From realistic films about the military like Act of Valor to shows with an apocalyptic bent, like ”The Last Ship,” the Navy and the other Armed Forces have long played a big part in Hollywood lore.
But how does the entertainment industry learn about the specifics of military life? Exposure, for one, as the Navy hosted executives last week as part of the “Hollywood to the Navy” program.
The Navy, in an attempt to introduce the industry to military hardware and training, offered tours of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron Three, the guided-missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones and the Los Angeles-class attack submarine USS Hampton.
Aditya Sood, president of Genre Films, said he was interested in the robotics and communications work at the systems center, where the Navy conducts research and development on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tools.
He said one form of communication being studied that relies on sprays of water as antennas fascinated him.
“From my perspective as a film producer, I’m always interested in what cutting edge ideas we can hopefully integrate into the movies that we are making,” Sood said in a news release. “There is actually so much value in showing people things they don’t know and haven’t seen before. That is entertaining in itself.”
For Jason Brown, executive vice president at the Sean Daniel Company, tours of the destroyer and the submarine will help guide his vision for a planned futuristic television project. The Navy already is influencing “The Last Ship,” a TNT that launched this summer, by cooperating and allowing production to take place on its ships.
“To be authentic to the way our Navy works, which will be the Navy in the future, and to get the authenticity of that and the experience of what it’s like to live in confined spaces … and how people operate in them, it’s enormously helpful,” said Brown.
The recent workshop, hosted by the Navy Office of Information, West, took place over three days, which concluded Sunday.
Comments are closed.