#‘JON DID NOT KILL LYMAN’

[laffytale]

i shouldnt take it this seriously but it hurts so much when ppl say lyman was killed by jon 😭😭

[pinkish-cat]

WARNING: blood, a hint of cannibalism

The images themselves are not scary, they don't have much detail, but still.

I do not know where to start… Cruelty for the sake of cruelty? Guro for guro?

And it all started when I watched the video according to the FNF Gorefield "Captive".

That's when I got the idea of how a horror story would go if Jon became the main villain, went crazy after accidentally (right??..) killing a man and made lasagna out of him (yes, I admit that it sounds stupid lol)? I don't see creepy images with Jon very often, except maybe this fashion with Lyman in the basement. But on the other hand, he often comes across as an unfortunate victim-a hero who needs to somehow survive from the monstrous Garfields.

So… Did I change their roles? Now a crazy owner torments pets and forces them to eat lasagna with human meat.

I probably won't develop this topic further, much less popularize it, just maybe draw a couple more drawings and forget about it. My job is to show my thought. :D

And that was my attempt at horror, I think. And I understand that I didn't draw blood very well. And at the same time, I haven't done many drawings on this topic, but maybe another time.

[catofadifferentcolor]

Terrible Fic Idea #49: Robert's Rebellion, but make it gender swap

The thing I love about Robert's Rebellion is that its causes and motivations are far from clear. Was Lyanna kidnapped and raped? Did she go willingly with Rhaegar and chose to stay with him even after her disappearance led to war? Was Robert fighting for the woman he claimed to love or the Iron Throne? Every side has its own opinion, and that is just so viscerally real I can't help but love it.

So naturally I thought: what can I do to twist the narrative even further? Or: What if Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen were gender swapped?

Just imagine it:

In 281, King Aerys and Queen Rhaella have two living children: Rhaelle, 21 and heir apparent to The Iron Throne, and Visneya, 5.

For lack of viable Targaryen alternative, Rhaelle married the Dornish Prince Elias Martell two years previously, but it's far from a love match. They try, but active, outgoing, worldly - even mystical - Rhaelle has little in common with sickly, introverted, salt of the earth Elias. The more they try to make their marriage work, the more they rub each other the wrong way.

Then the tourney at Harrenhal occurs and Princess Rhaelle meets Lyman Stark, the third son of Lord Rickard, and it's love at first sight.

(She's also introduced to Robert Baratheon, who falls in love with her instantly, but the feeling is very much not returned.)

The first signs of trouble come when Lyman Stark wins the tourney and crowns Princess Rhaelle queen of love and beauty. It's not unheard of for unbetrothed knights to crown members of the royal family, but the way he does it sets the Dornish party on edge.

Rhaelle and Lyman begin corresponding after the tourney and, shortly after Rhaelle births her second child, she disappears from the Red Keep.

Robert's Rebellion hits all the same notes, but in a slightly different key.

Brandon Stark, rather than demanding the return of his sister, enters the Red Keep with his father to answer Aerys' summons. When neither profess to know the location of the crown princess, Aerys has both executed. It's this that sparks the rebellion, with Robert being the face of it not for the theft of his betrothed but for his proximity to the Iron Throne. (There should be a decided feeling that Robert would have tried for the throne if Rhaelle ever succeed her father.)

Elias dies at the Red Fork. Jaime kills the Mad King before he can blow up King's Landing. Princess Rhaenys and Prince Aegon are killed by Lannister knights. Robert takes the throne. Visneya and Daenerys are spirited off to Essos.

Throughout it all, there's no sign of Rhaelle or Lyman.

Ned eventually finds them both at the Tower of Joy, where he learns Lyman caught a fever and died shortly after learning of Brandon and Rickard's death. Rhaelle has been keeping his bones next to her bed a la Gustav II - and has recently given birth to a young son she's named Aenys.

When Rhaelle refuses to hand over Lyman's bones or return to the capitol, a struggle ensues. It should never be clear if Rhaelle went the Juliet I'd rather die without my beloved route or if Ned accidentally wounded her during the struggle.

Ned claims Aenys as his bastard son, renaming him Jon, and canon proceeds apace.

Very little should change in the lead-up to the books save that Rhaelle's actions are held up by men in power as just another reason women shouldn't be allowed to inherit. Dorne insists that the crown princess was kidnapped from her loving marriage with Prince Elias, the North insists that she went with Lyman willingly. Robert mourns in his cups over his lost love Rhaelle, who he would have treated so much better than Prince Elias, but still maintains the strongest bonds of brotherhood with Ned Stark, who he doesn't blame for Lyman's actions, saying he would have stolen Rhaelle away too if given half the chance. He also still wishes to murder her sisters hiding in Essos to secure his throne.

...and that's where the plot bunny runs out. What happens during the events of canon because of these changes is very much dealer's choice.

Bonuses include: 1) The rampant misogyny endemic to ASOIAF and the clear suggestion if you just treated women as human beings you wouldn't be in this position, but Rhaelle's decision to run away with Lyman not treated as a victory of feminism so much as an abdication of the responsibility she accepted when named crown princess; 2) Suggestions of Aerys' madness echoing in all members of the Targaryen family at various points throughout, but never explicitly seen in another until the Tower of Joy; and 3) Ned, remembering Rhaelle's final moments, always looking for signs of a similar madness in Jon and openly encouraging his desire to join the Night's Watch.

And that's all I have. As always, feel free to adopt this bun, just link back if you decide to do anything with it.

More Terrible Fic Ideas

[roadtogracelandx45]

Prompt List updated March 27th

I am starting with 70 for now, I may add or change them going forward. but for now these were the ones i had in my notebook. i got all of them off of Pinterest. Some already have names by them but go ahead and request them again if you like the prompt and I can redo them.

