the Heart of the Cold WarYou can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Part of the reason Lookout Mount was established is because they didn't trust private contractors. They didn't trust private contractors to keep secret all this footage of nuclear tests and of missiles and such. They felt like they had to set up, that is the Pentagon, felt like it had to set up. its own totally self-contained film shop. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Derek Gannon. At the end of World War II and deep into the Cold War, the American military operated a strange

building in the Hollywood Hills. It was the 1350 second photographic group of the United States Air Force. And for two, decades it served as the nexus between the Pentagon and Hollywood, part movie studio, part propaganda machine, and part meeting hall. It attempted to shape American minds for a generation. And its story is largely untold. Here to tell us the story is Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman. Hamilton and O'Gorman are both professors at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. They've worked together on articles and books about the American military, the Cold War, and the role of images in the U.S. consciousness. Their new book is, Look Out America.

the secret Hollywood studio at the heart of the Cold War. Thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you for having us. It's good to be here. Yeah, really happy to be here. This is a real thrill. All right, well, let's start out with the basics. What was the Lookout Mountain Laboratory?

Go for it, Kevin. Well, Lookout Mountain Laboratory was the Air Force's premier film and photography production studio for about 20 years during the height of the Cold War. and it was a partly civilian, partly military outfit that worked on a contract basis for a number of clients across the U.S. government and covered all the nuclear tests. Pretty much every image we've seen of nuclear testing in the American government came from the studio. All right. And when we say the Hollywood Hills, where exactly was this thing nestled?

The studio was up in the area called Laurel Canyon, a storied area of Hollywood, probably known more for its, 1970s music scene than anything else. It's a highly residential area. And this 40,000 square foot facility is just right there on the same block with a lot of prestigious real estate. It's also where Sharon Tate lived, correct? Yes, and many others. We had a lot of the sort of music we associate from that period would have come out in the 70s up in there. Zappa had a place up the road. Yes. So how does this, I mean, is it fair to call it a military installation? I believe so. I'll give them that a turn there.

Yeah, it's absolutely a military installation. It was owned by the Pentagon. It was run by the Air Force. And most of its personnel were not military. So about 80% of the workforce there were civilians. But nevertheless, the military was in charge. of the operation. Well, how does this military installation end up in the Hollywood Hills, you know, surrounded by people like Frank Zappa? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's actually not all that complicated.

In 1948, the Pentagon, together with the Atomic Energy Commission, began a series of nuclear tests in the Pacific called Operation Sandstone. And this was a pretty secretive effect. and the Pentagon determined that they needed as much documentary footage of the test as they could muster. And so they put together a film unit to do the documentary work there. And they needed a place in Hollywood because that's where all, you know, the expertise was, as well as much of the equipment was for not only shooting, but developing and printing and storing all this footage. they needed a place in Hollywood and they happened to have an abandoned radar station up there in Laurel Canyon from World War II.

And so that was a vacant building and they looked at several different sites. They decided that was the most suitable one. And is there anything like the audience may remember really well or anything that's kind of iconic that came out of this studio, like an image or a movie that we all know and love? Well, I mean, I think for me, the most iconic image that your listeners may know that came from the studio was the mushroom cloud at the end of Dr. Strangelove. But really, as Kevin was saying earlier, virtually with the exception of some shots of what was known as Operation Crossroads in 1946, virtually every image of every mushroom cloud that came after that, it was shot by the cameras of this studio. We could also point to space monkeys and some of the astronauts from the space program,

et cetera, that were also shot by the cameras of the studio. And yeah, just to add to Ned's comments, the longer we looked at this project, As long as we looked at the work from Lookout Mountain, the more we saw that their iconography is just all across the American Cold War. You see their missile tests during the rise of the missile-based nuclear regime. They were just there at every front of the Cold War. Besides the archival kind of mission that the Lookout Mountain Laboratory had, what else were they kind of responsible for? Was it more of like a public relations type of thing?

