Woulard is a former Navy SEAL who was the stunt co-ordinator for Olympus Has Fallen, a job he has previously done on numerous DOD productions including the Iron Man films, Black Hawk Down, Air Force One and Tears of the Sun. Though they are only mentioned briefly, the four men are identifiable as Darrell Connerton, Joe Bannon, Ricky Jones and Keith Woulard. As he explains in the following ‘making of’ featurettes, director of Olympus Has Fallen Antoine Fuqua had at least three such men, and one other who was working for the DOD, helping him on the film.
Who needs a storyline supervisor from the DOD when you’re not really bothering with a storyline?įurthermore, in these days of outsourcing propaganda production to Sony and Showtime, often it is someone who is currently working outside of the government who provides the necessary expertise. This may be due to the production’s heavy reliance on CGI and other video effects, and so they didn’t need to rent out military vehicles or need any script advice. However, the film definitely had at least three people fulfilling these roles and their absence from the credits is curious given that the film also had no overt sponsorship from the military. Making the case for Olympus Has Fallen is slightly more complex, because the credits both on IMDB and at the end of the film list no script consultant or technical adviser of any kind.
When White House Down premiered Klein was in attendance, as was his boss Mack McLarty, alongside John Podesta (another of Bill Clinton’s Chiefs of Staff and soon to be an advisor to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign), Bill Clinton’s Press Secretary Mike McCurry and the then head of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. More recently, Klein wrote a blog for the Washington Post explaining how The Interview ‘really does subvert North Korea’s regime’. I guess accuracy is important to filmmakers, right up until it isn’t and they abandon the real world for the sake of drama as in films like all the franchises Klein has worked on. This is exactly the kind of assistance the State Department provided to the makers of The Spy Who Loved Me.Īs this article from the New Yorker explains, Klein’s role in the production of White House Down was to ensure that the White House looked accurate before they spent two hours blowing it up. These days, his specialty is in helping filmmakers gain access to difficult locations – Giza in Egypt for Transformers, the Burj Khalifa for Mission: Impossible. I didn’t know anything about this business until being thrown into it.’ This is a man from the political world, who worked for the government and then joined the corporate state, and only after that did he get involved in films.
#Olympus has fallen and white house down movie
As he said of himself, ‘I was so not a movie guy. While Klein himself is not working for the government, he did work for the State Department during Bill Clinton’s presidency and aside from running McLarty’s media consultancy division he is also the head of their Middle East & North Africa practice. The President of the company Mack McLarty was Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton and is a member of the Council of the Americas. The credits also note that Klein works for McLarty Associates, a law firm that until 2008 was one half of Kissinger McLarty Associates. Josh Young is a journalist and author and White House Down is so far the only film he has consulted for, whereas Rob Yalden (who is not mentioned on the IMDB page) is a former Secret Service agent. The film’s own credits also list two technical consultants named Josh Young and Rob Yalden. The film’s page on IMDB also credits a ‘political advisor’ named Richard Klein, who has also worked on the Transformers, Bourne and Mission: Impossible film franchises, all of which have involved either the DOD or the CIA, or both. The case for White House Down is easier to make, because the film appears not on any of the Department of Defense’s film lists, but on a list of productions assisted by the Canadian Armed Forces. Just like when in 1998 the identikit asteroid disaster movies Armageddon and Deep Impact were both released, both White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen were state-assisted productions. I recently had the displeasure of watching Olympus Has Fallen, one of a pair of 2013 movies about a terrorist attack on the White House, and a lone hero fighting back like Bruce Willis in Die Hard.
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