Feds on Film

(sstainbu@govexec.com)

n Veterans Day last year, the Treasury Department should have been deserted. Instead, hundreds of people stood shivering on the steps of the Washington building: Movie people, shooting a scene for Contact, a film based on a Carl Sagan novel about an American astronomer who receives a message from outer space.

There were actors, Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, being filmed walking down the steps. There was a director, Robert Zemeckis, telling them to go back to the top and do it again. There was a crowd of extras, some dressed in nun's habits and monk's robes, waving signs when a man with a megaphone shouted, "action!" There were silver catering trucks and bottles of spring water lining 15th Street.

Still, Treasury employees shouldn't look for their agency to figure into the plot of the film, which is scheduled for release in August. In Contact, the Treasury Department, with its thick white columns, is playing the part of the U.S. Capitol.

Contact's filmmakers needed a location that provided the same stately backdrop as the real Capitol, but was smaller, so it took fewer people to fill the screen.

Treasury officials, who receive several requests each year to film around the building, are happy to oblige filmmakers as long as shoots aren't disruptive to employees or interfere with security. The reason? "Ultimately, the building is owned by the public," says a Treasury spokesperson.

The Treasury Department isn't the only federal agency willing to act the part when Hollywood beckons.

In the last year alone:

• The Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., appeared as a clandestine research laboratory in Chain Reaction, a $50 million action movie starring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman. Producers of the film liked the look of the Argonne complex so much that one of them, John Wells, returned in the fall with actors Anthony Edwards and Sherry Stringfield to shoot a helicopter rescue scene for an episode of the NBC television series ER that aired last November.
• NASA's Kennedy Space Center doubled as a giant sound stage for The Cape, a weekly cable TV drama about the lives and loves of fictitious space shuttle astronauts, starring Corbin Bernsen. The show continues to shoot at KSC this year.
• The U.S. Postal Service's Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center allowed director Steve Marshall to film scenes during the facility's maintenance shift for Dear God, a comedy about a con man sentenced to do time in a dead letter office.
• The Defense Department loaned out a handful of Humvees for A Time to Kill, Navy fighters for Executive Decision and a squadron of F-15s for the upcoming Air Force One, among other transactions with Tinseltown.

Making movies with federal agencies is nothing new. The Defense Department helped Hollywood churn out patriotic films during World War II, and the government encouraged the production of Carmen Miranda films such as That Night in Rio and Weekend in Havana as part of a foreign relations strategy to popularize U.S. ties with South America.

But filmmakers were less willing to serve as conduits for government policy once the second world war was won. Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt for communists from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s drove a wedge between stars and bureaucrats. The Vietnam War further cooled enthusiasm for any partnership.

Now, filmmakers are back, albeit with a different agenda. And agencies are trying to turn this surge of interest to their advantage.

Setting the Scene

There are a variety of reasons why federal agencies' numbers are in Hollywood producers' rolodexes right now.

In order to achieve the level of verisimilitude which many directors are after, when a script calls for a federal location, that's where the director wants to be.

"Without the Post Office's cooperation, we would not have been able to make this movie," says producer Steve Tisch of Dear God. In addition to allowing the production to film at its Los Angeles Processing and Distribution Center, the Postal Service supplied postal uniforms, insignias and trucks. Forty processing center employees appeared as extras in the film and showed the actors how to use the automatic phaser cancelers, optical character readers, bar code sorters and parcel sorters the agency had loaned them. Tisch even sought advice from his father, Preston Robert Tisch, who served as postmaster general during the Reagan administration.