thing like, hey, the nuclear proliferation isn't as bad as you guys may think. Like, what else was their mission statement, sort of speak? Yeah, they were, they did a lot of different kinds of work. Most of the work that they did was the production of finished films, at least earlier in their history, in the first decade of their history, the production of finished films for either government or military personnel. And so this would include things like what were known as film reports. And so if you did a missile test or if you did a nuclear test, as odd as it may seem, often the first reports,

sort of full reports that government officials might get, and we're talking about members of Congress here, people in the White House, was in the form of a finished film that had been turned around by Lookout Mountain. And so that was a big part of what they were doing is they were sort of reporting, giving the latest updates on the latest developments and cold board technologies. They were also producing all kinds of training films for military personnel who were going to have to work with or around this equipment, which, you know, especially when it came to nuclear weapons, there were many, many, many military personnel who were terrified at this stuff for good reasons. And so part of Lookout Mountain's job was to convince them that they could work around this material and be okay. And so that's where things get, you might say, the most sort of propagandistic is a lot of lies, frankly, we're told in those films to military personnel about the relative safety, supposed relative safety of being out in a nuclear test site. And you could think about their job as being in part. simply the eyes of the test, and then also the storytellers of the test.

So in some ways, you go in and you find that they were just part of these huge joint task forces. They were out there in the Pacific, for example. And part of the test was to make sure there were images of the test, both for the scientists to play them back and see what happened, but also just to show what happened. What were the fruits of the tremendous expenditures that went in? So in some ways, simply the reels and reels of unedited film were their first charge. And then the editing of those into stories start to come into their life more and more. How did this become an Air Force job? Why that branch?

Yeah, that's a great question. It's a funny story and one that would take more time to tell than we really have here. But the brief story is that Operation Crossroads, which was helped. held in 1946 in the Pacific was the first post-warnicular test undertaken by the United States. And it was really meant, it was really designed as a kind of public relations spectacle. It was meant to prove that the Navy and naval ships could withstand an atomic attack. And what actually happened at Operation Crossroads was not only that not all the naval ships, some of them did survive the atomic blast, but not all of them did.

But also the Navy who was trying to champion this project really did a crummy job with film and photography. I mean, their goal, they set up all these cameras out there on the sea, and their goal was to show the world that, you know, their ships could withstand this kind of an assault. And they ended up blowing up a lot of their cameras. And so at the same time, the Air Force, or at the time it was still the Army Air Force, was on the site. they were shooting these tests from the air. And obviously, they were protected, relatively speaking, up there. And they ended up with some of the most dramatic and sort of spectacular footage of the test. And so that really gave the Air Force a reputation in the military for having some top-notch

cameramen that could do top-notch camera work. So that's really where the Air Force got started in this kind of work. But what gets interesting in that story is that since Lookout Mountain really forms at the beginning of the Air Force's own story, Lookout Mountain then ends up really becoming a big part of the branding of the Air Force. They're the ones out there figuring out how to film the Thunderbirds in a way that's compelling. And then they actually edited films of those that ended up circulating around the world, winning awards as little mini documentaries. They're filming the construction and inauguration of the Air Force Academy. They're really getting to the business of brand building for the Air Force.

Now, on top of the brand building for the Air Force, what other projects has the Lookout Mountain been involved with in let's say like the Cold War pop culture of the United States? Were they serptitiously involved in other things in the major studios or were they just there to kind of produce, for lack of better terms, propaganda, you know, pro-US propaganda. If you're thinking about their interaction with Hollywood, it's very much a two-way relationship. So you've got expertise from Hollywood coming up the hill to lend a hand, either as producers or directors for a short, or even as hired animators or sound recordists.

But then the directions go in both ways. They're also supplying stock footage when they need, supplying access to Hollywood film and even television to, military installations and helping arrange for those partnerships. So it's not so much that they produced any sort of feature films for Hollywood at the time, but that they were relying on their expertise and then began to be seen as an important sort of institution within Hollywood. They would test out early technologies, 3D photography, for example, or a Cinemascope. They were doing Cinemascope even before the premiere of the robe, the first Cinemascope film

that the studio is actually released. And who else was, would there be any kind of famous people within the Hollywood, you know, around that time that were involved involuntarily or voluntarily with some of the projects from Lookout Mountain? Oh boy. I mean, we

have quite a list in our book of famous people or semi-famous people that were involved with Lookout Mountain, but sort of the big, big names were you know, John Ford. did a couple of films for them. He also would lend them his ranch for their annual sort of company picnic. Jimmy Stewart was a regular at Lookout Mountain Films,

and so you can see him a lot in Lookout Mountain Films. And then Marilyn Monroe sort of iconically did one short for Lookout Mountain. That has been the subject of some speculation for decades now that Kevin did some amazing sort of investigative work and was able to uncover the story of that short. So, I mean, you really, Bob Hope, I mean, we could just, we could come up with a pretty long list of Hollywood Notables who were at one time or another all voluntarily involved with the work at the studio. That's really interesting because we typically think of the U.S. military in Hollywood

kind of in opposition to each other now. And that's not necessarily true behind the scenes, but I think that's kind of the perception. And I'm wondering, was it always a cordial relationship? Was it ever Rocky? Did it ever get strained in any way? Yeah, that's a great question.

