Page 30 - ARUBA TODAY

A30 PEOPLE & ARTS
Wednesday 25 april 2018

TV's 'Homeland' feels challenge of competing with real world

By DEB RIECHMANN tiple television dramas,
WASHINGTON (AP) — feeding a seemingly insa-
Members of the cast of tiable demand for all things
TV's "Homeland" call it "spy related to spying.
camp." It's when they travel With the number of intel-
to Washington to pick the ligence stories in the news,
brains of top U.S. intelli- there are an abundance of
gence officials. plot lines. WikiLeaks. Intelli-
And it's where Hollywood gence leaks. Insider threats.
meets real-world intelli- Cyber warfare. Black sites.
gence and both sides re- Russia accused of poison-
alize that not everything is ing ex-double agent Sergei
as it seems. The two worlds Skripal and his daughter
blur and it's hard to tell with a nerve agent.
where today's national se- "I don't think we can com-
curity and political events pete with the reality," said
stop and the fictional dra- Lesli Link Glatter, execu-
ma begins. tive producer and director
"I guess the challenge of of "Homeland," who meets
the show is that it is con- regularly with intelligence
stantly adapting to what's professionals. "I don't want
happening in real-time," to say it's fact-based. It's a
said actress Claire Danes, story."
who plays Carrie Mathi- She admitted the show
son, a former CIA opera- sometimes doesn't mirror
tive turned senior national In this Jan. 15, 2009, file photo, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden gestures during a news confer- reality. CIA operatives, for
security adviser who suffers ence at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. instance, operate abroad,
from a bipolar disorder. Associated Press not in the United States as
Danes and other mem- they have done on the
bers of the cast and crew sored by the Michael V. moderator. festo." show. The staff, however,
of "Homeland" appeared Hayden Center for Intelli- In the Showtime series, Patinkin said that during regularly confers with intel-
Monday night at the Na- gence, Policy and Interna- Russians manipulate the the video conference, the ligence pros.
tional Press Club to talk tional Security at George news. In real life, Moscow cast kept passing notes Laurence Pfeiffer, who had
about espionage in popu- Mason University. Its name- meddled in the presidential to each other under the a three-decade career in
lar culture. Several hun- sake, the former CIA direc- election. In the show, the table, urging one another intelligence and directs
dred people attended the tor and National Security president axes employees. to try to get Snowden to the Hayden Center, said
event, which was spon- Agency director, served as In real life, President Donald talk about something per- he watches the show with
Trump shuffles his Cabinet sonal. Patinkin said he looks his wife, who also worked in
and threatens to fire folks. to spy camp for informa- intelligence. "We say, 'Well,
Early in its seven-season tion about what makes in- that would never happen.'
run, the show portrayed a telligence officers human Or, 'Oh my god, we'd get
U.S. serviceman who was so he can replicate their shot if we did that.'"
held captive by al-Qaida, private soul-searching on At the International Spy Mu-
released and then turned camera. seum, Houghton said Hol-
against his country and "I'm looking for their heart- lywood has a responsibility
planned an attack on U.S. beat," he said. "How they to portray the spy world as
soil. Militant-inspired at- deal with terror in their own honestly as it can because
tacks have been carried lives. Who do they talk to few people get a look at
out in U.S. cities in recent when they are frightened?" the real one cloaked in se-
years. Spies in popular culture are crecy.
Actor Mandy Patinkin, who not new. British author Ru- "No one takes Bond serious-
plays Saul Berenson, a ca- dyard Kipling wrote one of ly, right? People realize that
reer official at the CIA who the first spy novels, "Kim," at the suave secret agent
becomes national security the turn of the 20th century, jumping out of a perfectly
adviser to the president, re- Vince Houghton, historian good airplane with a cock-
membered one spy camp at the International Spy Mu- tail in one hand and a stu-
where they had a video seum in Washington, said in pidly named blonde in the
conference with Edward an interview earlier Mon- other is not reality," he said.
Snowden, the former NSA day. A lot of fiction about Houghton spent two years
contractor who leaked espionage was written dur- writing a weekly column
documents revealing ex- ing World War I and even for The Wall Street Journal,
tensive government surveil- more was published during highlighting what in "Home-
lance. The experience was World War II and the Cold land" was authentic and
a letdown, Patinkin said. War. British agent James what probably would nev-
"We were all on pins and Bond has appeared in er have happened in the
needles," Patinkin said. "It published fiction since 1953 real world.
was the least interesting and on movie screens in "'Homeland' comes across
person who ever came more than two dozen films as being closer to reality
through the door. I'm all for since 1962. so people get really wrong
the truth. A lie is a cancer After the Sept. 11 attacks, ideas about the intelli-
to my soul. But that guy was the spy genre exploded gence world by watching
just proselytizing his mani- and today there are mul- shows like that," he said.q