Flying and filming in NASA's KC-135 zero-gravity simulator was "the only way to truly recreate zero g for the purposes of making a realistic movie about space travel," director Ron Howard writes in the forward to The Apollo Adventure (Pocket Books, 1995), Jeffrey Kluger's book about the making of the movie Apollo 13. The simulator, nicknamed 'the Vomit Comet,' is a gutted and padded Boeing 707 that NASA pilots fly in arcs between 30,000 and 36,000 feet; at the top of each arc, objects inside the plane are weightless for about 23 seconds. The filmmakers bolted their replicas of the cockpits of the Apollo command module and lunar module to the cabin walls and spent four weeks dive-bombing the earth to capture pictures of actors floating through the set and spinning their sunglasses. The film company paid for the costs of operating the plane.

The Cape's directors favor lingering shots of their actors dwarfed by Kennedy Space Center facilities such as the immense Vehicle Assembly Building, and they film at real astronaut training facilities to lend the show a sense of authenticity. The producers depend on information specialist Lisa Fowler, a Kennedy Space Center employee who spends about 80 percent of her time assisting The Cape, to locate new sites on the KSC complex for each week's show.

Filmmakers who need to shoot scenes in the wilderness will also find themselves talking to federal officials. The National Park Service manages 83 million acres of dramatic vistas, volcanoes, glaciers, beaches and mountains, the U.S. Forest Service tends to 191 million acres of forests and clearcuts and the Bureau of Land Management cares for 270 million surface acres of southwestern scenery.

With military movies, "you can do anything in the movie business if the money is big enough. But it's easier with Pentagon approval," producer Mace Neufield, who worked with DoD on Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games, Flight of the Intruder and The Hunt for Red October, told the Associated Press last September.

That's one of the reasons Demi Moore made such a fuss when the Defense Department declined to assist In Pursuit of Honor, an upcoming film in which Moore plays a female Navy SEAL. Moore tried to get President Clinton to order the military's participation (a presidential aide wouldn't put the call through) and had Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles telephone Phil Strub, the Pentagon's film liaison coordinator, to argue her case.

DoD, however, stood its ground. "The problem was not that female Navy SEALs do not exist," says Strub. "The problem was the conduct of military personnel in the picture." In Pursuit of Honor was forced to make do with filming at Camp Blanding, a state-owned National Guard base in Florida, and to hire retired SEALs as script consultants.

In many cases, filming at federal agencies helps producers keep their costs down. Many agencies don't charge location fees. "They often come to us with that in mind," says Strub. DoD does require film companies to pay the department's out-of-pocket operating costs-fuel, depot maintenance, electricity and civilian personnel salaries. Uniformed military personnel, who are on the government's payroll 24 hours a day, do not receive extra payment for participating. Big budget films in particular, Strub observes, tend to spend lavishly on the salaries of their star actors, directors and producers, and then look for ways to save on production costs.

Federal agencies are also appearing in more screenplays than in the past.

"The Washington movie is in vogue now," movie critic Pat Dowell observed on National Public Radio in January. The recent string of White House movies, including Independence Day, Mars Attacks!, Murder at 1600 and Absolute Power, have drawn hoardes of film crews to the District of Columbia to film around stately buildings.

The space movie is in fashion, too. Hollywood's interest in filming at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., is cyclical, observes Tina Pechon, audiovisual coordinator at KSC. "We'll have several feature films over a three- or four-year period, then they'll fade away. Currently, we're in another high cycle." Over the last two years, Independence Day, last spring's Charlie Sheen movie The Arrival and the forthcoming Contact all filmed scenes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, two government-owned radio telescope facilities.

Filmmakers aren't deterred from approaching federal agencies by the possibility of tangling with red tape. "Everybody has rules, whether they are a federal agency or a private company," says Paul Pav, Contact's location manager.

However, filmmakers prepare themselves to set aside a substantial amount of time to jump through agencies' regulatory hoops.

"The biggest problem with working with federal agencies is the time-consuming negotiations," says Pav. "It takes sometimes months. You talk to an agency director in one town-they have to call Washington for approval. When you film at a private company, you deal with one person."

"Agency directors change when administrations change and you can be in the middle of that," Pav says. Feature films set their schedules months ahead, he explains. A film company might get an agency official's permission to film at the agency at the beginning of the production cycle only to have the official's replacement come in and disallow it.

