Re-cutting humor targets the war

Dale Kutzera is a former staff writer on “Without a Trace” and co-creator, writer and producer of the onetime VH1 series “Strange Frequency.” During his down time, the film buff loves to “fan edit” movies on his computer.

“I kind of taught myself a lot about the new editing software that is out there these days by basically re-cutting existing films,” he says. “I did them for my own pleasure. I took the Clint Eastwood films ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ and ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and turned those into just ‘Flags of Iwo Jima.’ ”

It was his love for “fan editing” that led him to write and direct the antiwar spoof “Military Intelligence and You!,” which opens Friday at the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles for a one-week engagement. Kutzera will appear at the Friday and Saturday evening screenings to discuss his work.

The comedy uses footage from 1940s military training films produced by the First Motion Picture Unit, including Oscar nominee “Resisting Enemy Interrogation,” with Arthur Kennedy. Other clips feature William Holden and Ronald Reagan.

Kutzera combines these vintage films with new sequences shot in black and white and aged to match the training movies. Patrick Muldoon plays a ramrod major trying to find a hidden Nazi air base.

The film is actually a not so thinly veiled critique of the Iraq war. “Basically, leading up to the whole invasion of Iraq, I really felt the Bush administration was intentionally manipulating the country and using military intelligence to suit its own agenda,” he says. “I thought I could do some manipulating of my own. I could take some of these old films and have a look at America of today through the eyes of America during the 1940s.”

Kutzera adds, “I discovered looking at some of these old films . . . there was a lot of American patriotism in them but also a real genuine feeling that we were all in this together and we must sacrifice for the greater good. Compare that to today, [when] only the armed forces and their families are being asked to sacrifice and the rest of us are being told to go shopping.”

-- Susan King