The Big Picture - 2. I Just Don’t Talk About It | Do We Get to Win This Time?

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

It’s the mid-’70s, and Hollywood is still scared of Vietnam. But a series of dark and wildly entertaining B movies brings the war to the big screen, with explosive results.  Other films we talk about in this episode include ‘M*A*S*H’ (1970), ‘Soldier Blue’ (1970), ‘Brotherhood of Death’ (1976), ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976), and ‘Rolling Thunder’ (1977). Host: Brian Raftery  Producers: Devon Manze, Mike Wargon, Amanda Dobbins, and Vikram Patel Sound Design: Bobby Wagner  Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville All interviews for this series were conducted before the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everybody. Here at The Ringer, we're known for our talk shows, but you might not know we also have a whole slate of great narrative podcasts, all of them made for binging. If you're looking for an unmissable sports history show, you'll love Icons Club. It's a chronicle of the NBA told through the voices of legendary players, whose stories warrant blockbuster movies of their own. If you're a fan of culture podcasts, check out This Blew Up, an investigative story about how social media is inventing an all-new level of stardom. One that's not always as glamorous as it looks. There's also Gamblers, a show about people who make money betting on, well, pretty much anything.

Just don't bet on finding a better podcast about gambling, because you won't win. Thanks for listening. A quick note about this episode. A few of the movie clips you'll be hearing feature offensive terms used to describe people of color. They're included here to illustrate how certain perspectives and norms of the late 60s and early 70s were represented in the films of that era. Imagine you're sitting in a movie theater in the spring of 1970. For the last few years, you've been inundated with bad news about Vietnam.

The rising body counts. The raging anti-war protests. The growing belief that the U.S. was stuck in an unpopular, unwinnable battle. A war Hollywood had been mostly dodging for years. And then, in the theater, you see a massive American flag on the screen, and hear the sound of a bugle. And then George C. Scott, playing the legendary World War II hero George S. Patton, addresses a crowd of troops, reminding them why we fight. Men, all this stuff you heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war,

is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. Patton is pure epic. It's full of rah-rah speeches like this one, written by Francis Ford Coppola, and it has spectacular combat scenes. The movie wasn't conceived as an allegory for Vietnam. In fact, Patton had been in development since 1951. But many viewers naturally saw a connection between the vintage battles in Patton

and the ones raging in Southeast Asia by 1970. Viewers like Richard Nixon, one of Patton's biggest fans. Nixon had inherited the Vietnam War after being elected president in 1968. He'd vowed to bring what he called a just peace to the region and pledged to withdraw American troops. It was a point he reiterated in his 1970 State of the Union address. The major immediate goal of our foreign policy is to bring an end to the war in Vietnam. The prospects for peace are far greater today than they were a year ago.

But by April 1970, the fighting in Vietnam was spilling into Cambodia. Suddenly, Nixon had to decide whether the U.S. should bring war to yet another country. That same month, the president began a patent marathon at the White House. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. He screened it multiple times, often with his family and staff. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. Keep in mind, this movie was nearly three hours long, a huge time commitment,

especially for someone with an international crisis on his hands. Yet, like millions of his fellow Americans, Nixon couldn't get enough of Patton. The man, the movie, the message. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to America. By the end of that month, Nixon decided to get aggressive in Cambodia, where he'd soon send

thousands of U.S. combat troops. It was a major escalation of the war in Southeast Asia, one the president announced to the nation on April 30th. I would rather be a one-term president and do what I believe was right than to be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.

Nixon's message, namely that defeat is anti-American, echoed the words of a certain big-screen general. So much so, some people couldn't help but wonder, was America going into Cambodia simply because the president had watched Patton too many times? It's an almost unthinkable notion. And yet, Nixon did a lot of unthinkable things in his presidency. That may be why the rumor, however absurd, followed him for years. Journalist David Frost even asked the ex-president about Patton during one of their famous interviews in 1977.

