Cialdini's book is one of the best and most readable pieces of popular science writing ever. It's fascinating from start to finish, frequently hilarious, and pretty hard to summarize because there's so much cool stuff in it.
The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!
For the record The Manchurian Candidate was a book before it was a movie. I read the book once long ago but don't remember much about it. In contrast the imagery of the movie is very hard to forget.
I never read the book but apparently it was a favorite of JFK's and he was instrumental in getting the movie made. That explains how something so politically edgy could have come out of Hollywood in 1962—it had the President vouching for it.
Just a nit, but there was nothing special about Hollywood in 1962. Hollywood has always been a "cool kids" club, and JFK was right in the middle of it.
What we see over time is that various people are considered cool kids or not, and the cool kids all like one thing or another, but Hollywood in the 50s and 60s wasn't some kind of propaganda machine, although folks today make it out to be. It was just that's what all the cool kids were doing back then.
There was some really edgy stuff made in the 50s and 60s.
Yes. I thought Demme would do something interesting with it and was disappointed. The only thing I remember is Robyn Hitchcock's cameo as an arms dealer, and even that was bad.
The brainwashing scare from the Korean War is central to at least one classic movie, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). It was unavailable for 25 years, which rumor had it was because of its similarity to the JFK assassination (it's not that similar, really). If you like old thrillers and haven't seen it, see it—it's just great!