From Star Wars to Star Struck

All this attention can be exciting, but what does cooperating on a feature film actually entail? Officials at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., found out for themselves last year.

In March 1995, the Illinois Film Commission called Catherine Foster, Argonne's director of science and technology communications. They wanted to send a photographer to the facility to take pictures of any laboratories at which director Andrew Davis might film scenes for an upcoming thriller. Foster was surprised by the request, but racked her brains to think of a lab that was not in heavy use. She remembered a research facility called the Continuous Wave Deuterium Demonstrator (CWDD)-a lab built by the Army for Strategic Defense Initiative research that had never been used as Congress had canceled the "Star Wars" program just before its construction was completed. The facility had been declassified and released to Argonne in 1994, but it was sitting idle while scientists sought funding for new CWDD projects.

After getting an enthusiastic go-ahead from CWDD manager Tom Yule, Foster invited the photographer for a tour. Photos were snapped and sent to Davis. Then Argonne officials heard nothing for months.

In July, Mike Malone, the movie's location scout, telephoned Foster and arranged a visit. He took more photographs. More months passed.

Finally, in the fall, Malone called and asked if he could bring a group of people, including director Davis and the production designer, to look Argonne over.

"So the retinue arrived, and we did the tour again," Foster recalls. "As they wandered around, Tom was talking about the history of the area. . . . The warehouse-sized buildings in this particular area of the laboratory had housed dozens of different projects, Tom said, and engineers and technicians had moved from building to building, depending on their expertise on a given project. The tunnels connecting the buildings had been heavily used, Tom added. Andrew Davis turned with a gleam in his eye. 'Tunnels?' he asked."

That clinched it. Labs at the University of Chicago, Northwestern and the Illinois Institute of Technology had also been auditioning for locations in the film. But Davis couldn't resist another opportunity to use tunnels in a chase sequence as he had in his previous film The Fugitive. Inspired by CWDD's particle accelerator and hydrogen tanks, Davis had the screenplay of the film rewritten so that its plot emphasized technology rather than espionage, and changed the title of the movie to Chain Reaction. The filmmakers cast CWDD as Mount Weather, a clandestine laboratory where shadowy government and corporate officials attempt to convert sound energy to light energy for evil purposes; the CWDD's control room would appear as the FBI Counter-Terrorism Center in the movie. That is, with the blessing of top management at Argonne and DOE.

All the while the filmmakers had been mulling over their artistic options, Foster and her boss, Charlie Osolin, had been lobbying their agency for permission to participate.

Safety was a concern. "We're very proud of our safety record here," says Foster. Argonne didn't want movie-makers messing it up. The production company agreed to work with Argonne's fire and safety personnel, and reimburse them for extra hours of work.

The fact that Argonne would appear as a fictitious laboratory where evil minds were at work actually made it easier for Foster and Osolin to sell the idea to agency heads. "If Argonne had been Argonne in the movie, it would have raised our level of participation," explains Foster. The agency would have wanted to approve any scenes in which Argonne or DOE appeared, she says. Chain Reaction agreed not to use the Argonne or Energy Department logos in the film.

Ultimately, says Foster, the head of DOE's operations office in Chicago decided that assisting on the film was a unique way to promote science-in one scene, for example, Keanu Reeves' character's ability to make explosives out of common lab chemicals enables him to escape-and therefore part of the Energy Department's mission.

Only one snag remained. When the filmmakers cast their eyes on the contract, a standard non-federal use of federal property agreement, they were taken aback by a clause that stipulated that in the event of a national emergency, Argonne would throw them off the site. After all the scouting work, "it looked as if they weren't going to come," recalls Foster. Finally, someone at the film company asked the critical question: What would constitute a national emergency? An event such as World War III, Argonne officials answered. The filmmakers decided that, if war did break out, sticking to their filming schedule would be the least of their concerns, and they signed the contract.

