Hollywood has been more heavily censored since 2001, films bashing US army & CIA can’t go public – Oliver Stone to RT
The American film industry changed beyond recognition after the milestone year of 2001, director Oliver Stone told RT, with producers using financial restraints to censor movies challenging the US military or the CIA.
“Maybe in the 1980s, when I did ‘Platoon’, ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ and ‘Heaven & Earth’, I could do that, because it was a slightly more relaxed system,” said the award-winning filmmaker, mentioning his famed movies while making his case during former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s show on RT Spanish.
When the Iron Curtain fell and the Cold War ended, things didn’t change for the better, Stone believes. “My film career has suffered, because sometimes I’ve said things that American producers hate to hear,” he revealed, adding that those sponsoring film productions sometimes resort to “economic censorship.”
Hollywood has changed since 2001. It has become more censored. The military, the CIA, the depictions of these organizations has been very favorable.
“You can take the budgets down... let’s say you want to make a film criticizing the American military, taking an Iraq war story or a horror story that recently happened in Iraq... You do those kinds of stories, it’s not going to happen,” he explained.
Stone, who scored a number of Academy, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, has been widely criticized for his anti-war dramas and, most recently, for a series of films questioning the widespread Western narrative on the Ukrainian turmoil, as well as exclusive interviews with Vladimir Putin.
“Now, censorship isn’t something that exclusively affects the American film industry,” Stone lamented, “I can read the American media but they all say the same things ... And you don’t hear from Iran and China, you don’t hear from [North] Korea, you don’t hear from Venezuela, you don’t get their point of view.”
The CIA realized – after World War II, basically – they [went into] the business, the news business, they put their people, their agents at newspapers, at magazines and television.
- Source : RT
