Countless films producing the United States feature, the use of rather expensive military

equipment, and often real-world military personnel.

Given the extreme expense of all of this using things paid for by the US taxpayer to benefit

for profit companies, how is that allowed?

Further, how are projects that the military will support selected?

Can just any US citizen apply for use of such equipment and personnel for their particular

project to make it all fair?

And just too much does this cost the US tax-pair in cases like, for example, the recent

wildly profitable Top Gun Maverick.

And why and how did it all get started?

As though I, as William Brady, one-time head of the National Association of the Motion

Picture Industry, wrote in 1917 to US President Woodrow Wilson, the motion picture can be made the most wonderful system for spreading the national propaganda

at little or no cost.

Fast forwarding to the mid-20th century, the United States Office of War Information

even had a Bureau of Motion Pictures which reviewed over 1,600 film scripts in the United

States during World War II.

As to why, once again, as the Bureau's head, Elmer Davis stated, the easiest way to inject

propaganda idea into most people's minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment

picture when they do not realize they're being propagandized.

Beyond propaganda, the second commonly stated reason as to why this is a benefit to the

military is in recruitment.

That said, it may surprise you to learn that despite what almost every media outlet says, even the original Tobgun, actually didn't have much of any measurable effect on recruitment numbers when you actually look at the data, as we'll get into in a bit. This now brings us to how it all got started. While going all the way back to 1910, there were examples of films that featured

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