Chain Reaction filmed at Argonne for a week in February 1996 and a few days in April. But Foster, assigned to movie-detail, worked on the project for months. She collected photographs of Argonne employees who wanted to be extras in the film and shipped them off to Chain Reaction's casting director. Employees who were chosen had to arrange for time off and were paid by the movie company. On separate occasions, Foster sneaked Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman into Argonne without visitor's badges so that they could quietly tour the facilities and talk to engineers to help them develop their characters. It didn't always work. After the actors met with Argonne's management, "we emerged to find employees clustered throughout the lobby and others hanging off the railings on the upper floors," says Foster. Argonne's security chief, Dave Metta, escorted the celebrities out of the building.

"As the lab's representative to the movie company, I spent what seemed like every waking hour on the set while the filmmakers were there during that week in February, just in case something went wrong," Foster recalls.

The national laboratory was lucky to have a communications director with those qualities standing by. But agencies that do a lot of business with Hollywood don't leave it to luck-they appoint members of their public affairs staffs to be "film liaisons" and establish agency guidelines for assisting film companies.

Life as a Liaison

The Defense Department receives hundreds of requests from filmmakers for technical advice and material assistance-access to military bases and military equipment-each year.

Filmmakers direct their requests to Phil Strub or to one of the services' film liaison officers at the Federal Building in Westwood, Calif. Each service, plus the Coast Guard, has at least one film liaison officer. The Westwood branch of Air Force public affairs recently transferred its community and media relations functions to the Pentagon, and now its entire staff (three people) is dedicated to entertainment industry projects.

DoD's film liaisons read scripts submitted by filmmakers to determine whether they present an opportunity to inform the American public about the armed services, and whether they portray the military in a reasonably realistic way.

When a script does, DoD will supply the production with military equipment, locations, extras and technical consultants. That is, if resources are available. "We don't order units to participate," says Lt. Col. Bruce Gillman, director of the Air Force public affairs office in Westwood. Also, when a film crew wants to shoot scenes on a military base, a film liaison must be available to go along to ensure that filming doesn't interfere with the base's mission. Liaisons can be gone for weeks at a time. The film companies pay their travel expenses. "It's first come, first serve," says Gillman. "We don't hold out for a 'better' picture to come along."

If a script doesn't meet DoD's criteria, the film liaisons will suggest changes.

Usually, says Strub, scripts contain a whole lot of technical errors pertaining to rank and military terminology and one or two structural problems. "Sometimes, there's a fundamental show stopper," he says. "For example, in Crimson Tide, a crew mutinies. We can talk about where the ribbons should be pinned, but if there's a fundamental problem with the situation, they're not going to get our help. Then we try to negotiate."

With a fully stocked arsenal of cool military equipment like the vertical-takeoff Harrier jet that Arnold Schwarzenneger's character flew in True Lies, and a legacy of films like Clear and Present Danger that succeeded at the box office in part because audiences loved the techno-reality that only the real armed forces could provide, DoD negotiates from a position of strength. The first film DoD assisted, Wings (1927), even won the first "Best Picture" Oscar presented by the Academy of American Motion Pictures.

But DoD's clout is not always enough.

The producers of Courage Under Fire decided to walk away rather than address faults the Army film liaison found with their script and listed in a memo, later reprinted in Harper's magazine, including:

• "Unrealistic relationships: There are several instances of dialogue and behavior between military personnel that would never take place. Although the examples below require only a little toning down, they are currently unacceptably unrealistic and negative. Rady's comment to Walden that she doesn't need to prove she has balls: All soldiers who work with women are trained and counseled many times to watch all sexual references."
• "Serling's alcoholism: Serling can't be shown drinking or being drunk while on duty. He could be seen recovering from the night before . . . but otherwise it appears that the army is unabashedly tolerating his serious problem. Also, when Serling says he is trying to quit, he should say something about joining the army's alcohol rehab program."
• "Anti-Pentagon comments: Serling would not behave as if everyone assumes that those assigned to the Pentagon are slow and stupid. Micromanagers, maybe."

