The media trashes an important new film and "dumbs down" the public on the explosive subject of secret societies.
4/7/2000
Flying Saucers over Hollywood! by filmmaker Paul Davids offers a rare glimpse into the great Hollywood UFO films.
While Universal.s ERIN BROCKOVICH holds on tight to the Number One slot at the national theatrical box-office for the third week in a row, with a $14.2 million-dollar weekend, the number three position (after THE ROAD TO EL DORADO) goes to another Universal picture: A newcomer called THE SKULLS weighed in at $11.4 million for its opening weekend.
THE SKULLS started out with just under half the gross that MISSION TO MARS made at its opening. Yet the pair of movies share in common the fact that critics beat them to a pulp on opening day. But of interest to all discerning UFO fans, they share a whole lot more than that. Both films dramatize the fact that secrecy has a pernicious effect on our culture. The manipulative forces that control the news essentially lie to the public. The media never want us to know .too much. about things of potential significance. Ufologists believe that forces within our society contribute to the .dumbing down. of the American public. Whether by ridicule or ignorance, or through the misuse of skepticism (to the point where skepticism becomes malicious debunking), the message of the BIG PICTURE just isn.t getting through, say ufologists.
To grasp this BIG PICTURE, we have to step outside the conventional boxes that the Establishment uses to shape and direct our thinking and our attention. Is it important in the BIG PICTURE of life that there is solid evidence of UFOs and intervention by some sort of .alien. intelligence.? Of course. And is it important in the BIG PICTURE that for decades the Establishment utilized a cult of secrecy (on grounds of national security, etc.) to withhold facts, official documents, and ufological evidence that .they. (the Establishment) don.t want us to examine too closely? Of course. So, is there value in a motion picture that shows us dramatically, step by step, how the insidious cult of secrecy takes hold, seduces our young, and snatches up .souls. for life? Absolutely. It.s a brilliant topic for a motion picture. Such a film doesn.t have to be perfect to have considerable value. Seeing the process of seduction into secrecy in an exciting, suspenseful (though somewhat exaggerated) film story definitely serves a higher purpose. It works in the opposite direction of .dumbing down.. It .smartens up,. makes us aware, and equally important, it makes us SUSPICIOUS. And we ought to be.
We.re about to have an election where the father of one of the candidates (George Herbert Walker Bush) was a Yale graduate and "Skull and Bones" secret society member. The elder Bush went on to become the head of the CIA, then Vice-President, and finally President. You won.t read about this in the Establishment papers, but the elder George.s son, George .Dubbya. Bush, not only attended Yale, but was ALSO a member of the Skull and Bones. Shouldn.t we be asking questions about what a membership in that society entails? Shouldn.t we take interest in the fact that a secret society membership transfers from father to son, from one who was President to one who aspires to be? Of course. There are questions galore to ask. Once we see the seduction of one generation by another into the cult of secrecy, assuring continuance of the Establishment.s ways and means, then by gum, we become not only question-askers, but investigators.
Does this sound like a film the Establishment critics want to kill? Perhaps they wish to snuff it out before it takes root? Would they lie about it to keep you away? Absolutely!
It.s almost a rule of thumb that production of a motion picture which suggests .conspiracy" will be attacked by Establishment critics. Word of mouth can only do so much to help a film these days. Usually word of mouth doesn.t kick in for a few days until after the opening weekend. By then it.s probably too late. The damage will have been done, because pictures don.t survive long in the cineplexes if they don.t start out impressively well. If critics can counteract a film.s trailer and exciting publicity by, in effect, WARNING moviegoers to stay away, they have the effect of controlling public opinion. They act as a filter. They become the censors. They can.t stop a film from playing (the way they could in a totalitarian regime), but they can gang up to blunt its impact. The critics create a sort of .group-think. attitude of derision BEFORE people even catch on to what they.ve done.