And the answer to that is it depends on what period of Lookout Mountain's history that you're looking at. But I think that the thing to say about Lookout Mountain's relationship sort of political relationship, we might say, with Hollywood, is that, you know, during the 1950s, there was a real push in Hollywood itself towards, you know, what what historians have called a kind of Cold War consensus, a Cold War liberal consensus. And so if prior to World War II, Hollywood had certainly a kind of, among some actors and directors and such, a kind of radical tinge to it, during the 1950s, it moved more towards a kind of Cold War liberal consensus.

And meanwhile, Lookout Mountain itself did not seem to want to get associated with the blacklisting or with the McCarthyism and that kind of thing. They were too trying to play cool. And so I think what you end up seeing in the 1950s is a relatively cooperative relationship between many people in Hollywood and Lookout Mountain, where neither sort of group is wanting to take things to any kind of extreme. In the 1960s, that does start to change. And Vietnam is obviously critical in that.

And it becomes harder and harder for Lookout Mountain to draw upon, especially Hollywood actors, even sort of B-level actors. And part of that is, sort of cultural stuff, like, it was really hard, you know, look at Mountain wanted men in their films that had short military-style hair in the 1960s. All the actors in Hollywood wanted to grow their hair out. And so, but there was also the political, the politics of Vietnam were starting to emerge. And so, so, yeah, I would say that their relationship with Hollywood really grew cool during the 1960s to the point where it became, by the late, 1960s really just not that useful to be in Hollywood anymore.

When I look at the contemporary relationships between a director like Michael Bay, working on the Transformers films and working with the Pentagon, I recognize some familiar relationships from this era because there's a kind of an acknowledgement that the Air Force at the time was borrowing from some of the styles and rhetorics and ways to tell them stories. the ways of scoring, the ways of visualizing these things for a military audience and a government audience. And there seemed to be some acknowledgement that even at that stylistic level, there is some swapping back and forth. And the same way today, you might see that in advertisements

for military recruiting, they're borrowing a lot from Hollywood, the same way that Michael Bay is borrowing access to actual soldiers and actual military installations. That's something I think people don't realize is that when you see, say, an F3 in a big budget movie, then the Air Force or somebody in the Pentagon had a hand in placing it there and being a consultant, right? Absolutely. That's absolutely right. And the way that happened at Lookout Mountain was really through stock footage. They were a library, a virtual library for Hollywood when it came to stock footage of military exercises and military equipment.

All right, so looking towards the 60s, what were they doing around the Vietnam War and how did all of this kind of end? Because it ends in 1969, correct? That's right. Yeah, by the time of the Southeast Asian conflicts first in Korea and in Vietnam, Lookup Mountains brand had become pretty well known throughout the military. And they were seen not just as producing highly stylized images, but highly engineered images. And they figured out how to document these missile tests in ways that would allow scientists and engineers to play them back and see what happened when there were mishaps and that sort of thing. And so every time there was a new, really complicated problem of getting better images in support of not just intelligence, but actual the functioning of war, would turn to Lookout Mountain, and that's where they get involved in Southeast Asia,

they were brought in to start figuring out how to get better footage of bombing raids. If you think about the traditional approach to aerial bombing being one that's reliant on initial aerial reconnaissance identification of targets and then subsequent later bombing surveys, also involving photography to sort of compare before and after, in Lookout Mountain's work, you start to see some. collapsing of those out of a desire to say, can we actually document the bombing as it's happening? Can we get almost closer to a real-time feedback? So that when the pilot returns to base, they develop to film as quickly as possible,