Did that have an influence on you? Well, I've seen The Sound of Music twice, and it hasn't made me a writer either. Quick aside, I have no idea what he means there. Anyway, carry on, Mr. President. The war part of the Patton movie didn't

particularly interest me. The character sketch was fascinating. And as far as that was concerned, it had no effect whatever on my decisions. Nixon denied the connection. But he clearly had Vietnam on his mind while watching Patton. And he wasn't alone.

Hollywood had tried to ignore the war in the 60s. Studio execs feared audiences were already burnt out on a violent, divisive conflict. And if they weren't, they could already watch at home for free on the nightly news. But by the early 70s, as rage and resentment grew, it became impossible to keep Vietnam out of the movies. Filmmakers still couldn't sell their Vietnam movies to the major studios. Instead, they snuck the war onto the big screen,

in strange and unexpected ways, and with unsettling results. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery. And this is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Even after the success of John Wayne's The Green Berets in 1968, the big studios were still skittish about Vietnam. But the war had become part of popular culture.

You could hear it in anthems like Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 hit, Fortunate Son. And you could even see the outrage over the war on TV. On the news, for sure. But also on the controversial late 60s hit, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which frequently addressed

what was happening in Vietnam and how it was affecting America. Yes, it's a song about a problem and how with good old American ingenuity, some people attempt to solve it. The song is called The Draft Dodger Rag. But the major studios, and the often older executives who ran them, stayed far away. In the early 70s, Paula Weinstein was transitioning from activism to moviemaking. She was surprised by how conservative the industry was at the time. Hollywood was very backward in every way.

It was 10 years behind everybody. It wasn't even that they liked the war. It wasn't about what you like. Don't rock the boat. We're here to entertain everybody. Back then, if you wanted to get a film about Vietnam in the theaters, you had to make it about something else.

Frank Snepp first landed in Saigon in 1969. He was a journalist who'd recently joined the CIA. And for the next six years, Snepp worked as an analyst and counterintelligence officer. It was an intense job. And Snepp would sometimes unwind with other Americans at a downtown hotel. We would watch movies on the roof as we looked out over the edge of Saigon

and there were firefights all along the horizon. Rockets going into the night sky and what have you. GIs were up there. You're not supposed to be carrying weapons, but oftentimes if a scene came on in a movie and you went nuts, somebody would take out a.45 and fire it into the air.

One night, not long after his arrival, Snepp and his fellow Americans caught a showing of a recent British war satire, The Charge of the Light Brigade. It was based on a famously disastrous battle between British and Russian forces. On a day of confusion, disorder, and defeat, in one brilliant moment of madness,

the 600 officers and men of the British Light Cavalry faced the entire Russian army. The events in the Charge of the Light Brigade were more than 100 years old. But to some of the Americans watching that night, the struggles of the British cavalry felt very relatable. Nearly 17,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam in 1968 alone. The Russian army with artillery blows them to smithereens. We're watching this. I'm sitting there and the movie room goes totally silent. No one has to be told this is a metaphor of the war we're sitting in the midst of. We're sitting

in the charge of the light brigade. We're part of it. We're in a hopeless cause. And it was a terrifying experience. By the late 60s, the conflict in Southeast Asia had become so ubiquitous, nearly every war film, no matter where or when it was set, became a parable for Vietnam. Sometimes the connection was a coincidence, but a few anti-war filmmakers used older battles to explore the new terrors of Vietnam. In 1970, right around the time Nixon was binging on Patton,

a very different version of the U.S. military was hitting theaters. It was a combative comedy set in an American medical unit, a place where blood and booze flowed in equal measure. This is the story of two indispensable military surgeons. They had the army over a barrel. But did they take advantage of it? Yes. Set during the Korean War

and directed by Robert Altman, who'd flown bombing missions in World War II, M.A.S.H. is about as pitch black as a comedy can get. It depicts U.S. military men as bored, horny nihilists, partly the image of American might that Hollywood projected in the 40s.

