BONUS PODCAST

How the Pentagon Changed the Plot of ‘Top Gun’

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Hickey explains how movies and TV affect everything from our biology to our beliefs and what happens when governments get involved.

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Did you know that Charlie Blackwood, Kelly McGillis’ character in Top Gun, was originally meant to be a Navy colleague of Tom Cruise’s Maverick? Or that the enemy in the film was supposed to be North Korea before producers agreed to a request from the Pentagon to leave the enemy country unnamed?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Hickey details the plot changes in his new book You Are What You Watch, which looks at how movies and TV affect everything from our biology to our beliefs.

With the Top Gun example he explains to The New Abnormal’s Andy Levy that the producers went to the Pentagon to ask if they could utilize things like aircraft and Navy bases at cost to ensure the film was cheaper to make.

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“When they pitched the Pentagon on this, the Pentagon was like, ‘We’re gonna look really good at the end of Top Gun.’ The Navy was very, very keen on how it made Navy pilots look. Now, they had some caveats and they were like, ‘Listen, we wanna make a few adjustments,’” Hickey said. “For instance, the Kelly McGillis character, the character who has a romantic entanglement with Tom Cruise, is not in the Navy. She’s a contractor… it had been (originally written as) a within-the-service relationship, but that’s a big no-no in the military.”

“Also, originally in the script the enemy was North Korea and then the North Korea desk at the Pentagon was like, ‘Hey, we would not like you to do North Korea. Might we suggest doing Libya or something?’’ Hickey says. “Then in pencil written on top of that memo, it’s like, ‘Hi, Libya desk here. We don’t wanna give Gaddafi any ideas so please just make it a country that has no name.’ So as a result, it becomes just ‘the enemy.’”

Hickey goes deeper into how horror movies affects the chemistry in our bodies and explores the link between violent movies and violent crime in You Are What You Watch, which comes out Tuesday.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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Mathew MurphyEditor

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