Rumors that DoD won't cooperate on tough subjects are untrue, Strub insists. "It all depends on how it's depicted." He points out that the agency assisted HBO on Tuskeegee Airmen, a film that shows racial discrimination in the Air Force in the 1950s.

And, while DoD passed on comedies such as Sgt. Bilko, Major Payne, The Peacemaker and the forthcoming McHale's Navy, it was happy to help with Down Periscope, In the Army Now and episodes of ABC's Major Dad. "Pauly Shore's character in In the Army Now attributes every good thing to the Army," including his renewed attractiveness to his girlfriend, says Strub. The insurmountable problem with Sgt. Bilko was that "the military characters were incompetent at best, corrupt at worst," he says.

"We don't ask for documentary realism," says Strub. "We understand these are movies."

Kennedy Space Center, another federal facility that attracts filmmakers like flies, also requests that studios send scripts. But its four film liaisons, who work out of offices at KSC's state-of-the-art press center next to the countdown clock, don't consider films' story lines as much as their impact on operations. "We're not in the business of trying to censor or direct a project so we really look at logistics, whether or not it's feasible," says audiovisual coordinator Tina Pechon, KSC's primary contact for filmmakers.

"The ground rules for anything that we do for these productions is that our main focus in life is to process, launch and land the space shuttle," says Pechon. "Our operations take first priority. If a movie wants to come in here and film, they simply have to do it around our operations schedule."

That said, the agency has earned quite a reputation in the film industry for being "movie friendly." Contact's producers found NASA officials willing to permit the film crew to paint a Contact emblem over the Vehicle Assembly Building's Bicentennial Emblem, as long as the crew would replace the facility's emblem when they were finished filming. KSC discourages outsiders from filming on launch day because, explains Malone, "we have to assign a body to go with any film crew [and] media services personnel are trying to produce a show for the live media." However, when Contact wanted to truck in a few thousand extras and film them, along with the real crowd, watching Space Shuttle Columbia lift off last November, the media services staff rounded up agency volunteers to accompany the film crew. (All these well-laid plans were eventually scrapped. The painting exercise proved to be too expensive to pursue; the multiple delays of the Columbia launch sent the filmmakers scurrying back to the studios with shots of an empty causeway. At press time, the producers intended to add the crowds in by computer, but were also considering returning to KSC in April for the next daytime shuttle launch.)

"There are many projects that we get that we will support entirely on a reference level," says Pechon. KSC maintains a library which filmmakers can use; last November, officials were letting researchers for From Earth to the Moon, a 13-part HBO series on the Apollo program that began filming in February, rifle through boxes of uncataloged papers and photographs in a storeroom. When the Apollo 13 producers were looking for assistance in constructing models of the Apollo command module and lunar module, KSC officials put them in touch with the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, a privately owned museum in Hutchinson, Kan., that boasts the largest collection of space artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution. The museum let the filmmakers incorporate pieces of the real Apollo 13 spacecraft in their models.

Unlike DoD's film liaisons, running interference for film companies is not the full-time job of the KSC audiovisual team. They also produce NASA's television programs and oversee all the KSC photography. But the time they dedicate to feature film and television projects has increased, says Manny Virata, KSC's television coordinator. Assisting The Cape-a job which entails helping producers scout locations for future shows while attending film shoots and helping wrap up shows that have completed filming-became so time-consuming for Pechon that KSC had information assistant Lisa Fowler give up her duties as VIP logistics coordinator to concentrate on the project.

Star-Spangled Banner

That federal agencies are willing to commit so much staff-time and resources to Hollywood ventures indicates that officials believe they can turn Hollywood's interest in the government to their advantage.