they set it up and review it for checking on effectiveness and seeing what they can provide that pilot almost in a kind of technical system feedback about what the pilot should do differently next time. So Lookout Mountain got involved in engineering some F-150s in particular and finding every possible way of getting a camera attached and embedded within that piece of technology. So Lookout Mountain, in essence, brought a higher form of technology to movie making in regards to military and action movies. Is that what you could say? I think if you think about it in terms of how to get specialized forms of photography, that rely not just on special kinds of film

to capture some of the unique kind of atomic events, but how to capture images at high velocity, right? How to capture those images that are happening for split seconds. It's that kind of technology that sort of extreme action and occurrence that they figure out how to engineer. Like we talking slow motion technology, time lapse photography. They kind of had a hand in all this stuff? They worked really closely with an outfit known as EG and G, which was started at MIT in World War II or just after World War II by Harold Edgerton, who some of your listeners may know.

He's famous for some iconic high-speed photographs of a bullet, sort of going through an apple, right, or drops of milk hitting the ground. And so Edgerton got in his graduate students and eventually his company started working with Lookout Mountain after World War II or right when Lookout Mountain itself was starting, 1947, 1948. And Edgerton's group tended to handle the high-speed photographic duties. And so you might say that Lookout Mountains were subcontracted out to EG&G, some of that stuff. Nevertheless, Lookout Mountain did themselves do some high-speed photography, time-lapse photography, that kind of stuff. But they generally relied on their MIT friends for help with that sort of thing. Is the Pentagon doing anything now that even resembles what Lookout Mountain was doing? One of the interesting things about the story of Lookout Mountain's closure is the way it's also a story of image making and becoming such an embedded part of what it is to be. military in the contemporary era that you can't even point to just one studio anymore.

Part of that's a matter of the rise of video, right? Video is a less specialized medium than film in terms of what it requires around training of how to use it, how to develop it. So that, the rise of video comes into play there. But when we look at some of the contemporary manifestations of image production that are in the Pentagon's shop, we just don't see a single studio anymore. We see a single public relations entity

and that a bunch of contractors involved in helping get those images out into different outlets and things like that. But we don't see any contemporary equivalent. Yeah, and I think, you know, to follow up on that, I think that part of what happened at Lookout Mountain in the 60s was also a sort of change in, ideas about the role of contractors in military work. And so during the 1950s, I mean, part of the reason Lookout Mountain was established is because

they didn't trust private contractors. They didn't trust private contractors to keep secret all this footage of nuclear tests and of missiles and such. They felt like they had to set up, that is the Pentagon, felt like it had to set up its own totally self-contained film shop. that could do everything, you know, from start to finish. It just was not safe or secure to rely on outside contractors. And in the 1960s, you know, you start to see a real push from Congress,

certain powerful people in Congress as well as within the Pentagon to do this more efficiently, do this more cheaply. And that meant, you know, contracting out to private contractors. And so that's part of the story here. And I think today, you know, the military relies so much on private contractors for all kinds of services, including this kind of image work that Lookout Mountain did. That's another reason we don't see anything quite like it today in the military. It seems like it's got a large but also complicated legacy.

Right. No, I think that's exactly right, you know. And that's why, you know, when we set out to write this book, you know, which, I mean, frankly, we spent six, seven, eight years. doing the research before we really set out to write the book, we really felt like what we were going to end up doing, and I hope it's what we were able to do in the book, is not only tell the story of Lookout Mountain, but to tell the story of the Cold War through the cameras of Lookout Mountain, because in fact, they were everywhere that, you know, the American military was during the Cold War. And so it is a complicated and diffuse legacy that,

really kind of mirrors or maps onto the complicated and diffused legacy of American power during the Cold War. And it's tied as well to the emergence of air power. And when you look at the number of detachments that proliferated from Lookout Mountain, they're largely following the path of the military air transport service across the Pacific and the new role and responsibility that America saw itself as bearing in the Pacific after World War II. So there's ways in which the story is large because the story is migrating with American military might. What about the lookout mountain laboratory itself did you two kind of cling to or find the most interesting to start this process of researching it? Like what was the rabbit hole that you both went down to kind of put you on this path for this book?