Consider the fact that THE SKULLS received a rave review from the Yale University student newspaper -. in the very place where Skull and Bones thrives, where people are aware of the insidious nature of secret societies. This review was about the only one of its kind in all of the U.S. The Los Angeles Times had this to say: "SKULLS A NOT-SO-SMART THRILLER ABOUT ELITISM, SECRET SOCIETIES." How many of you want to rush out to see a film that.s .not-so-smart.? Reviewer Robin Rauzi tried to make sure it wouldn.t be very many of you. USA Today wrote this in their headline: "THE SKULLS: BAD TO THE BONE," but the actual review said "THE SKULLS? More like numbskulls. This is a boneheaded thriller. President Bush is a member of such a club, and THE SKULLS is bush league as it plunges into titter-provoking paranoid overdrive. When it comes to being brainless, THE SKULLS is at the head of the class." Thank Susan Wloszczyna for that review. All I can say is that one person's "titter-provoking paranoid overdrive" is another person's revelation of THE TRUTH.
I had the privilege of seeing THE SKULLS -- a Rob Cohen film -- at its Westwood premiere, held the night after the Academy Awards. Crazed fans outside the theater at an opening like that one should know by now that if they look skyward they will see me, like Santa in his sleigh, flying my hovercraft, swooping down from the skies above Hollywood Boulevard in search of THE TRUTH. I was jolted with so much TRUTH, in fact that the experience could only be called shock therapy. Kudos to Rob Cohen and to Universal Pictures for having gonads big enough to beat the band.
Balls are usually something you.ll see at a tennis court or baseball stadium, but rarely will you find them in the spacious offices of Hollywood decision-makers. Sometimes, though, some of us are pleasantly surprised to find a studio film that requires a lot of guts to make. Not everyone is happy when a controversial picture becomes a hit . tapping a raw nerve like a dentist drill grinding away without the patient having any anesthetic! Controversy always has its targets, and the targets may squirm, get uncomfortable, or lash out in screaming rebuttals. A recent example is the film THE INSIDER, in which Al Pacino kicked Mr. Butts in the butt. (For those of you who don.t read Doonesbury, Mr. Butts is the character who looks like a cigarette, defending the tobacco industry.s worst practices.) Of course, THE INSIDER was not a hit, by the classical definition. The tobacco industry was pretty much down for the count when Pacino did his stomping. We all know that tobacco will rise from the grave like a vampire on the prey for fresh blood, especially with all the help it gets from the Supreme Court these days.
Another classic example of a film with chutzpah was Oliver Stone.s JFK. The Washington Establishment was so nervous about that picture that the film actually received negative reviews based on a critic's reading of a stolen script -- before Stone had begun shooting one frame of film. The Washington Beltway Bunch hated the coverup and conspiracy message when the film came out, so they bullied the messenger. But they didn.t beat him into submission. An unrepentant Stone survived the assaults on his JFK assassination theories to go on to make NIXON, his biography of the President who resigned in disgrace, and ANY GIVEN SUNDAY, which made us think of football the way Caesar thought of gladiator extravaganzas.
Let.s add to our list of films with gonads-of-steel such classic films as THE CHINA SYNDROME (which beat-up the nuclear industry), NETWORK (based on Paddy Chayefsky.s magnificent screenplay dissecting the broadcast industry), ON THE BEACH (about the absurdity of nuclear war), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (mind control in action), and SILKWOOD (based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistle-blower who was murdered). And while we.re on the subject of SILKWOOD, every ufologist should pay his or her respects to the indominatable attorney Daniel Sheehan, who not only handled the Silkwood case, but also the Pentagon Papers case, and certain aspects of the Iran/Contra affair. More recently, he was hired by the Gorbachev Foundation to work on the scholarly framework of a .New Paradigm. for international relations, to replace outdated Cold War strategies. Sheehan, a recent speaker at the International UFO Congress, is also devoting much of his energies toward ending the UFO coverup. For Sheehan, the UFO coverup is fact, and like Howard Beale, the troubled newscaster in NETWORK, he is .MAD AS HELL AND HE.S NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!.