Fandoms I write for:

Top Gun Maverick: All

Elvis: Elvis

One Chicago: Kelly Severide, Jay Halstead, Will Halstead, Connor Rhodes, Adam Ruzek

Avengers: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Bucky Barnes, Natasha, Clint Barton, Peter Parker

Triple Frontier: Will Miller and Benny Miller

Four Brothers: Bobby Mercer, Jack Mercer

Sons of Anarchy: Jax Teller, Opie Winston, Juice Ortiz, David Hale,

Fast and Furious: Dom Toretto, Roman Peirce, Brian O'Conner, Letty Ortiz

Band of Brothers: Wild Bill, Babe, Malarkey, Nixon, Winters, Joe Toye

Twilight: All of the Cullens, Jacob Black and Bella Swan

Harry Potter: All

WWE/TNA/AEW/ ROH : Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Dean Ambrose, Stephanie McMahon, Triple H, Shawn Michaels, Chris Jericho, CM Punk, The Young Bucks, Adam Cole, Bobby Fish, Kyle O'Reilly, Roderick Strong, Chris Sabin, Alex Shelley, Randy Orton, Edge, Christian Cage, Matt Hardy, Jeff Hardy, Hurricane Helms. Mr. Kennedy

Supernatural- Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Cas

The West Wing: Josh Lyman, Sam Seaborn

Game of Thrones: Robb Stark, Jon Snow, and Sansa Stark

Lord of the Rings/ The Hobbit: Thorin, Fili, Kili, Bilbo, Legolas, Aragon.

Black Sails: Billy Bones, James Flint, Eleanor, Charles Vane, Anne Bonney, John Silver

Law and Order SVU: All

Hawaii Five-0: All

SWAT: All

Yellowstone: Kayce Dutton, Rip Wheeler, Beth Dutton, Jamie Dutton.

Crash- Kenny

Southland- John Cooper, Ben Sherman

Gotham- Jim Gordon

White Collar- Matthew Keller

The Mighty Ducks- All

The Outsiders- All

Masters of the Air- all

Newsies- Jack Kelly, Davey, Spot Colin, Mush, Kid Blink

*****

01 “Oh you think I am cute when I am angry? Well get ready because I am about to be gorgeous.”  

02. “I can’t lose you again. Can’t  you see that? I am not strong enough.” 

03. “Marry me’ 

04. “I’m not jealous.” 

05.  “Kiss my ass.” 

06.  “Were you ever gonna tell me?” 

07. “Excuse you?”

08.  “This is all your fault.” 

09. “It’s not fair.” 

10. “Game Over, you lose.” 

11.  “Is she always this obnoxious?” “Oh, she is just getting warmed up.” 

12. “We don’t need to control them. We need to unleash them.” 

13. “It should have never come to this.” 

14. “I’m not a lot of people’s favorite person.” 

15. “I shouldn’t have wasted 3 years on someone when Russia could have sent me a good bottle of vodka.” 

16.  “Can we have this conversation when you aren’t upset?” 

17. “Come over here and make me, why don’t ya?” 

18.  “I am tired of being your secret.” 

19. “Mess with them, you mess with me.” 

20. “I don’t want to sleep alone tonight.” 

21. “ I am coming to get you. Stay there.” 

22. “Are you safe?” “I, I don’t know.” 

23.  “This is why I don’t let myself fall in love.” 

24. “You are my regret.” 

25. “You have to make a choice.” 

26. “Put the knife down.” 

27. “Jokes on them.” 

28. “The way you flirt is shameless.” 

29. “With all due respect, I’m going to ignore everything you just said.” 

30. “It’s me! It’s me baby! Calm down.” 

31.  “Have you lost your damn mind?” 

32.  “Hey, I am here with you. Okay? Always.”

33. “Hold me back.” 

34.  “You aren’t a bad guy.” 

35. “You know we are meant to be.” 

36. “Mine.”

37. “Seriously, you are a manchild.”

38.  “I get it alright! I fucked up!” 

39. “She’s dead! I killed her!” 

40. “You smell nice.”

41.  “I think I am pregnant.”/ “I am pregnant, not helpless. Stop worrying so much.” 

42. “So what if I am jealous? Its not gonna change anything.” 

43. “You owe me.”

44. “Be careful.” “I always am.” 

45. “Take my jacket, it's cold outside.” 

46. “I am not some toy  you can play with.” 

47. “Just play long. Please.’

48.  “I did something terrible.’ 

49. “Don’t hurt the hair on their head.’ 

50. “I got your back.” 

51. "I told you not to get too close to me."

52. "How long?' "Since the beginning."

53. "Touch her and you're dead."

54. "Baby, we are the law."

55. "Baby, don't make me spell it out. You know I want you."

56. "I will always choose you."

57. "What happened? I told you to stay by my side!"

58. "Don't you dare!"

59. "Well what can I say? I am a badass."

60. "Excuse me, I have to go and make a scene."

61. "Before this happens, I need you to know that I have always loved you." 1

62. "No panties, baby girl?" 1

63. "Well you are coming home with me whether you like it or not."

64. "That looks hard. Let's switch."

65. "Saddle up doll."

66. "Like what you see?"

67. "Don't pretend to be innocent."

68. "You're mine. And I don't share."

69. "Welcome back, now fucking help me."

70. "Don't be an asshole, asshole."

[skyllion-uwu]

Did Jim Davis just kill Lyman himself

No but Jon did

[interplanetarycondiment]

It pisses me off so fucking bad when people try to say Garfield is scary or sad or stuff like that. No Jon did not kill Lyman. He left to become a wildlife photographer. No Garfield is not depressed. He just jokes about suicide too much. He's a normal cat who is FAT and ORANGE and he loves Jon and odie. Also fuck the pipe strip no one cares about the pipe strip

[nyan-ryder]

i thot i was crazy and the only one thinking jon and lyman would make a cute couple. i mean they basically are in the early comics theyre so domestic! jon cooking for lyman when he comes back from work and them going to tennis together 🥺

Yeeeaasss!! I thought I was alone on this train too!

I’m kind of sad they ended up writing Lyman out of the comics, they were so cute together???

Just look at ‘em! The perfect little family

[wigmonster]

i love hardcore unironic garfield fans because they get really mad over the "theory" that jon killed lyman. it isn't a theory jon canonically did

[eatsteas]

i wish there was more wholesome garfield content out there. garfield is not an eldritch beast jon did not kill lyman they're just a funnie cat and his loser owner

[monkeyparasite]

Also I’m glad you agree with me

JON FUCKING ARBUCKLE KILLED LYMAN

HE DID!!! HES A COLD BLOODED MURDER AND HES TACKY AND GAY

[raeloganthesonic06fangirl]

So, I just found out thanks to @violetvenom that my revealing of that "What Jon did to Lyman" thing made it to a website??

