5 Questions: Marine Helped Produce Movies

Working side by side with Hollywood producers to accurately portray Marines on film was a regular occurrence for one Camp Pendleton Marine.

Capt. Barry Edwards, now a spokesman for Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, worked in the Marine Corps Motion Picture and Television Liaison Office from 2008 to 2011.

He assisted in a long list of films and television shows and would travel — at the entertainment company's expense — for days and weeks at a time to work on set and write dialogue for the productions.

Camp Pendleton Patch talked to Edwards to learn more about his time working in Hollywood.

Patch: What are some of your tasks when you work on a film?
Capt. Edwards: Some of the tasks that the Los Angeles office may have can range from ensuring that any civilian background extras or civilian actors they may hire to perform the functions of a Marine on set. It might range from ensuring they have a proper haircut to ensuring they are wearing the uniform properly or their language is correct or something that the Marine Corps would use.
We had script rewrites, maybe they wanted to change a scene. Maybe they want to have something else in the scene that is Marine-esque. We would coordinate, sometime there on the spot, and it's nice to have a Blackberry so you can reach out to the rest of the Marine Corps while you're on set in White Sands New Mexico, for "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." It does come in handy.
And many times, the director or the producer is right there next to you and asks: "Is this something that the Marine Corps would say or use?"
You had to be on your toes, you had to have a little knowledge of everything — a jack of all trades, master of none, so if you didn't know the answer, you knew how to get an answer, quickly for them.

Patch: What was your favorite project?
Capt. Edwards: If I had to pick one movie, we gave courtesy support to "Avatar," where we created some dialogues for the actors, maybe changed up some dialogue, we created some dialogue for the background chatter you hear.
To actually work one-on-one with Jim Cameron was a moment I'll never forget, but I couldn't really narrow it down to one movie because working for Jon Favreau on "Iron Man 2" was quite an experience. He was a very polite courteous gentleman who had a lot of respect for the military. He actually became educated on what we did before he stepped on set.

Patch: Have you spotted any mistakes in movies you didn't work on?
Capt.  Edwards: One that stands out is "Max Payne." They were using a picture of a Marine where they were testing a futuristic drug or serum on a Marine. Instead of being a more proficient war time Marine he actually turned into a bad guy and they used his official photo and the official photo had the national colors and the Marine colors in the background with him in the desert digital camouflage pattern and they had Army chevrons on him upside down.
It's a little thing that maybe the common moviegoer doesn't recognize, however, Marine recognize the littlest of things in any movie.

Patch: You worked on Discovery Channel's "Surviving the Cut," which features training for elite forces including some Marines. How was that experience?
Capt. Edwards: Watching the students go through the rigors they have to endure to become a recon Marine or Scout Sniper is actually something that would make me sit back and reflect: "would you actually do this?"
I think that I could, in some aspects, but I could how some of the pain and agony would set into these guys while watching the show.

Patch: What was the most fulfilling part of the job?
Capt. Edwards: It means a lot to me when they adore the military and the fact that they want to encompass them in the show, they want to feature them or want to have them present as part of a "thank you for what you do."