When I set out in 1989 to produce the TV motion picture ROSWELL (which was eventually made in 1993-1994, starring Kyle MacLachlan, Martin Sheen, and Dwight Yoakam), most of the companies that turned it down said to me, .Crashed flying saucers and alien corpses? Do you really think the government could keep something like that SECRET?. Before even considering the evidence, the premise was attacked. This wasn.t the case because it was unimaginable that space aliens could reach Earth and have some fatal mechanical problems with their saucers. warp drives over New Mexico skies. It was attacked because we all THINK we know human psychology, and folks just COULDN.T keep their mouths shut about something like that if it REALLY happened, now could they? (Note that our naiveté about secrecy has been attacked by AlienZoo contributor Jim Marrs repeatedly in his AlienZoo column, THE VIEW FROM MARRS, and he will attack the subject again in his forthcoming book, RULE BY SECRECY, from Harper Collins, due out April 23).
My reply to a lot of the executives who turned down ROSWELL THE MOVIE was that yes, secrecy is rampant in our society, and that the government has kept many secrets for decades. A list of cover-ups exposed in the last decade exceeds the scope of this article, but the executives who turned down my ROSWELL film refused to equate alien landing secrecy with the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, where the A-Bomb was built secretly in Los Alamos, New Mexico. They knew that extreme secrecy worked on the Manhattan Project, but they could not extrapolate that into speculation about what would happen if alien advanced technology were actually to fall by happenstance into human (military) hands.
THE SKULLS brilliantly dramatizes, in the most convincing and searing style, how the cult of secrecy takes hold in our society. It also shows how college-age youth are seduced even before the military or international corporations get their claws into all that vulnerable young blood. Is the lust for secrecy just part of human nature? Or is it an acquired taste? THE SKULLS shows that it.s BOTH. Secrecy has become the ultimate game of the military industrial complex, which influences every aspect of our lives. THE SKULLS dramatizes precisely what that allure really is. When the stakes are important, such as when the best minds of young America are groomed to serve powerful interests, then money is no object. The Ivy League students in THE SKULLS who join the secret society of the same name are given fat bank accounts, cars, and free scholarships to the law schools of their choice . which they won.t even by ready to apply to for years to come. They.re handed it all in exchange for blind obedience, a brotherhood of secret allegiance that transcends law and endures until death. Speaking metaphorically, the Ivy Leaguers in this film don.t have studs or rings lodged in their pierced tongues. Instead, they have silver spoons, and they covet them with a fetishistic passion.
At the premiere, people went crazy with applause as the movie as the end credits rolled. Someone screamed .Fantastico!. The crowd swooned like they had just seen the coolest thing going. Of course, the response wasn.t unanimous. I asked a couple of girls leaving the theater what they thought. They said, .good.. I said, .Good, not great?. They said, .We have high standards.. Rather than inquire further about their standards, I walked half a block away in Westwood to Art.s Deli, site of THE SKULLS premiere party. Art.s of Westwood is like no other delicatessen in the world. It.s got more class than it has pickles, a lot more charm than coleslaw. Unlike the pre-Academy Awards party of USA Films (in honor of TOPSY TURVY), where the music was so LOUD that merely shouting to a friend .HEY, HOW ARE YA?. ripped out your vocal cords, at Art.s Deli the music was pumped at a more modest level. You could carry on a conversation. I told a writer of popular Hollywood mystery novels that I was now writing a UFO-oriented column for AlienZoo, and that this film had a moral for all concerned about the UFO cover-up. She asked me in a very condescending tone, .Oh, are you a BELIEVER?.
.BELIEVER. is the Establishment.s sub-human label for those who object to the government withholding UFO documents. I replied that it wasn.t a matter of what I believed, but that astronaut Gordon Cooper said unequivocally that UFOs and aliens are real and the Rightful Authorities have yet to own up to that fact. Also, lunar astronaut Edgar Mitchell has weighed in on the same side of the argument. Didn.t she know? No, she didn.t. I ditched the go-nowhere conversation and sought out SKULLS director Rob Cohen and congratulated him on his movie. His last picture, DRAGONHEART, was a world away from this one, a fantasy with a captivating score, in which Sean Connery taught us that even a dragon can play the role of a con-artist. That film touched my heart, and I have been a softy for high fantasy dating back to Korda.s classic masterpiece THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD and Ray Harryhausen.s masterful dragon movie, THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD. Unfortunately, DRAGONHEART never proved to be a fire-breather at the box office, and it slinked off the screens prematurely with its scaly tail between its legs. Clearly, though, it did not leave Cohen impaired or handicapped in pursuing his conspiratorial chef d.oeuvre, THE SKULLS, which, as I mentioned above, is being distributed by Universal, the same studio that backed his medieval dragon story. Anticipation that Cohen had a breakthrough movie on his hands this time around, and that THE SKULLS would be embraced by a society completely numbed by the fact that one of its two prime Presidential choices for November is the son of former President George Bush.
