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George S. Patton Lesser Known Facts

Khalid Elhassan November 19, 2024 12 min

Patton - George S. Patton — George S. Patton. Europe Remembers

4. Getting The Pentagon’s Help With a Movie

The Pentagon has long had a quid pro quo relationship with Hollywood as a condition for assisting with movies. Encyclopedia Britannica

As with any movie that seeks help from the United States Department of Defense (DoD), Patton’s producers had to meet some basic criterion. The DOD demands a say in every American made movie that wants to use US military resources that are not available on the open market. There is an section dedicated to that: the DoD’s Entertainment Media Office. The resultant mutually beneficial relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon is known as the “military-entertainment complex“. There are quite a few hoops that Hollywood films have to jump through in order to get production assistance from the US military.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.