Ooooooooh, man, of all the things for me to get recognized for, it always seems to be Garfield related (remember when I uploaded all of the "Garfield: Am I Cool, or What?" jazz CD directly ripped from my copy to YouTube, and suddenly I got a metric crudton of YouTube traffic on those days, only to find out a few websites, such as Cracked, linked to my uploads as they were the only uploads of those tracks anywhere?). 😂

I'll be honest, I'm still relatively surprised at the fact that people didn't know that tidbit, but I guess because I've been into Garfield for a majority of my life, I wasn't aware of how surprising that was. XD

[fandom-will-be-my-fall]

Person: What's wrong

Me: Nothing m8, am fine

Me, internally: How come I've never noticed that Jon Arbuckle was a horrible person all along? I have been fooled by society and the goodhearted comics that tend to make him seem like a pure being. I was blind to the truth all this time, but now I understand. @ihatejonarbuckle has opened my eyes. Not only is Jon an animal abuser, hitting and insulting Garfield (and occassionally Odie) several times in the comic strips, but he also captured and possibly killed his old roommate, Lyman just so he could have his dog, what kind of sick beast would do that?! It is implied that he is a master manipulator, which explains why his pets have not truly rebelled against him or ran away yet: they believe that everything's fine and Jon is a nice person. His violent behavior might have caused Garfield's cruelness too, hence he thinks violence is fine and does mean things to his owner, Odie and the neighbors. Although he can't really be accused for his actions, since he is a cat with little moral sense, but Jon can, because you mustn't abuse your pets no matter what. He does not take good care of them, either. He gives Garfield inappropriate food that is bad for cats' health (so is coffee but that's just the tip of the iceberg), then randomly puts him on a diet. OF VEGETABLES. Cats are carnivores, god damnit. If he was a good owner his cat wouldn't have become fat in the first place, yet he shames Garfield for that too. Because everything's his fault, isn't it? He's just a cat, he shouldn't be blamed for Jon's mistakes. If he can't take care of pets, why have them? Maybe simply for his own ill amusement, to watch them suffer. And if this wasn't enough to convince you of Jon's horribility, he is a sexist pig who looks down on women and keeps harrassing them even if they repeatedly say "no". He's a stalker, a catcaller, and just a creep in general. He has traumatized many females with his behavoir, too (like the lady that screams when they meet on the street in one of the comic strips), only God knows what he has done to them..  How the hell did he get a girlfriend, anyway? I bet he manipulated Liz into dating him, or she's only doing it to save Garfield and Odie from this evil man. He is an evil entity and must be stopped. I'm not blaming Jim Davis for creating him, I respect the guy a lot, but the fact that he modeled this character after himself is concerning.

[onionjulius]

House Tully things

I’ve always been confused about how fandom commonly discusses House Tully, so here’s a post about it. It’s not the best post, but it could be worse.

So regarding Hoster’s favoritism—clearly Catelyn is his favorite, due to her dutiful nature. But people often also assume that Lysa was the second banana throughout her childhood, the eternal Jan Brady to Catelyn’s Marcia, and I don’t see much evidence in that way. All the envy we see from Lysa regards either Petyr Baelish’s affections or the effects of her forced abortion. The development of her resentment throughout her estranged adulthood is easily imagined, but as for her childhood at Riverrun, note first that Hoster wanted to contract for her a marriage equal if not superior to Catelyn’s, and second that anything construable as special treatment towards Catelyn seems to come from her being the heir presumptive (Lysa, who isn’t shy about airing her grievances, never indicates that she wished she were Hoster’s heir). Lysa would easily be aware of her father’s favoritism, but it’s hard to read her fate as an indictment of it, rather than as an indictment of the commodification of her body for dynastic politics. (More on her forced abortion shortly.)

Edmure is a better example of the bad effects of Hoster’s favoritism, insofar as he possibly never managed to please Hoster as well as Catelyn. Still, as of AGOT she hadn’t lived at home for 15 years. And even were he an only child, might he have still failed to fulfill the hypermasculine ideal that underpins his low moments? Might he have still been captured in a siege, strategically blundered inn a battle, failed his part in Hoster’s mythic Viking warrior funeral? He believes he would be loved better or more if he fulfilled his expectations better, and quite possibly, observing Cat helped create that suggestion. But did this sense of inferiority majorly motivate his decisions, or did they “merely” lend them emotional color?

As for Cat, her own favoritism of her kids could be discussed but I’d rather move on to this idea of the selfishness of her motherhood. I’ve often seen people claim that she only cares about her own family, but this would not then explain the horror she expresses at the death of Lyman Darry, or wanting to bury the dead men in the Vale mountains, or praying for peace and solace for those affected by battle, or interceding on Brienne’s behalf mid-attack for no reason other than her innocence. It would be less extreme (and therefore more responsible) to claim not that she only cares for members of her own family and none other, but that she does not care for the child of her husband with another woman conceived out of wedlock. I’m not sure why the two are so consistently conflated when, clearly, her lack of care for Jon does not logically entail that her care is limited to only Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran and Rickon, nor does one situation constitute a pattern.

This is not to say that selfishness makes up zero percent of Catelyn’s psychological makeup. It is to say that her level of selfishness is thoroughly common. Consider Rickard Karstark, who would kill Jaime Lannister to avenge his dead sons, House Tyrell, who would poison and backstab to get Margaery on the throne, Doran Martell whose ambitions for his children drove his own wife away, Lyanna Stark whose deathbed wish was likely for Ned to protect her son though it meant treason. It is a rare person who would not privilege their own children’s safety above others’, but Catelyn’s maternalism specifically is pathologized to an almost singular extent in fandom discussion.

