Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (40 page)

He was sitting at the desk in the back of talent where there was an Apple G4 with Final Cut Pro Editing installed on it. The Talent Dept used this system to cut together audition tapes that were done in LA at the Talent Office located in Celebrity Centre. Marie Bystrom, the Talent Chief, would put ads on Internet Casting sites, video the auditions and send them up to Gold where they would be submitted for final approval to the Director and then on to Dave if it was for an important video or film.

Darius took his headphones off as I walked in.

“Hey, man, what’s up?” Darius said.

“Oh, you know, same ol’ same ol’,” I answered, pawing through the tapes he had laying around the desk.

“What submission are you doing?” I asked him, seeing he had Mini DV tapes stacked everywhere.

“Some project for RTC,” Darius said.

“This many tapes?” I ask, motioning to the piles on the desk.

“Yeah, well first, we auditioned every single up and coming Scientology actress we could get our hands on in LA. We have seen all of those and now we are reviewing
any
Scientologist actresses whether they are working or not.”

“Wow, what qualifications do they need for the part?” I asked, thinking this seemed like the most bizarre casting submission I had heard of yet.

“Well that is just it,” Darius said, obviously frustrated with the entire thing, “We have no idea what it is for. It seems like it is for some kind of Tom Cruise movie but we don’t have any description or lines for them to read. We just ask them a bunch of questions about Tom and have them explain what they are doing in Scientology and where they are on the Bridge. That’s it. And a hundred girls later, here I am, still cutting these together.”

“How do you know if the girls you are sending up are right or wrong?” I asked.

“We don’t. The submissions just go up to RTC, and they don’t come back,” Darius said. “We just keep sending them up assuming that when they get one they like, we’ll get told to stop sending up new ones.”

“Wow, how did you get roped into this?” I asked.

“My dad. He is apparently going to New York to interview some other actresses as well,” Darius said.

“Wow, maybe it is for Mission Impossible 3,” I told Darius.

“I doubt it,” Darius said. “Some of these girls would not make it as background extras in MI:3, much less any speaking part.”

“Well, as much as I would love to sit here with you and cut footage of these girls together, I need to get those drives I lent you a few weeks ago,” I told him, looking around for my drives.

“I still need them for a bit longer,” Darius replied. “With so many of these girls auditioned, I have like 300 gigs worth of auditions on these drives that I don’t want to have to re-digitize.”

“Okay, well as soon as the plug gets pulled on your little project, bring the drives back over.” I tell him as I head out. “Have fun, dude!”

I went back over to Systems before securing for the night, grabbed a few things and headed home. It was around 1:00
 a.m.
and my wife had mentioned that she might be home early so I might even see her tonight if I was lucky.

My wife worked with Greg Wilhere in RTC, so I figured I could maybe find out what movie they were auditioning all these girls for. I knew she would know about it. There were only so many people up there and they all talked amongst each other about this sort of stuff.

When she got home a little while later I asked her. “Hey, what movie is Cine doing all those auditions for RTC on?”

“What auditions?” she answered.

“Oh come on, there is no way you could not know what I am talking about. Darius probably had at least fifty submissions up in RTC on this thing. You would have probably been buried by the envelopes sent up by him alone.” I told her.

“Oh,
that
project,” she answered.

“I knew you knew,” I said. “You so suck at lying.” I laughed.

“You have to promise not to tell anybody about this,” She told me, which is what anything she told me about what went on in RTC was prefaced with.

“Shelly told me that COB has been getting calls from Tom about getting him a girlfriend,” my wife continued, “since now he obviously can’t have a girlfriend who is not a Scientologist. COB told Shelly that he wanted her to sort this out and get him a girlfriend. So Greg has been going through all of these girls that Cine has been auditioning and trying to find one that Tom might like. They are trying to screen which ones might have potential baggage attached to them that could flap later on if Tom actually ends up going out with one of them. And of course COB has to like her as well.”

As we all know, Tom Cruise was married to Nicole Kidman for close to ten years. Well, Nicole was only a Scientologist very briefly, after which she wanted none of it. Next, he was with Penelope Cruz, and his attempts to convert her from her prior religious beliefs were unsuccessful. So this was building up a history of being a problem for Tom, and now Dave was going to solve it for him and find him the perfect Scientologist partner.

“So it has nothing to do with any movie? I knew it. I knew it. Oh my god, if Darius only knew. He has been slaving away over in Cine cutting these tapes and it is not even for a movie. What a scam,” I told her.

“Well, that’s between Greg and him. Greg’s the one that got him involved. I don’t even think they will end up using any of the girls on those tapes,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, Greg just got some brand new suits and is supposed to be flying off to New York to meet a few girls,” she said.

“Wow.” I was speechless.

“COB’s Celebrity Pimp Service. How may I help you?” I could hear the receptionist now.

(At the time I did not know which women got picked and which ones were auditioned by Tom himself, but since then I have heard of at least one woman who spent time with Tom but did not end up staying with him. I omitted her name out of respect for her. If there were others or not, I guess only Greg, Dave and Tom, and any other women “test driven” will know for sure.)

uditors Day’s 2004 had just been completed and the IAS event was next up to be produced at the Int Base. This IAS event was going to be huge. Dave Miscavige had finally decided that Tom Cruise would get a Freedom Medal at this event. This was a big deal as Tom Cruise had done more than any other celebrity Scientologist. Not only had he given more money, but he was just a bigger star than any other celebrities who were in Scientology.

Whenever someone was awarded an IAS Freedom Medal, they traditionally had a video produced that told their story and what they did to earn the medal. Every year, there were at least two or three winners and video teams would go out and shoot the videos and then these were edited, the music scored, recorded and mixed, etc.