"Fewer people have any experience with the military today," says the Defense Department's Strub. "Fewer people serve. Fewer people know people who serve. Consequently, we feel a responsibility to be particularly aggressive in looking for opportunities to tell the public about the military. We don't want to be some mysterious guard off on a base surrounded by a wall. We are part of American society. These entertainment products reach a wide and impressionable audience. We would just as soon the impressions be positive."

"There has to be some kind of public information value [to us]," says Strub, "Otherwise it's a lot of trouble for no good reason."

The publicity-shy FBI has been known to break its code of silence when the film industry offers opportunities to boost agency recruitment. In 1990, the agency arranged for Keanu Reeves to spend time with FBI agents as research for a role in Point Break. The FBI also provided assistance to Silence of the Lambs, a film starring Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, that came down the pipeline at a time when the bureau was looking to recruit more female agents.

Apparently, the agency is not so interested in attracting rogue agents to its ranks. The X Files, a Fox television series whose two main characters, special agent Fox Mulder and special agent Dana Scully, have been known to show up at the deputy director's apartment in the middle of the night with a wanted felon, skip town to Siberia when scheduled to testify in front of Congress and generally disregard agency requests to keep travel spending under control as they crisscross the country in search of aliens and Loch Ness Monsters, gets no assistance from the bureau.

The FBI is more than happy to assist NBC's Unsolved Mysteries: The program's re-enactments of crimes have led to real-life arrests. The FBI's film liaisons are located in its Fugitive Publicity Office, making cooperation with Unsolved Mysteries efficient.

NASA's willingness to bend over backwards for filmmakers-any filmmakers, be they Oscar-winners or Australians documenting the lives of fire ants on the KSC complex-has won it valuable allies in the dream factory. For example, the HBO project From Earth to the Moon is the brainchild of Tom Hanks, the actor who played astronaut Jim Lovell in Apollo 13. While Hanks has been a space buff all his life, his experience working with NASA in 1995 was pleasant enough to bring him back. Each episode of the HBO project will be a separate one-hour movie; big Hollywood names, including Hanks, Fred Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Ted Demme (Beautiful Girls) and Lili Fini Zanuck (Rush) have signed on to direct. If your scope of existence is determined as much by public opinion as NASA's, it's nice to have people willing to spend $47 million to tell your story.

Films shot on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service earn money for the government. The agencies assess commercial film companies a "use fee" on top of billing them for costs such as agency employee overtime and paperwork processing. The agencies remit the use fee to the U.S. Treasury. The standard rate for filming on BLM property in Utah is $100 to $600 a day, depending on the number of people involved in the film shoot, according to BLM realty specialist Terry Catlin. The rates are based on fair market value for use of the land.

The National Park Service doesn't charge such a fee for land use, although there is currently some discussion at the agency about assessing one. The Park Service, in fact, only received the authority to recover costs incurred by film company use of their land three and a half years ago.

Nevertheless, "the film industry does a tremendous amount of good, by portraying areas in parks that people don't always get the chance to see," says Dick Young, special uses coordinator for the Park Service. "Even if we are not specifically identified, people look at [the scenery] and say, 'gee, where is that?' That's part of our mission, to get the word out." The Park Service allows the CBS series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to maintain a set on property once owned by Paramount Studios that is now part of the agency's Santa Monica Mountains recreation area. In their Park Service permit, Dr. Quinn is required to open some shooting locations to the public, so visitors can watch the series being filmed. "Filming is a major cultural attribute of this country," says Scott Erickson, deputy superintendent at the Santa Monica Mountains recreation area. The arrangement with Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman "dovetails very tightly with the National Park Service mission to preserve and protect our cultural resources," he says.

Finally, as Argonne National Laboratory discovered, nothing boosts employee morale like the prospect of catching a glimpse of movie stars acting like feds. And there are the perks of celebrity: When Chain Reaction hit the silver screen last August, a local theater knocked $2.75 off the ticket price for Argonne employees.