And I feel that way about House Tully in general. To return to Lysa’s forced abortion, it is indeed a consequence of Hoster trying to do his duty as a father by securing the future of his family in the most honorable way he could think of. And it is indeed deeply regrettable, as the character himself regrets it literally to his last breath. At the same time, I would love to hear the argument that certainly, say, Rickard Stark would have done any differently in the same situation, given his comparable ambitions for his family and his conceivable understanding of what constitutes their well-being. (Incidentally, in addition to easily dislikable characters such as Tywin Lannister and Randyll Tarly, Rickard Stark himself raised a son with a sense of inferiority in none other than good old Ned.)

The downfall of “Family, Duty, Honor” is an intentional through-line in the Tully characters’ story, and it carries clear elements of indictment, but it is a thematic association helped along by circumstance. If Catelyn’s biggest mistakes are all related to her motherhood, it is because GRRM has chosen her to tell a story about a mother’s destruction, not because the potential for destruction is more endemic or unique to her motherhood than to anyone else’s anythinghood. In my view, through House Tully Martin exploits bedrock values that are widespread across his world. Whereas the Lannisters are grandiosely flawed and the Starks are deftly romanticized—the better to tell the particular stories he wants to tell there—the Tullys are thoroughly typical, making them the perfect vehicle for showing that the center could not hold.

[themastercylinder]

  SUMMARY

In the film’s prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. In the lab is an egg-like container which is keeping an alien creature alive. The creature emerges and kills the researchers. Two months later, the geologists’ spaceship crashes into the space station Concorde in orbit around Earth’s moon, its pilot having died in his seat.

CREATURE, 1985

NTI dispatches a new ship, the Shenandoah, to Titan. Its crew, consisting of Captain Mike Davison (Stan Ivar), Susan Delambre (Marie Laurin), Jon Fennel (Robert Jaffe), Dr. Wendy H. Oliver (Annette McCarthy), David Perkins (Lyman Ward) and Beth Sladen (Wendy Schaal), is accompanied by the taciturn security officer Melanie Bryce (Diane Salinger). While in orbit, the crew locate a signal coming from the moon—the distress call of a ship from the rival German multinational Richter Dynamics. Their own landing turns disastrous when the ground collapses beneath their landing site, dropping the ship into a cavern and wrecking it. When radio communication fails, a search party is sent out to contact the Germans.

In the German ship, they find one of the containers from the prologue breached, as well as the dead bodies of the crew. The creature appears and kills Delambre when she lags behind the escaping group. Fennel enters a state of shock at the sight and Bryce sedates him. When they return to their own ship, the Americans find that one of the Germans, Hans Rudy Hofner (Klaus Kinski), has snuck aboard. He tells them how his crew was slain by the creature, which was buried with other organisms as part of a galactic menagerie. He proposes returning to his ship to get explosives, but the crew are unwilling to risk it.

It becomes apparent that the creature’s undead victims are controlled by the creature through parasites. Unsupervised in the medbay, Fennel sees the undead Delambre through a porthole and follows her outside. She strips naked, and he stands transfixed while she removes his helmet. He asphyxiates, and then she attaches an alien parasite to his head. Now under alien control, Fennel sends a transmission to his crew mates, inviting them over to the German ship. Hofner and Bryce are sent to get some air tanks for the Shenandoah and stand guard over it, while the rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship.

Hofner and Bryce stop over at the menagerie on their way, and are attacked by Delambre, who has had a parasite attached earlier. The rest of the crew go over to the Richter ship, and find Fennel with a bandage on his head to conceal his parasite. Davison insists that medical officer Oliver examine his head, so Fennel has her accompany him to the engineering quarters to feed her to the creature. Davison and Perkins notice Fennel doesn’t sweat and go check on them. They are too late to rescue Oliver, who is decapitated by the creature, but Perkins blows up Fennel’s head with his pistol.

Soon afterwards, Sladen runs into an infected Hofner. She escapes the ship, and in her haste, only puts on her helmet after exiting. Perkins spots her outside and opens the airlock. Now unconscious, Sladen is carried in by Hofner to lure the others. They fight, and Davison manages to defeat Hofner by ripping off his parasite. The three survivors formulate a plan to electrocute the creature with the ship’s fusion modules, which can only be accessed by going through the engineering quarters.

Alarms suddenly sound as a creature makes its way through the ship, committing sabotage. Sladen and Davison go through engineering to construct an electrocution trap, while Perkins goes to the computer room to monitor the creature. Sladen finishes rigging the trap just in time for the creature’s arrival, and they apparently electrocute it to death. However, when Davison leaves, it captures Sladen.

CREATURE, Robert Jaffe, Klaus Kinski, 1985

Davison and Perkins follow her screaming and find her locked inside engineering. Studying the ship’s blueprints, they find another entrance to engineering and sends Perkins to lure away the creature while Davison retrieves Sladen. On the way, Perkins locates one of the bombs Hofner had mentioned, just before the creature jumps him. Dying, Perkins manages to attach the bomb to the creature and set off the countdown so Davison can jettison it through the airlock.

It climbs back aboard, however, so Davison tackles it, throwing himself out the airlock in the process. When the bomb fails to explode, Bryce appears and shoots it, which sets it off and kills the creature. She recovers Davison and dresses his wounds, then they reunite with Sladen and finally launch the ship.

  Director William Malone

BEHIND THE SCENES/ PRODUCTION

Even though in space, nobody can hear you scream Bill Malone still wants you to try. The 37 year old director of SCARED TO DEATH is getting ready to try and scare audiences again with his second feature, THE TITAN FIND. The $4.2 million production is set to open this spring, and Malone is cautiously optimistic about its chances.

The film is set in the near future, when the commercialization of space is well under way. On the surface of Titan, a research ship has discovered the remains of an ancient alien laboratory and its collection of specimens. One specimen, however, turns out to be much livelier than originally thought, and kills all but one of the crew. The survivor lives long enough to make it back to Earth, setting off a race between two competing multinational firms for whatever is there, both unaware of just how deadly the alien is.

Despite its small budget, the film boasts good production values, with set design by Robert Skotak and effects by the L.A. Effects Group, and stars international weirdo Klaus Kinski as a German space commander.

Malone, a baby-faced man who resembles DREAMSCAPE’s villain David Patrick Kelley, explained the roundabout way THE TITAN FIND got off the ground. “After I did SCARED TO DEATH, I was trying to get another project going.” said Malone. “One of the people my producer Bill Dunn and I went to see said they’d really like to make a picture like SCARED TO DEATH. They signed us up to do one of our projects, MURDER IN THE 21ST CENTURY, a detective story. After we did the screenplay, they didn’t think it had enough exploitation value. ‘What else do you have,’ they asked, and can you have it to us by tomorrow morning?’ This was in January, 1984.

“On that short a notice, all I could do was go through my files and see what I had kicking around. I found a two page story synopsis of THE TITAN FIND which I had written six or seven years earlier, and I took that in to them. It was basically just the beginning of the picture as it is now. I read it to them with some background tapes of classical music and they loved it. I said to myself, ‘Great…, now how do I make a film out of this?”

Not only was how a problem, but where as well. With a tight budget and little lead time given the company, it would have been nearly impossible to get studio space to shoot the film. The production’s answer was to create its own studio, setting up shop in an abandoned industrial plant in Burbank. The small warehouse became a tight maze of different bits of spaceship interiors and planet exteriors, with Malone’s crew shooting on one set, while another was torn down behind them and another built just ahead of them. Filming began June 25th.

Construction of the bridge of the NTI spaceship ‘Shenandoah

“We’ve been on it now for 8′ weeks, and I’m tired,” said Malone. “This has been a particularly tough picture because everything’s got smoke and dust and lava rock, which not only creates a lot of noise when you step on it, but makes this gritty dust and gets into everything. We’re forever wearing filter masks. Initially it sounded like a good idea doing everything in one location where you wouldn’t have to be moving people around, but after a while, all you want to do is go outside and see some sun.”

Malone is taking a lot of liberties with the Titan setting. “Well, I figure it will be a long time before anybody gets there to find out what it is actually like,” he said. “Everything’s got this sort of Dante’s Inferno look to it. There are these tremendous lightning storms going on all the time. The picture almost winds up looking like gothic horror. In fact, when we designed the miniatures, that was the instruction, make them look like Dracula’s castle. From the dailies, someone said they thought it looked like a Mario Bava picture, which I take as a compliment.”

To get the most out of the sets and special effects, Malone decided to shoot in widescreen Panavision. “A space picture practically demands that kind of format,” said Malone. “I had to do some fast talking because most of the people involved didn’t want to go anamorphic. Initially it’s a pain in the ass to deal with the Panavision company. If you’re not a major company, they tend to want all their money up front, and that’s very hard to deal with, but once we had set the deal with them, they were easier to get along with. Using Panavision really paid off in the long run, because it gives the picture a bigger look. With Panavision, you gain about 40 percent in image area, and it tremendously improves the image and clarity. This is only my first Panavision picture, but after working with it, you get kind of spoiled.”

Robert Skotak on the set of the Richter Dynamics spaceship from ‘Titan Find

One group that found it a little harder to work up enthusiasm for the widescreen format were the people involved in physically producing the special effects for the film, the year old L.A. Effects Group headed by Larry Benson. The company includes Alan Markowitz, director of animation and optical effects, and Corman effects graduates Robert and Dennis Skotak. Robert serves as director of visual effects while brother Dennis is director of photography.

“The single biggest problem we had was the anamorphic format,” said Dennis Skotak. “Bill Malone likes widescreen, and I like widescreen, but for a limited budget, it’s a problem. It’s real hard to force depth of-field because you have to have a great deal of light to close the camera aperture down.

“Because the budget was so low on this picture, we had a limit on how much time could be spent building the models. The ships are not large enough for a lot of the things that are necessary. One of the producers wanted a shot of the Shenandoah much closer than what we had planned it to be. I had to pull out the bag of tricks to get it done. We had to have the ship so close to the camera that it was grazing the film magazine.”

“I storyboarded the film, designed all of the miniatures (except for the American ship, The Shenandoah, which Bill Malone designed himself), and worked closely with Bill on the planning and staging of each shot,” Skotak explains. “He pretty much left me with a free hand to design the look and layout of each scene. His input was heavily along the lines of what the mood and coloration of something should be, the things that were important to convey a building feeling of suspense. For example, when the ships are approaching Titan, they’re not zooming by. They’re moving very slowly, almost serenely. Then as they enter Titan’s atmosphere, there is all of this lightning going on around them and huge dust storms everywhere. “In the same way, we wanted the interior of the Richter Dynamics ship, where a lot of the action takes place, to look very German Gray, functional, much like a battleship. We wanted it to look like a weird place without getting ludicrous. I made it a little expressionistic, gave it buttresses and bulkheads to shoot from behind. There is also a geographic quality to the bridge; the area is broken up into planes by several different shapes.”

An Early Concept

Robert Skotak’s Creature Design

Skotak also designed the look of the alien, which Malone finally approved after choosing elements from dozens of different sketches that Bob drew. Mike McCracken and Don Pennington were among several people who contributed molds and mechanics to the snakish suit, but it was Doug Beswick, who was called upon, under a heavy deadline, to pull the whole suit together.

“I was real skeptical about it being finished on time,” Beswick recalls. “Bill could only push the shooting schedule back 13 days. The neck and jaw had to be rebuilt to give the creature a larger bite radius, the fingers had to be extended and given long claws, legs and arms had to be built, we had to get a truly vicious look into the face.

This is the small scale maquette, which estabilished the look for the Monster — which would have only minor modifications. It was built by Michael McCracken’s team.

“We would have liked to have done more, but it was a very limited schedule. Considering that, I’m very happy with the way the thing turned out. I haven’t seen many dailies, but what I’ve seen looks good. They are shooting it right, taking their time to light it correctly. I hesitated at first to take on this job, because of the time limit, but I was able to do it and I’ve learned quite a lot, so now I’m glad that I took it on.”

Beswick also built a mock up version and a one-third scale gelatin replica of the rubber suit, both of which will be used in surprise special effect scenes. But monsters from other planets aren’t all you’ll be cringing at. Besides your basic assortment of gouged necks, chewed limbs and decapitated skulls, Titan Find will grace screens with the spectacle of ripped faces, exploding heads and flying cow bellies.