The movie was so anti-war, executives at 20th Century Fox forced Altman to add on-screen titles, making it clear the movie was set in Korea. The studio worried audiences would think his Korean War movie was really a Vietnam War movie, which effectively it was. Here's Altman speaking for a 2002 MASH director's commentary. I wanted people to mix it up. I didn't want them to think about this being Korea, but think of it more today. I mean, today being 1969-70. But the studio insisted on putting that in because they were very edgy about the Vietnam War. Nobody knew what position to take on it. With studios still nervous about addressing Vietnam head-on, directors like Altman

had to look to the past, expressing their frustrations with the war via older American battles. The result was a series of downbeat films that took a strongly anti-war stance, without ever mentioning Vietnam. Some movies went back to the First World War, like Johnny Got His Gun, a 1971 drama starring Jason Robards about a gravely injured soldier flashing back to his life. A film Metallica would later sample in the nightmarish video for its hit song, One. What is democracy? Well, I was never very clear on it myself. video for its hit song, One. Other Vietnam allegories came in the form of westerns, none as brazenly, nor as brutally, as 1970's Soldier Blue. It billed itself as the most savage film in history,

and starred Candace Bergen as a white American woman who takes up with a group of Native Americans. After surviving a grisly battle, she's escorted back to a U.S. military camp, against her will, by a naive U.S. cavalry officer. Good brave lads, coming out here to kill themselves, a real live Indian, putting up their forts in a country they've got no claim to. So what the hell do you expect the Indians to do, sit back on their butts while the army takes over their land? Those words echo the sentiments of Soldier Blue director Ralph Nelson.

Like Altman, he was a World War II veteran. But Nelson had toured the refugee camps in Vietnam and had become opposed to America's involvement in the war. He'd grown tired of the myths that had dominated Westerns, in which Americans were the de facto heroes and Native Americans the automatic villains. Nelson was also frustrated by one of Hollywood's most beloved myth makers, John Wayne, whom Nelson dismissed as, quote, a great American hero who never fires any bullets and never has any bullets fired at him. So Nelson ended Soldier Blue with a gruesome battle sequence

based on real events in which U.S. cavalrymen slaughter countless Cheyenne women and children. It's a truly nightmarish scene, one that can still make you wince more than 50 years later as you watch the cavalry leader call for an entire civilization to be destroyed. Raise the village. Burn this. Testimons. As upsetting as the film's final moments are, even those who turned away from the screen understood Nelson's thinly disguised metaphor. The cavalrymen were stand-ins for Americans in Vietnam, while the Cheyenne were the Vietnamese.

Soldier Blue would have been a shocker no matter when it was released, but the movie took on a greater urgency during filming. While on set, Nelson heard about an incident that would soon stun the world, the My Lai Massacre. In 1968, U.S. forces had killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese women and children, an incident the military was able to cover up for more than a year and a half But the horrors of My Lai eventually became public Thanks to newspaper reports and to broadcasts like this one from ABC News But Ha Thi Quy was also at My Lai that day, nearly two years ago

Ha Thi Quy's 24-year-old daughter died there Her son had part of his hand shot away By the time Soldier Blue was released America America was still reeling from Me Lie, which may be why the film's ending provoked such strong reactions. At one sneak preview in New Jersey, nearly 200 people marched out of the theater, and several angry patrons stormed the box office, demanding refunds. Maybe they were put off by the film's violence. Or maybe they didn't want to be reminded of the war their country was fighting thousands of miles away.

Whatever the reason, their response proved what some in Hollywood had long suspected. Audiences wanted nothing to do with Vietnam. As one offended viewer told the press, we just weren't ready for the atrocities. A few years before he found himself in one of the wildest Vietnam movies ever made, Haskell Vaughn Anderson was a young veteran trying to put the war behind him. He'd served in the Navy from 1966 to 1969.