Yeah, for me it was, so this project started when I was doing research years ago on my first book that had to do with Eisenhower. And I was spending some time out at the Eisenhower Library in Avaline, Kansas looking through White House archives. And I came across a memo about a film that Eisenhower was shown in the White House called Operation Ivy, which was a film. about the first American or first anybody's thermonuclear test, and it was done in the Pacific. And the memo talked about how Eisenhower was completely, you know, metaphorically speaking, blown away by the film and declared to everybody in the room after he finished watching it that every American should see this film. And so I, you know, I'd never heard of this film. And so I, you know, I, spent the next day or so in my free time in the hotel in the evening's trying to figure out what this film was and where it was. And I eventually did find a digitized, redacted version of it on the Internet archive. And so I watched it. And I saw that it was it was branded. It was branded produced by Lookout Mountain Laboratory. And so I never heard Lookout Mountain at that point. And I started doing some digging around. And Kevin,

and I had built a relationship here on campus around that same time. And so when I got back to town here, I asked him to watch this film with me. And we just, you know, had lots of conversations and started asking more and more questions about Lookout Mountain Laboratory. And that's really what got us into the rabbit hole, as you say. And I think for me that as soon as Ned showed me this film, the questions that came right to mind from me were about why would a film, what a film be made as if it's for a mass audience when it was originally commissioned for a very elect and select audience the Operation Ivy's longest cut that still has not been seen outside of a very small set of folks was it was as tricked out as any feature

film from the time I mean the the animated titles the rising score the hired actor on screen and the idea that they would go to that much trouble just for the top brass in the Pentagon and the top folks of the White House to watch, that was the question I wanted to pursue and understand and what I think really got Ned and I started on this. Now, are there any conspiracy theories floating around Lookout Mountain that you guys ran across in your research? Yeah, there are all kinds of conspiracy theories floating around Lookout Mountain. And, yeah, it would make me a little nauseous to try to detail them all. But, you know, I think that's something we've had to deal with.

And it's not to say that the government was not involved in forms of conspiracy and that Lookout Mountain was not in some way involved in them. You know, there was a lot of conspiracy, you might say, in and around nuclear testing, particularly with respect to the health of the workers in these sites. And Lookout Mountain was complicit in that. But, you know, you start digging and you hear all kinds of. of stuff about how German prisoners were hit were sort of imprisoned at the facility and drug and these sorts of things. And, you know, it really doesn't make any sense that German

prisoners would be imprisoned by the U.S. government in 1948 or 49 or 50, given that World War II ended in 45. But you hear a lot, you hear a lot of different stories about this and that. And so we've had to try to stay focused. Let's put it that way throughout the last seven or eight years of sort of what can we verify here. Right. What seems legitimate, what makes sense, you know, when chronologies get that messed up, you know, around German prisoners, then you immediately start to think maybe that's not something to pay a lot of attention to.

And a lot of the questions that came up for the public at the time were mostly coming from the neighbors. And you've got this facility, mostly underground, up a very windy road in Laurel Canyon. with these big trucks coming up and down, making all kind of noise, tearing up the streets. The neighbors were not happy about this. And you can go back and find articles in the LA Times about the neighborhood, bringing their complaints to the military about it, contacting their city councilmen, that sort of thing. And I think that's probably where some of the questions and speculation started to happen.

You could not miss the base, as secret as its activities were. And at the time, like a lot of contemporary-based neighborhood relations, Lookout Mountain had to turn on the PR. They would do an annual open house. They would go down to the elementary school down the hill and do a flag-raising ceremony, this sort of thing. So they were involved in those kind of relations trying to manage a lot of those questions and theories. All right.

Well, Kevin and Ned, thank you so much for coming on to War College and telling us about the book. It's called Lookout America, the Secret Hollywood Studios. at the heart of the Cold War. It's big and it's beautiful and it has lots of incredible images and everyone should absolutely check it out. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.

Yeah, thank you, Derek and Matthew. It's a privilege to be here thinking about this next to the other work you all do. And as we said a couple times here, just thinking about the role of images in military conflict is what we're looking to do here and help folks think about that. So I hope we've been helpful to that end.

Yeah, you guys were great. It's a great show. Thank you. That's it for this week on War College. War College is me, Matthew Galt, Derek Haganon, and Kevin Nodell. He was created by me and Jason Fields, who assures me every week he has not been eaten by wolves. If you like the show, please rate us on iTunes and leave a comment.

It helps other people find the show. You can follow us on Twitter at War underscore College and on Facebook at Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. Next week, it's all about Russia and what we fundamentally misunderstand about its leader. Stay safe until then.