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an outside contractor,” Bruckheimer told Brill’s Content magazine. The resulting movie was such an effectiverecruiting tool that the Navy set up booths in theater lobbies, to sign up enthusiastic recruits after they saw it.
    Q: What’s the potato’s closest edible relative?      A: The eggplant.
THE PENTAGON SEAL OF APPROVAL
    Here’s a look at a few films that have been through the Pentagon’s screening process:
    Independence Day (1996), starring Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum
    Story Line: Evil aliens try to destroy the world.
    Status: Cooperation denied. “The military appears impotent and/or inept,” one Pentagon official complained in a memo. “All advances in stopping aliens are the result of civilians.”
    G.I. Jane (1997), starring Demi Moore
    Story Line: A female Navy recruit tries out for the Navy SEALs.
    Status: Cooperation denied. The title was bad, for one thing, because “G.I.” is an Army term and there are no G.I.s in the Navy. The military also objected to a bathroom scene in which a male SEAL who shares a foxhole with Moore has difficulty urinating in front of her. As one naval commander put it, “the urination scene in the foxhole carries no benefit to the U.S. Navy.”
    Goldeneye (1995), starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond
    Story Line: Russian mobsters and military men are out to rule the world using the GoldenEye—a device that can cut off electricity in London to control world financial markets.
    Status: Cooperation approved. The military did, however, object to one character in early drafts of the script, a U.S. Navy admiral who betrays America by revealing state secrets. “We said, ‘Make him another Navy,’” the Pentagon’s Hollywood liaison, Philip Strub says. “They made him a French admiral. The Navy cooperated.”
    Forrest Gump (1994), starring Tom Hanks
    Story Line: The life story of a developmentally-disabled man named Forrest Gump, who spends part of the movie fighting in Vietnam.
    Status: Cooperation denied. The Army felt the film created a “generalized impression that the Army of the 1960s was staffed by the guileless, or soldiers of minimal intelligence,” as one memoput it, arguing that such a depiction is “neither accurate nor beneficial to the Army.” Separately, the Navy objected to the scene where Gump shows President Lyndon Johnson the battle scar on his buttock, complaining that “the ‘mooning’ of a president by a uniformed soldier is not acceptable cinematic license.”
    The Great Salt Lake is six times saltier than seawater.
    Windtalkers (2002), starring Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater
    Story Line: Based on true events, the film is about Navajo Indians who served as “code-talkers” during World War II. Their Navajo-based code so confused the Japanese military that they were never able to crack it. The top-secret code-talkers were so valuable that each was protected by a bodyguard who also had instructions to kill him rather than let him be captured by the Japanese.
    Status: Cooperation approved…but only after the producers agreed to tone down the “kill order.” The characters imply that there’s an order to kill, but they never get to say it because the military “would not let them say the words ‘order’ or ‘kill.’”
    Courage Under Fire (1997), starring Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan
    Story Line: A military investigator (Washington) tries to solve the mystery of how a helicopter pilot (Ryan) died in combat.
    Status: Cooperation denied. “There were no good soldiers except Denzel and [Meg],” says the Pentagon’s Strub. “The general was corrupt. The staff officer was a weenie.”
    Apocalypse Now (1979), starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen
    Story Line: An Army officer (Sheen) is sent to Vietnam to “terminate” a colonel who has gone insane (Brando).
    Status: