I had no idea about alot of this stuff!
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=pageone&article_no=1611&page=1<snip>
While Saunders’ book received many favorable reviews and most mentioned the CIA having a hand in the creation of Animal Farm, the information seemed trivial compared to more sensational revelations including the CIA financing the publication of several fine art books, and their using Nelson Rockefeller and the Museum of Modern Art in New York to present art exhibits of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and other abstract expressionists to counter the social realism being advanced by Moscow!
<snip>
The CIA’s Role in Producing Halas and Batchelor’s Animal Farm
By the late 1940s the CIA was spending our tax dollars creating culture as a secret weapon to combat Communism and to promote our way of life around the world. Their choice of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an animated film to produce almost makes sense. Almost, because the book’s ending shows both the pigs and humans joined together as corrupt and evil powers.
They probably bought the rights assuming that the ending could be changed to better serve their purposes.To use Animal Farm for their purpose, the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (they directed covert government operations) had two members of their Psychological Warfare Workshop staff obtain the screen rights to the novel. Howard Hunt, who became infamous as a member of the Watergate break-in team, is identified as head of the operation. His contact in Hollywood was Carleton Aesop, brother of writer Joseph Alsop, who was working undercover at Paramount. Working with Alsop was Finis Farr, a writer living in Los Angeles. It was Alsop and Farr who went to England to negotiate the rights to the property from Sonia Orwell. Mrs. Orwell probably knew Farr as she moved in literary and artistic circles as an assistant to the editor of Horizon magazine. This is well documented in The Girl From the Fiction Department by Hilary Spurling (Hamish Hamilton, 2002). Mrs. Orwell signed after Alsop and Farr agreed to arrange for her to meet her hero, Clark Gable. “As a measure of thanks” a CIA official named Joe Bryan made the arrangements for the meeting according to The Paper Trail, edited by Jon Elliston.
<snip>