Special effects makeup was originally designed by Bruce Zahlava, who left the production due to creative differences halfway through the shooting. Jill Rockow, a makeup veteran of The Howling, Frightmare, Deadly Eyes, Conan the Destroyer and Friday the 13th-The Final Chapter, among numerous others, is responsible for the daily applications. One of her primary tasks was to destroy parasite victims Robert Jaffe and Klaus Kinski from the inside out.

“Robert Jaffe has the most makeup of anybody.” Rockow explains. “He attacks people and spits blood at them. His face deteriorates and pulls off. In fact, it’s my hand that rips his face off! The actress he’s fighting with in the scene had to go home, and the actual ripping was done with a fake head. I just reached into the frame and pulled off a section of it to expose the underneath, which was a duplicate of the makeup Robert had on.

Jill Rockow Applies Prosthetics

“His face peels off more later on, to reveal this whole bloody and slimy underface. Eventually, his head explodes completely. That was done with another fake head and pyrotechnics. The head was filled with cow bellies, cow brains; it was a real party there. It was made out of gelatin and we planted pieces of primacord inside it. Primacord’s an explosive that is so powerful that a piece of it wrapped around your neck will shoot your head right off. It cuts things off clean. People who do blasts for oil wells use it.

“Robert Jaffe really gets destroyed in this. He’s a producer as well as actor; he produced Motel Hell and Demon Seed. He was wonderful to work with, very cooperative. We went through five hours of makeup application every day and two hours of taking it off. He never moaned once.”

Three overlapping appliances are used to create Klaus Kinski’s makeup. The chin goes on first, then the nose, and the forehead and cheek pieces last. As his character starts to deteriorate, plugs on his cheeks and chin are pulled out to uncover the monstrous mutation going on underneath. Rockow and her crew, which included Jerry Quist and Paul Rinehard, have their work cut out for them with these designs; because of the limited budget (estimated at $4 million), Kinski does not appear in all of his scenes, and two doubles, neither of whom resemble the Polish actor, or each other for that matter, have to stand in for him in a number of action scenes. Luckily, Rockow’s foam rubber appliances cover the entire face, so the differences in actors is impossible to detect.

“The alien itself and all the parasites were covered in K-Y,” Rockow explains, “and everyone’s face was K-Y’d too. We tinted it a yellowish-brown for all of the decomposing human stuff. The neat thing about K-Y is that it dries about an hour or so after you apply it, to a point where it’s not slippery. A lot of makeup people use Methocel for creating slime, but that dries hard and you’ve got to peel it off before you can put a new batch on. This stuff just keeps dripping until it dries.

“About the gore, I tend to sort of pull back in that area,” says Malone. “There are some dramatic scenes that have some gore in them, but I think that if you do it all the way through, then it loses its punch. My basic approach is that I really like suspense more than gore, but the problem is that you have to remember that we also have to try and sell the movie overseas. There are countries that won’t buy your picture without a certain amount of gore in it. Look at the Italian zombie movies, and Japanese kid shows, they have people getting hacked to pieces and arrows that go through eyes … that sort of stuff, so you have to have some pretty heavyweight material in your picture for them to be interested in it.”

Regarding Klaus Kinski

Surprises and difficulties were in store for the live action crew as well. No sooner had Malone worked out the story line for the film and started work on the script when his backers threw him a curve. To help give the film a stronger selling point, his investors had gotten a “name” actor, Klaus Kinski. The problem was that they only had Kinski for a week, and there wasn’t a part in the film that would suit him.

“Previously, we had clues in the original story as to what happened in the German ship, and the audience was supposed to draw its own conclusions,” Malone said. “But once we had Klaus, it seemed the best thing to do was make him the commander of the German ship and work from there. I think he enjoyed working on the film, but it was very hard to tell. He’s got an unusual personality. He worked with me on his part in the script, and actually, I think he would make a very good story editor. He was very helpful with suggestions and with working with the other actors.

I think it helped everyone else too because they really seemed to be working harder because they were working with him.

“Klaus was crazier off camera than the part I wrote for him, and I wrote him as a total looney. The first day of shooting he shows up, and the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I raped my 12-year-old daughter, you know.’ I thought, oh great, this is going to be fun. “Halfway through the first day of shooting, the crew came up to me en masse and said, ‘Billy, we want you to know we’re all going to take Klaus out back and beat the shit out of him.’ I said, ‘Look guys, you have to wait until the end of the week, and then you can do everything you want.’ He was a madman, really, but I will say this, when he’s on screen, he just lights up the screen. He’s definitely one of the best things in the picture. He really added a lot to it. When we write a script, a lot of times the actors don’t give you what you heard in your head. Klaus was one of the few people who gave me exactly what I was writing, the intonation and delivery that I heard for this stuff.”

A running gag on the set occurred after Kinski tried to make a pass at the female makeup artist who was applying his makeup by sticking his knee between her legs and telling her, “That is not my knee, that is my cock.” From then on, whenever anyone on the set bumped into someone else, it became de rigueur to say, “That is not my knee, that is my cock,” regardless of the circumstances.

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ALIEN rip off?

 “You have to understand that this movie has turned out to be a lot bigger picture than we set out to make. We started out small, but after the second week of shooting, the investors looked at the footage and said they loved it and wanted us to make it bigger and better, so they kept throwing money at us, which is really a filmmaker’s dream. We’re using a Dolby stereo soundtrack, which isn’t something we were originally designed for. When we put together a rough cut of the movie, we decided it would add a lot to the film, even though it was going to cost another $80,000.”

Aside from the technical aspects of the film, Malone knows he’s going to run into objections about the film: is it an ALIEN rip off?

“I don’t know what to say about the ALIEN question,” Malone continued. “I guess it depends on whether you consider ALIEN an original story. I don’t look at that many films as real originals. I know ALIEN had elements of several films in it that I could name, but beyond that, most genre films are pretty derivative. I think that THE TITAN FIND has got some unusual and interesting things in it. Certainly the film is going to be compared to other films, but I don’t think you can help that. I actually think there’s a lot more of 1950’s science fiction in it than anything else, and that it resembles ALIEN because Dan O’Bannon and myself were probably inspired by the same pictures. I like Spielberg’s JAWS also. I think it’s probably one of the best monster movies ever made; when I was writing Klaus Kinski’s part, I wanted to try and capture more of the feel of Robert Shaw’s part in that, than ALIEN.”