It was an intense period, one that was sick with Anderson long afterward. Here I am taking care of people who went through that kind of trauma. Ambushes, hit by shells. I realize now as I get older that a lot of that caused me to be distant to a lot of things that I should be very sensitive to. People ask today about Vietnam, and I just don't talk about it really. When his time was up in 1969, Anderson headed home.

He was one of the hundreds of thousands of troops who traveled back to the U.S. over the next few years. Anderson wasn't sure what awaited him upon his return. After news of My Lai broke, some Americans viewed Vietnam vets with suspicion. Anderson even heard stories about some vets being called baby killers. That was the attitude that they had

then. I did not want to be wrongfully accused of something that I didn't do. So he left his uniform on the base. Because I had gone out the week before, got a brand new blazer, went to Brooks Brothers. Brand new blazer, khaki shirt, tie.

And I put everything in the sea bag and left it. Went outside, went to a newsstand, got a Wall Street Journal, as if I was an executive. You know, I did not want anybody to know. Anderson went to grad school before finding work on the East Coast as a model, and later as a stage actor and theater manager. He was tagging along with a friend to a movie audition when the casting team asked him if he'd like to try out too.

And I said, yeah, okay. And eventually, five, six days later, I got the role. Never done film before, so I had no idea what I was doing. None whatsoever. The role was for an action flick about a group of black Vietnam vets who come home to their southern town and find themselves at war with local KKK members. The movie had a tiny budget, a mostly rookie cast,

including former NFL wide receiver Roy Jefferson, and a gripping title, Brotherhood of Death. The army taught them to kill and protect themselves. of death. Anderson plays Junior, one of the returning vets. At first, they try to find peaceful solutions to their problems. I'm pretty sure this is one of the only B-movies with an entire subplot about voting drives. But when that doesn't work, Junior and the rest of the Brotherhood fight back and capture a pair of Klansmen. It all leads to an intense showdown, with big explosions and big monologues.

At one point early in production, Anderson, who'd never been on a film set, found himself waving a gun and wearing fatigues as his character confronts a captured KKK leader. Do you actually believe that you can put on evil spirit costumes and call yourself dragons and burn crosses? And all the darkies will shake in their shoes and afraid to fight your white supremacy. Well, these darkies are about to do you in. Mother! Sure enough, the movie ends with the Brotherhood annihilating the Klansmen,

using the skills they learned in Vietnam. The last ten minutes are ruthless, with villains in KKK robes being blown up or gunned down. Did I mention the veterans attack the KKK with snakes? Or that they set up a booby trap using an upside-down cross covered with nails? You can probably understand why Quentin Tarantino loves this movie. But despite the cartoonish explosions and gunfire, you can sense a genuine anger and anguish among the film's heroes.

For Anderson, making Brotherhood of Death sparked some memories. But I did not realize taking that experience and putting it in the film, how true that was. Even though, yes, it was a low-budget film, but the reality was

that I was experiencing some of the, I don't want to say trauma, but the activity that was going on. Brotherhood of Death was released in 1976, but just barely. It was a B-movie, one you were most likely to catch as part of a double feature, probably at the local drive-in. The major studios may have been skittish, but starting in the 70s, indie companies began releasing all sorts of cheapo movies about Vietnam and about the men who fought there. They included revenge films, like 1973's The No Mercy Man, about a decorated young vet who returns home, finds his town overrun by thugs, and is forced to fight back. No mercy, man. No mercy for any enemy or any lover. No mercy even for himself.

Then there was Dead of Night, a horror film first released in 1974 and later retitled Death Dream. It was also about a returning Vietnam vet, except this one had been killed in action, only to show up at his parents' house later, acting strange and stilted. Andy, look, I'm not going to dwell on this, but do you know that they sent us a telegram tonight? I mean, they actually sent us a telegram telling us that you were killed.