That was, of course, a few days before the critics had their say. The critics pounded this movie into lean hamburger and then roasted it and tossed it to the dogs.
Let.s face it, the release of THE SKULLS eight months before a presidential election that will have a Bush on a major ticket is a political statement. The movie invites us to do something that too few people engage in these days: Thinking. Think long, think hard. President Bush didn.t exactly rise from obscurity onto the vice-presidential slot with Ronald Reagan. He headed the CIA from 1976 until the 1980 campaign.
It.s not being overly conspiratorial to assert that the CIA, which the elder Bush ran, has been the ultimate symbol of the cult of secrecy in America for decades. Never mind the fact that the CIA has probably been left in the dust by other even more-secretive agencies of government, some of which have no names. Consider .No Such Agency,. the NSA. Consider DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But the CIA, even with its public relations face-lift, is still the place you think of when you contemplate MK-ULTRA and mind control. CIA authority and author Victor Marchetti stated in one of his books that the CIA certainly could and would keep secrets such as the dusty remains of little gray men plucked from parched New Mexico lands who arrived in a spacecraft from Beyond Earth. Check out www.blackvault.com, with its 20,000 Freedom of Information Act documents . and then consider the extent to which certain leaders who kept those documents TOP SECRET in the first place got their early training from secret societies, like Skull and Bones at Yale.
But surely THE SKULLS is a grotesque exaggeration, you might say. Utterly unbelievable, others will insist. So what.s my problem? Am I reading too much into the movie by finding the seeds of the government.s cover-up of ET contacts and ET technology spoken of by Command Sergeant Major Robert Dean? I don.t think so.
Roswell military witness Frank Kaufmann sat me down one day a few years ago and explained to me about the fraternity and comradery that determines the rules of secrecy. He was speaking of the military, of course, but it would appear to hold in other realms of corporate society that venerates secrecy, itself, like a god. When you are entrusted with a great and important secret, Kaufmann said, it is assumed that it is a secret for life . or until you are TOLD that it is no longer a secret. If you don.t stick with the program, he said, then you are .screwed blue and tattooed.. He broke his oath of secrecy about Roswell after more than four decades, and he was hung out to dry. The press attacked him. He was called a liar. Even so-called .friends. in the UFO community assaulted his credibility. But his wife asserts that even today, in Frank.s old age, they get a phone call from the Pentagon every month or so to check up on what Frank is doing. As he explains it, he publicly called Uncle Sam a liar on UFOs, but he has held back the .smoking gun. physical evidence that would prove it. He stepped over the first line but won.t step over the second, for now. He.s still part of the Old Boys network. He may remain so until the day he dies. So will all the members of the Skull and Bones society that set former President Bush on the path to .being a man. when he was at Yale. And let.s not forget George .Dubbya,. who has Lord-knows-what in store for us.
So if you learn to be a bit more suspicious of inimical, unspoken secrets, then you will have more than benefited from the cost of the movie ticket to see THE SKULLS. But the Establishment will tell you you.re a numbskull for seeing it. It.s how things work, and nothing has changed. Some are in the Club and the rest are not. And those in the Club will wield it over the remainder of society, because secrecy is power, and power, not TRUTH, is their game. As Walter Cronkite used to say every night on the CBS evening news, "And that's the way it is."
Until next Friday, this is your AlienZoo Hollywood reporter, screwed blue and tattooed by a new understanding of the TRUTH after seeing THE SKULLS. Log on again next week for more FLYING SAUCERS OVER HOLLYWOOD! See ya then! And for gosh sake, remember, DON.T lose your secret key, and guard your RULEBOOK with your life!