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Cast

Stan Ivar as Captain Mike Davison

Wendy Schaal as Beth Sladen

Lyman Ward as David Perkins

Robert Jaffe as Jon Fennel

Diane Salinger as Melanie Bryce

Annette McCarthy as Dr. Wendy H. Oliver

Marie Laurin as Susan Delambre

Klaus Kinski as Hans Rudy Hofner

  Directed by   William Malone

Produced by William G. Dunn

Screenplay by William Malone Alan Reed

  Produced by

Moshe Diamant       …       executive producer

William G. Dunn      …       producer (as William G. Dunn Jr.)

Ronnie Hadar          …       executive producer

William Malone        …       producer

Don Stern     …       associate producer

    Art Direction by Michael Novotny

  Stephen Glassman  …       scenic artist

  Special Effects by

Wayne Beauchamp …       pyrotechnician

Doug Beswick         …       creature coordinator / miniature construction

John Eggett  …       pyrotechnician

Michael McCracken …       creator: “Titan Find” creature

Gerald Quist …       special effects makeup assistant

Paul Rinehard         …       special effects makeup assistant

Jill Rockow    …       special effects makeup assistant

Robert Short …       weapons creator

Bruce Zahlava         …       special effects makeup supervisor

  Visual Effects by

Larry Benson          …       visual effects executive producer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Suzanne M. Benson          …       visual effects production associate: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Bob Burns     …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Caldwell        …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George D. Dodge    …       effects cinematographer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as George Dodge)

Judith Evans …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alec Gillis      …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Sanford Kennedy    …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

John Lambert          …       optical consultant: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Alan G. Markowitz   …       animation supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz) / director optical effects: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. (as Alan Markowitz)

Pat McClung …       special thanks: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jake Monroy …       mechanical engineer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Jay Roth       …       model maker: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Dennis Skotak         …       director of photography: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / stage supervisor: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Robert Skotak         …       special designer: The L.A. Effects Group Inc. / visual effects director: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Kathleen Spurney    …       effects technician: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

George Turner        …       effects animator: The L.A. Effects Group Inc.

Steve Benson         …       visual effects supervisor (uncredited)

    REFERENCES and SOURCES

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      Creature (1985) Retrospective SUMMARY In the film's prologue, two geological researchers for the American multinational corporation NTI encounter an ancient alien laboratory on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.

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8 Historic Cases That Show The FBI And CIA Were Out Of Control Long Before Russiagate Date: March 27, 2019Leave a comment share 0 0 0 0 Photo Credit To Sgt. Audrey Hayes By Jon Miltimore and Carey Wedler The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power—and make no mistake, that includes President Trump. Conservatives tend to have two bad habits. First, they’re prone to viewing the past through a nostalgic lens. Second, they tend to instinctively give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. These tendencies help explain why conservatives for decades have been able to overlook the many abuses—constitutional, legal, and moral—of US intelligence agencies. Unlike some more seasoned media, conservatives have appeared genuinely shocked by revelations of the Trump-Russia saga: abuse of FISA warrants, classified leaks from top FBI brass, corruption, campaign moles, and an apparent plot to remove an elected president through undemocratic (and likely extra-constitutional) means. These revelations are unique in that they have become highly public and involve a sitting president. However, an examination of the history of US intelligence agencies reveals government bureaucrats were out of control long before the 2016 presidential election. 1. That Time the CIA Considered Bombing Miami and Blaming It on Castro It’s no secret that the US government sought to assassinate Fidel Castro for years. Less well known, however, was that part of their regime-change plot included a plan to blow up Miami and sinking a boat-full of innocent Cubans. The plan, which was revealed in 2017 when the National Archives declassified 2,800 documents from the JFK era, was a collaborative effort that included the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and other federal agencies that sought to brainstorm strategies to topple Castro and sow unrest within Cuba. One of those plans included Operation Northwoods, submitted to the CIA by General Lyman Lemnitzer on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It summarized nine “pretexts” the CIA and US government could employ to justify military intervention in Cuba. One of the official CIA documents shows officials musing about staging a terror campaign (“real or simulated”) and blaming it on Cuban refugees. “We could develop a Cuban Communist terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” the Operation Mongoose document says. “The terror campaign could be pointed at Cubans refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated.) We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States… Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots. Ultimately, the broader Mongoose effort failed to remove Castro from power or effectively establish an infiltration within Cuba, though the CIA did engage in several sabotage operations. Mongoose was suspended and ultimately discontinued amid the Cuban Missile Crisis. 2. In 2014 the CIA Was Caught Red-Handed Spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee In the summer of 2014, the CIA’s inspector general concluded that the CIA had “improperly” spied on US Senate staffers who were researching the agency’s black history of torture. As the New York Times reported: “An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. And that’s not the worst part. The Times goes on to note that CIA officers didn’t just read the emails of the Senate investigators. They also sent “a criminal referral to the Justice Department based on false information.” John Brennan, CIA director from 2013-2017, insisted during Senate hearings these were “very limited inappropriate actions” and that “the actions of the CIA were reasonable.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) disagreed. “That’s not what the Inspector General [concluded],” Wyden said. “When you’re talking about spying on a committee responsible for overseeing your agency, in my view that undermines the very checks and balances that protect our democracy, and it’s unacceptable in a free society. And your compatriots in all your sister agencies agree with that.” Brennan, who publicly lied about the episode, was not punished and even retained his security clearance until Aug. 15, 2018. 3. The FBI’s “Suicide Letter” to MLK and His Wife Before he had a day named in his honor and a monument on the National Mall, the government viewed Martin Luther King Jr. very much as a threat. In fact, his message of peace, love, equality, and civil disobedience had the FBI so scared that agents actually sent King and his wife a package containing a strange letter and tape recording. It contained details of the civil rights activist’s sexual indiscretions and encouraged him to kill himself. In 1961, the FBI learned that Stanley Levison, a known “Red,” had become a close advisor to King. The following year, Bobby Kennedy approved wiretaps on Levison’s home and office, surveillance that would eventually expand. It turns out that J. Edgar Hoover stumbled on to MLK’s busy sex life while investigating King. “Hoover found out very little about any Communist subterfuge,” wrote Yale historian Beverly Gage in the New York Times in 2014, “but he did begin to learn about King’s extramarital sex life….” The FBI apparently had no scruples about using the information to try to bring King down. James Comey, Gage writes, used to keep a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk “as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong.” 4. The CIA Forced Prisoners to Participate in Mind Control Experiments in the 1950s If you’ve never heard of Project MKUltra, you might find it hard to believe. Also known as “the CIA Mind Control Program,” the effort was launched by the agency in 1953. The program used drug experiments on humans, oftentimes on prisoners who were tested against their will or in exchange for early release. The experiments were undertaken so CIA agents could better understand how to extract information from enemies during interrogations. Here is a description from the History Channel: “MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences. Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.” How was any of this legal? Well, it wasn’t, which is why the CIA understood it had to be concealed from the American public at all costs. “Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general,” wrote a CIA auditor. “The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.” 5. The FBI’s Systemic Forensic Fraud in Crime Labs In the early 1990s, Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, an attorney and chemist who worked at the FBI as a Supervisory Special Agent, noticed troubling practices in the in the bureau’s Investigation Laboratory. There were “alterations of reports, alterations of evidence, folks testifying outside their areas of expertise in courts of law,” said Whitehurst. “[Really] what was going on was human rights violations. We have a right to fair trials in this country… And that’s not what was going on at the FBI lab.” In 1994, he blew the whistle on the “systemic forensic fraud” he witnessed. Nothing happened. So he took his case to the Department of Justice. The FBI didn’t like that. Whitehurst was eventually chased out of the Bureau, but not before winning a $1.16 million settlement. Unfortunately, however, the wheels of justice turn slowly at the Bureau. “It wasn’t until ten years later that Whitehurst was finally vindicated,” notes the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund note, “when a scathing 500+ page study of the lab by the Justice Department Inspector General, Michael Bromwich, concluded major reforms were required in the lab.” But by then, an untold number of people had been convicted with the help of tainted evidence—evidence the DOJ knew was tainted. “In 2012 the Washington Post published an extensive review of the FBI and DOJ failures to properly review the cases impacted by the FBI lab scandal, based on Whitehurst’s research. As a result, the DOJ agreed to conduct yet another review of hair cases in collaboration with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). • 3,000 cases were identified by the government that had used microscopic hair analysis from FBI examiners. • 500 have been reviewed as of March 2015. • 268 included pro-prosecution testimony from FBI examiners. • 257 (96 percent) contained erroneous statements from “FBI experts”. At least 35 of these cases involved convicted criminals who received the death penalty, according to the National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund. 6. Operation Midnight Climax: Drugging Unsuspecting Johns and Filming their Interactions with Prostitutes In the 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA admitted to operating a “bawdy house” in a San Francisco apartment where “unsuspecting citizens were lured… for the CIA’s drug experiments,” according to a local news story report documented by the agency. “Private citizens were taken to the bordello by $100 prostitutes and drugged without their knowledge, usually with LSD,” the San Francisco Examiner reported in 1977 after the CIA admitted to the operation. Agents sat behind a two-way mirror and filmed the interactions between the drugged men and prostitutes. Then-CIA director Stansfield Turner suggested the operation was intended to understand how drugs could potentially be used against the American people, though he called the experiments “abhorrent” and acknowledged it was “inexplicable” that the CIA would do this without the subjects’ consent. He insisted the agency had ceased the experiments 12 years prior. In a 1977 Senate testimony, CIA agents said the purpose of the experiments was to “learn about thought control and sexual behavior,” the Examinernoted. 7. The FBI Has Routinely Staged Acts of Terrorism In the wake of 9/11, the FBI has, on numerous occasions, targeted unstable and mentally ill individuals, sending informants to bait them into committing terror attacks. Before these individuals can actually carry out the attack, however, the Bureau intervenes, presenting the foiled plot to the public as a successfully thwarted attack. In 2011, journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized several examples of this deceitful tactic: [T]he FBI subjected 19-year-old Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud to months of encouragement, support and money and convinced him to detonate a bomb at a crowded Christmas event in Portland, Oregon, only to arrest him at the last moment and then issue a Press Release boasting of its success. In late 2009, the FBI persuaded and enabled Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year old Jordanian citizen, to place a fake bomb at a Dallas skyscraper and separately convinced Farooque Ahmed, a 34-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, to bomb the Washington Metro. 8. The CIA’s Media Manipulation Campaigns From the agency’s earliest days, it has attempted to control the flow of information to the public. In his book Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner documented how much influence the agency’s first civilian director, Allen Dulles, had among major media companies: “Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo. Weiner noted, “It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information.” During his time at the agency, Dulles “built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.” In 1977, Carl Bernstein further exposed the CIA’s efforts to influence news organization in an article for Rolling Stone in which he revealed that “more than 400 American journalists…in the past twenty?five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters.” The Lesson Amid the media and political establishment’s ongoing, frenzied coverage of Russia-gate, Americans are eager to pin guilt on the president have shown a willingness to trust the CIA and FBI without question despite numerous past and present reasons to be skeptical of their conclusions. Considering the CIA’s long history of intervening in other countries’ elections and governments, it is particularly ironic that their claims of Russia’s meddling in the US’ democracy are taken at face value. Nor is the corruption and deceit limited to the FBI and CIA. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to lawmakers and the public in 2013 when he claimed NSA did not collect any type of data on “millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” He was caught red-handed months later when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agency’s mass surveillance operations. The survival of liberty depends on skepticism of government power—and make no mistake, that includes President Trump. But in light of these federal agencies’ chronic tendency to engage in behavior wholly inconsistent with American values, the same distrust must be applied to the institutions that claim to shed light on abuses by unpopular leaders.