They actually said that my son was dead. I was. The newly zombified Andy soon goes on a blood-sucking rampage, one that ends with him burying himself in his own grave. If that makes Dead of Night sound sleazy, well, it is. So is No Mercy Man. But in their own crass ways, both movies, along with Brotherhood of Death, are sympathetic toward the plight of the returning Vietnam vet.

They're about men who feel misunderstood, and who come home to a world, and to a family, they no longer understand. That sense of post-war isolation wasn't new to the movies. In the 40s and 50s, Hollywood used soldiers returning from Korea in World War II as go-to main characters. The V-E Day celebrations weren't even a year old when, in 1946, filming began on the best years of our lives, about three servicemen who struggled to fit in after

returning from World War II. One of them, a naval petty officer named Homer, has trouble reconnecting with his family after coming home with hooks for hands. He was played by Army vet Harold Russell, who'd lost his hands during World War II and took the role despite having never acted before. It's a remarkable performance. A man

attempting to rebuild his life after a war, played by someone who'd actually gone through it. In scenes like this one, in which Homer gently bemoans how he's treated by others, the line between the on-screen vet and the real-life vet almost seems to disappear. Well, they keep staring at these hooks, or else they keep staring away from them. You mean whatever they do is wrong? Why don't they understand that all I want is to be treated like everybody else? Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives won eight Oscars, including two statues for Harold Russell.

Look, this isn't a movie criticism podcast, but really, you've got to see The Best Years of Our Lives. It's like a feel-good movie that just punches you straight in the gut. The Best Years of Our Lives was also way less heavy than the post-war film noirs that dominated the 40s and 50s. Some of them were about men who survived World War II and were now fighting to survive modern life. One of the greatest noirs of all time, In a Lonely Place, starred Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele. Dixon Steele! We used to have such great character names. Anyway, he's a

veteran-turned-screenwriter who drinks too much and who's been accused of murder. In one chilling scene, he even describes how easy it is to kill. Put your right arm around her neck. You get to a lonely place in the road, and you begin to squeeze. You're an ex-GI, you know judo, you know how to kill a person. These kinds of film noir vets were unpredictable outsiders who couldn't be trusted by their friends or by viewers. But those images were countered by more upbeat films,

which treated returning World War II servicemen as de facto heroes. White Christmas, It's a Wonderful Life, An American in Paris, they all featured veterans. And if those men had troubles from the war, they were gone by the end credits. But as we've learned, Vietnam was nothing like World War II. The troops who served in the 60s and 70s wouldn't be celebrated like the greatest generation.

Americans had seen the violence from Vietnam on their living room TVs. Many didn't understand why we were in Vietnam in the first place. And some of them were angry at the troops themselves. When I was in Vietnam, I went on R&R in Hawaii. That's retired Lieutenant Colonel Michael Lee Lanning, who we met last episode. I met my pregnant wife in Honolulu. There was a protest against the war. And they hollered at me because of my haircut. They recognized me as a military and called me a baby killer.

I thought it was pretty obvious I was trying to raise them and not kill them. I stayed in the Army after Vietnam, and we didn't have much to do with civilians because civilians didn't care for us. And some of those who did leave the military had trouble readjusting to civilian life. In the fall of 1970, the New York Times ran a lengthy story titled The Vietnam Veteran, Silent, Perplexed, Unnoticed. It pointed out that there were now more than 2.5 million Vietnam vets back in America, and many were keeping a low profile. From the article. They seldom make news. Hardly anyone calls them heroes. They return one by one, not by regimen or division, as their older brothers did from the Korean War, or their fathers from World War II, or their grandfathers from

World War I. And one by one, they fade into the American backdrop. In other news accounts from that time, veterans were asked what happened to them in Vietnam. Some of their answers were brief. One response? If anyone asks me about the war, I refer them to the library. Another? I just don't want to talk about the war.

