Pentagon Goes to Hollywood

H O L L Y W O O D, Calif., June 12 -- When Hollywood calls on the Pentagon to help make war movies more realistic, taxpayers help pay for some of the big-budget costs.

For Hollywood, real aircraft and genuine soldiers help spice up the special effects of war movies. Plus, it makes production costs cheaper. In the new film The Sum of All Fears, for example, the film's producers paid about $1 million for scenes involving an aircraft carrier.

"If we had to do that ourselves it would have cost $3- to $4 million … that's just a guess," said Mace Neufeld, producer of the Paramount film based on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name.

In one scene, an actor playing the president is rescued from an overturned car. Real helicopters and actual Marines save him. The production company paid for flight time, but not for the Marines.

"So they were actually doing an exercise for us, and I don't think that actors dressed up in uniforms and the helicopters we could have gotten would have given us the same feeling of reality," said Neufeld.

The Pentagon provides technical and material help to movies likely to portray an accurate and positive image of the military. So, for a price, they give boot camp training and advice on tactics to actors in the MGM movie Windtalkers, a World War II period film.

In Black Hack Down, which depicted the failed 1993 U.S. raid in Somalia, actual helicopters flew and special operations troops roped down for the cameras. The price to producers of the Sony film: about $2.5 million.

Disney, the parent company of ABCNEWS.com, received military help for the filming of Pearl Harbor, which was released last year. The Pentagon was criticized when the aircraft carrier John Stennis sailed to Hawaii to be the platform for the movie's premiere. Disney paid all costs related to the party.

Enhancing Image With Tax Money?

The relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon has its critics.

"This is not a private corporation trying to enhance its image by advertising with private funds, this is the government that we all pay taxes for enhancing its image," said Ivan Eland of the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank.