Dangerous History, Made in America

Title: Dangerous History, Made in America

Description: Today we are join by CJ of the Dangerous History Podcast to talk about the 2017 movie American Made starring Tom Cruise. CJ leads us through the really dirty history and background behind this fictionalized account of 80’s drug trafficking in the United States.

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By https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTUxNzUwMjk1Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNDkwODI1MjI@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,675,1000_AL_.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54231436

Begin Transcript:
, [00:00:00] this is beyond the big screen podcast with your host, Steve Guerra. Welcome back to beyond the big screen today. I'm very happy to be joined by prof CJ of the dangerous history podcast. We're going to discuss a very interesting bit of history from the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of the movie American made starring Tom cruise released just in 2017.
We will discuss a wide variety of topics from the proxy wars in central America to the drug wars, Iran, Contra, and much more. And so thank you very much for coming on the show today, CJ. Oh, you're very welcome. It's great to talk to you before we get started. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your show?
The dangerous history podcast? Sure. Yeah. Well, I've been. Teaching college history since I [00:01:00] think 2006, and I started back in 2014, a podcast called the dangerous history podcasts, and you can go to dangerous history, podcast.com and find it all the usual podcast venues, you know, iTunes and so forth. And I've always really been interested in the kind of dark corners of history that.
Neglected by a lot of the typical mainstream coverage of history. It leaves out a lot of what I think is the most interesting stuff. And there there's a lot of, lot of history that's hidden in plain sight and it's easily found in a library or these days online, but just nobody knows it. So I would share those sorts of things with my classes, you know, within the, within the context of like an American history class or whatever.
But ultimately I decided I wanted an outlet where I can really just dig into all that stuff. So my show covers all sorts of different [00:02:00] time periods and topics. And I always try to kind of dig up the things that people just. I don't know. Yeah. That's why I really love your show. It's when you get into those pieces of history where you're like, wow, that really happened.
It gives you a really different perspective on how things went down. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the things that I cover are things that, you know, to the average person, who's never encountered any of these things might strike them as like bizarre conspiracy theories. And I always say that I don't deal in conspiracy theories.
You know, if there's something that's not, not proven, I'll maybe mention, oh, there's a rumor of blah, blah, blah. I can't prove it. So who knows if it's true, but the thing is there are so many things out there that are not theory anymore. You know, where, where things have been exposed one way or another, um, over the years that you don't need to be a theorist to have all kinds of bizarre and sometimes funny and sometimes disturbing stories, um, about some of the darker things that have happened.
And I think we're going to get into quite a few of those in. [00:03:00] Discuss this movie. Yeah. Yeah. This movie is definitely right up the alley of a lot of the sorts of things I cover on my show. So as I said, this movie was released in the latter half of 2017 and it stars Tom cruise as the character Barry seal, we'll get into him in just a moment.
The film isn't directly based on a book or on a particular source. That's a fictionalized story about true events. And interestingly, it's directed by Doug Liman whose father attorney Arthur Liman was chief counsel for the Senate Iran Contra investigation. And also there was a lot more in this story about some connections between the CIA.
Can you maybe get into just a little bit about this production? Even the production of this movie has some interesting twists and turns. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, I tried really hard, um, two things that I tried to dig up in preparing for this show, um, that I wasn't quite [00:04:00] able to nail down. Um, one was, I was trying to get to see if I could find floating out there on the internet anywhere a copy of the original script, because you know, so sometimes you can do that.
You can find just out there posted somewhere as a PDF or whatever, an original script, because as I'm sure lots of people know, um, very often the, the original script for a movie, and then what ends up actually being the final script and getting made as the movie are often very, very, very different. And in this case, um, the original script was actually entitled MENA, a reference to MENA Arkansas, which is where, um, Barry seal eventually makes his headquarters for his smuggling operation.
And. Um, I, the, the name of the writer escapes me. Um, and I forgot to, I forgot to jot it down, but the original script from what I've dug up, I haven't been able to find it, but I found some, some articles and things talking about it. And the original script was more about the overall operation itself and [00:05:00] broad focused, more specifically on like the CIA's involvement and all that.
And the final script, what was actually made into the movie that's there, but it's not, that's not the focus as much. And instead the actual movie is more focused on seals, personal story. So the focus is different. It's not as focused just on the sort of smuggling Iran-Contra angle though. That's part of it.
And also from what I found in the original script, they supposedly showed more, uh, direct contact in various ways between Barry seal and both George HW Bush. And between Barry seal and bill Clinton. So, um, there are a couple of quick scenes where this is brought up and they do, you know, give little illusions to it and things, but they, they apparently the original script had a lot more of those kinds of scenes, including by the way, there was originally going to be a scene [00:06:00] where Barry seal actually meets with bill Clinton in person and Clinton at the time is getting a lap dance.
And that scene obviously didn't make it into the film and I'm not sure, you know, why, why did they reduce the amount of showing, you know, contact and perhaps complicity between seal and both the Clintons and bushes when there's a fair amount of evidence out there to show that there was a lot of maybe not always personal face to face contact, but a lot of, you know, people kind of helping protect seal for a number of years while he was doing his thing.
And it's possible it could be to limit. How much the film negatively depicts, um, the American political elites. Like they're willing to do a little bit of it, but not too much. I don't know. Um, it also might potentially have been because of legal worries that if they depicted too many scenes of Clinton and or Bush helping out this, this dirty smuggler that, you know, because those are ex presidents who are both still alive that [00:07:00] I don't know, maybe they'd face some sort of, some sort of legal issue.
Um, something like that. And just one more thing, interestingly, I think anyway, because who knows how the movie would have been, but I believe when the script was originally sold, Ron Howard was going to make the film and then obviously it ended up being Doug Liman, but who knows, you know, how different of a movie it might've been.
If, if Ron, Ron Howard did it now on the, on the other topic that you raised, the topic of was the CIA self involved in actual. The production of the movie in some way, I wasn't able to, to find a clear answer. I did my best. And sometimes you can find this. Sometimes they admit it. Um, this is something that I've been getting more into lately and maybe the last few months, or year or something, I've really come to realize that the amount of direct and indirect influence that [00:08:00] the defense department and the CIA have over Hollywood movies is huge.
And I kinda knew it was there. And I knew it was a thing, but it's like bigger and deeper and more profound than I had ever thought when I really started digging in. So the CIA and, and the military in the United States have what they call entertainment, liaison offices, or ELs, and what these offices do is, and that they're heavily connected to Hollywood producers.
They, the people who work for these offices, they rub elbows with top Hollywood people all the time and go to parties and things. And the, what they do is they offer movie makers, things like the ability to shoot on a military or CIA facility or. Providing technical consultants and expertise to try to make the movie, um, more realistic or the action scenes more compelling.