Somebody might want to argue. A lot of people had gone into the service thinking, I'm going to go over there and I'm going to be America's hero and come back and have the same experience and the same accolades and acknowledgement as those in World War II. That's Vietnam vet David Moraine, who spent four years in the Marine Corps. Remember, those were fathers and uncles, and that's some of the environment that a lot of us grew up in. And a lot of people sought that kind of accolade by going in and coming back, fighting for our country.

And when they got back, some of us, some of those places, there wasn't that appreciation, and that was a shock. The early 70s also saw reports of vets experiencing something called Vietnam Syndrome, or post-Vietnam Syndrome. The symptoms, according to the press, included guilt, isolation, nightmares, and bouts of rage. The military and the medical community would argue about just how much psychiatric damage had been caused by the war and about its severity. But the news made it clear some veterans were suffering. In the 70s, when they're all returning and many of them are experiencing the things we would now call PTSD, there was no label for it. That's psychologist Joe Ruzek, who specializes in

traumatic stress and is the former director of the Dissemination and Training Division at the National Center for PTSD. In fact, there was no label in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is the arbiter of what's a mental health disorder, for anything related to combat. So the understandings of it were very primitive, even amongst mental health professionals, let alone the public. Filmmakers took inspiration from these troubled vets and took creative liberties while trying to put their lives on screen. At the movies, Vietnam Veteran soon became an easy shorthand to describe a character who might snap at any moment.

That's not to say the on-screen vets were always villains. Slaughter, which came out in 1972, starred Jim Brown as an ex-Green Beret who takes on the mob in order to avenge his parents' deaths. It was classier than some of the other low-budget Vietnam vet films of the era, but thankfully not that much classier. Jim Brown is Slaughter. It's not only his name, it's his business.

I'm going to lay this on you one time, baby. I'm going to kill him and anybody else that gets in my way. Slaughter was a bad dude. But he wasn't a bad guy. Audiences were supposed to cheer for him. But he was an exception. Many early films portrayed Vietnam vets as knee-jerk killing machines.

Like the haunting 1968 drama Targets, which was re-released in theaters in the 70s after its director, Peter Bogdanovich, had a huge hit with The Last Picture Show. Targets follows a seemingly clean-cut young veteran who breaks from his square existence and becomes a deadly sniper, ending with a shootout at a drive-in theater. It would be followed by early 70s films like The Visitors and Welcome Home, Soldier Boys, all of which featured Vietnam veterans who were violent, potentially murderous brutes. And then came a guy audiences couldn't ignore.

You talking to me? Who the hell else are you talking to? You talking to me? Then who the hell else are you talking to? You're talking to me? Well, I'm the only one here. A weird, quick question about Taxi Driver. Is Travis Bickle really a Vietnam vet?

That's always been the assumption ever since the movie came out in 1976. After all, Travis wears a military jacket, he's the right age to have served in the war, and he even brags about his experience to a Secret Service agent. Is it hard to get to be in the Secret Service? Why?

Well, I was just curious, because I think I'd be good at it. I'm very observant. I was in the Marine Corps, you know, I'm good with crowds. Whether or not Bickle is telling the truth about his service is up for debate. I mean, he's not the most reliable narrator. But in a way, it doesn't really matter. In Taxi Driver, Bickle's military record, whether it's real or imagined, just gives viewers one more reason to believe his transformation from weirdo loner to rampaging murderer.

The taxi driver is looking for a target. Getting ready. Getting organized. Preparing himself for the only moment in his life that will ever mean anything. While Vietnam is only mentioned in passing in Taxi Driver, the war hangs over the movie like a bad weather system. All of New York City, which is this dreary urban wasteland, looks defeated, and almost everybody Travis encounters, from hustlers to politicians, seems suspect. Vietnam had turned the country upside down. While being interviewed by the legendary journalist Studs Terkel in 1976,

director Martin Scorsese talked about this shift in American society. He told Terkel a story about his friend Joey. He turned to me and says, it wasn't simple, he said in the 50s everything was either black or white. You know, that's it. Now all of a sudden, you know, somebody's wrong, another guy's right, but he's half right. Then this guy's wrong, but he wants to do this.

