Tom Sacker is a British-based writer and filmmaker.

He is the founder of SpyCulture.com, a blog and podcast which you can also support on Patreon.

His latest book is National Security Cinema, The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood, which I just finished reading.

Good to have you with us, Tom.

Hi, Roy. It's good to be talking to you. Thanks for having me on.

Sure. Now, I've been teaching U.S. politics for a while and have used as reference material work by

Trisha Jenkins and Oliver Boyd-Barrid with their books such as Hollywood and the CIA, which

discuss how the U.S. government, namely

the Pentagon, DOD, CIA, and NSA influence and manipulate Hollywood. There's not a lot of

material out on this subject, and I've always thought the Hollywood Pentagon connection to be

much worse than it seems. And finally, your new book, National Security

Cinema, proves that. You describe how there is a wealth of documented material which is squared

away in the private library of historian Lawrence Swede, which we don't have access to right now.

And you mentioned one author, David Rob Rob, who somehow obtained access to these

papers for a short period of time and published Operation Hollywood in 2004. Can you tell us

first before we get into some of these examples, the difficulties in researching the subject

of how the government manipulates Hollywood and blockbuster films.

Well, like you just said, one of the main problems, at least with the DOD, is that there is a large amount of material in this private archive in a library in Georgetown.

The archive is maintained by Lawrence Seward.

And he has written several books on this topic, but nothing since 2005.

And as a result, all of this stuff from, I mean, it goes up to roughly 2003.

That's our understanding of it.

...