It's impossible. You know, black and white in the 50s is much easier. Taxi Driver made a film nerd celebrity out of Scorsese, as well as its screenwriter, Paul Schrader.

A little more than a year after the film's release, Schrader's name would be linked to another intense tale of post-Vietnam vengeance, one he'd later distance himself from after it was rewritten

by Heywood Gould. I'm talking about a nasty little revenge picture called Rolling Thunder. There's a storm brewing in this man. They took his arm, they took his family, and his soul. His anger is building, and it's going to explode. Directed by John Flynn, and named after a U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam, Rolling Thunder stars William Devane as Major Charles Rain, a prisoner of war who finds himself back in his small Texas town.

A gang brutally attacks him and kills his family, so Rain turns to a fellow POW named Johnny Voden, played by Tommy Lee Jones, to help seek revenge. I found him. Who? The man who killed my son. Both Raines and Voden have returned from the war distant, distracted, and violent. I'll just get my gear. The carnage in Rolling Thunder, including a shot of Devane's hand being pushed into a garbage disposal, jolted audiences. At one screening, angry

moviegoers burst into the lobby and threatened to beat up the studio executives, a response similar to the one that greeted Soldier Blue. But while the gnarly bravura of Rolling Thunder was a turnoff for most moviegoers, it found its fans on the fringes. Nearly a year and a half after Rolling Thunder's 1977 release, you could still find the movie playing at some drive-ins. And while Rolling Thunder was nowhere near as acclaimed as Taxi Driver, both films helped solidify a brand new big-screen stereotype. One that would soon become a cliche, the violent Vietnam vet. These were men who, in the movies, returned from Vietnam broken from the war, Outsiders. It's a depiction that still frustrates some veterans.

The Western movies, when I was young, the saloon doors opened and in walked the guy with the guns and a black hat. You knew he was the bad guy right from the start. Michael Lee Lanning. Well, when Vietnam movies came along, the black hat was replaced by the army field jacket. If a fellow walked in a bar with an army field jacket, he knew he was a problem, he was crazy,

or a criminal, or all three. It's just not true. The down-and-dirty Vietnam films of the early to mid-70s didn't just create a new kind of stock character. They also proved how deeply the war had ingrained itself in America's consciousness. Horror movies, revenge flicks, bleak urban thrillers. The darker the story, the more likely Vietnam was to be found lurking in the background. These films weren't pleasant, but they proved that, despite Hollywood's fears, some moviegoers were open to revisiting Vietnam and its impact. The initial shock of the war was slowly, very slowly, giving way to the realization that it wouldn't disappear anytime soon. Next on Do We Get to Win This Time.

Deerhunter was overly aggressive and kind of testosterone-laden and myopic about the subtleties of the war in Vietnam, didn't have the kind of war sensitivity that coming home had. There was a guy in a full camo outfit with a gun sitting on a log watching me, never said anything for 15 minutes. In his speech, he had a key phrase in there, which went something along the lines of, I lost my body to regain my mind. I remember where I was when I saw the movie, and I was so outraged. You built up a certain amount of credit. If you could make money appear over the transom,

which was the standard, then you get to do a few things that you really wanted to do that everybody thought was nuts. This is Do We Get to Win This Time? How Hollywood Made the Vietnam War. Written and reported by me, Brian Raftery. The executive producers are Bill Simmons,

Juliet Lippman, and Sean Fennessy. Our story editor is Amanda Dobbins. The show was produced by Devin Manzi, Mike Wargon, and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Dan Comer. Copy editing by Craig Gaines. Talent booking by Kat Spilling.

Sound design by Bobby Wagner. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music in this series comes from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Mixing and mastering by Scott Somerville. The music in this series comes from Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Art direction and illustration by Davis Shoemaker. Thanks for listening.