Larry Jacobs, Video Team Director, was assigned to the Tom Cruise video. The idea was that we already knew the story of what Tom Cruise did and we were going to just video a bunch of people who knew Tom, interview them and cut those interviews together. Larry spent a few weeks doing interviews with every single celebrity Scientologist in LA.

The interviews were all cut together and it was a bunch of Scientologists talking about how much they loved Tom Cruise. It was a complete puff piece and when Dave Miscavige saw it, he hated it. We did not have a lot of time to make these videos and a few weeks had been wasted on this one so far. Back to the drawing board. Larry Jacobs was taken off the project and was surely going to get in big trouble for this.

The day after Larry was taken off the video, I was contacted by Security Gold. They brought me a laptop that they needed me to get working. I plugged the laptop in and turned it on. It worked fine. I told them that it was fine. They wanted me to get into it.

“It just needs to be logged into and you can get whatever you want,” I told them.

“We don’t know the password,” I was told.

“Well, whose is it? They will surely know the password.”

“It is Larry Jacob’s laptop and he is not available to ask,” the security guard answered.

“Well, I can’t help you then,” I said.

Larry had obviously blown and they were trying to get onto the laptop to find out any clues as to where he had gone.

With Larry Jacobs now blown and probably on his was to being declared or RPFed, anyone working on the video was on pins and needles.

The next batch of interviews done was of non-Scientologists who knew Tom. Everyone from Steven Spielberg to Will Smith was interviewed. Again the video was a complete wipe out. Now we had all of these people talking about how Tom Cruise was a really nice guy. Being a nice guy does not get you an IAS Freedom Medal award. Dave hated the new interviews and we were out of time. There were only a few weeks left until the event and a video had to be done.

No matter what anyone came up with, Dave hated it. In the end, Dave’s conclusion was that nobody at the Int Base really knew Tom Cruise or what he had done. None of us were hanging out with him in Telluride, Colorado. None of us were regularly going down to his house in Los Angeles. None of us were going to big time celebrity birthday parties with the likes of Oprah and Will Smith. None of us were going high-speed motorcycle riding or to the car races with Tom Cruise. None of us, except one David Miscavige. Dave and Tom were not only buddies, but they talked all the time. Dave would routinely name drop about who he had met with Tom the week before or about who he talked to at the latest movie premiere. Dave was showing us
Last Samurai
trailers that had not yet had music added to them. Dave and Tom might as well have had the same circle, they were that close.

Dave Miscavige ended up dictating the entire Tom Cruise video project. Dave’s idea was that no one could talk about Tom Cruise better than Tom Cruise himself. A list of questions was drawn up and Tom would be shot on video and, more than anything, Tom would say whatever he wanted to say and from the footage, a video would be cut together that would tell the story of Tom Cruise the Scientologist.

When the tapes came in, the footage was transcribed and all the transcripts were reviewed by Dave himself. He would cut up portions of the transcripts and piece these together to make a script. The music that Dave decided on was the
Mission Impossible II
movie theme. The video would start out with a VO and some graphics of Tom Cruise. Then we would use footage of a lot of other videos that had anything to do with Tom or anything he had ever done, Ground Zero in New York, CCHR, Interviews with Larry King, movie premieres, you name it, the footage had to be tracked down so it could be used in his video. Everything from supermarket magazines to newspaper articles was sent in from Tom’s PR people. We shot it all five different ways, pan across, zoom in, zoom out, static, you name it, we shot it and gave Dave Miscavige six ways from Sunday to edit it.

Dave sat in the video edit bay for over a week straight, day and night, tweaking every single frame of this video until it was perfect. This was going to be his baby. He worked out what was used and exactly how one shot transitioned to the next, what interview bits from Tom were used, everything. There was nothing about this video that was not seen by Dave Miscavige at least ten times.

The music had to be perfect; the shots used had to all be perfect. No stone was left unturned. Dave was not only making a video that would be about Tom Cruise, but Tom himself would have to be blown away when he saw it.

The funny part was that in the end when the video was done, it was as if Dave Miscavige had put on a Tom Cruise mask. The way Tom talked and acted was as if he were a clone of Dave Miscavige. People who know Dave well and don’t know Tom Cruise could tell you, in 2004 Tom Cruise started acting like Dave Miscavige. Now all Tom Cruise needed was to get an acting role as some foul-mouthed executive that beats his staff and he would be set.

Dave Miscavige thought he was the Tom Cruise of the Int Base. Dave once met Bill Clinton. When Dave was telling the story to some of us, someone commented, “You met the President of the United States?” Dave Miscavige answered, “No, he met me!” That was Dave Miscavige in a nutshell.

Dave made the entire Int Base watch his Tom Cruise video several times and told us that this was how a video got done and when someone really wanted to get a product, it could be done.

A special Freedom Medal of Valor was designed and made for this event. It was just like all the other freedom medals that had been given out over the years except it was a bit bigger and was encrusted with diamonds and instead of being gold plated it was white gold or platinum or some such thing.

When the event finally came around and everyone went off to UK where it was held, we all knew that Tom Cruise would be there. It was even leaked that Tom Cruise might be there so that more Scientologists would attend the event in a remote part of East Grinstead, England.

Oddly enough there was not that much concern for Tom Cruise at the actual live event other than making sure he had a seat in the front row. The event video cameramen were instructed to keep the cameras off Tom for the entire event while he was in the crowd. He was sitting next to a girl that he was going out with who was not EVER to be on camera during the event. Even so, she still ended up on camera when he got up from his seat to accept his medal and when he sat back down.

At the event that night Dave Miscavige did a whole intro to the Tom Cruise video, even saying that Tom Cruise was the most dedicated Scientologist he knew. When he said that, the Int Base staff knew that was the case because Dave had already told us that if he could, he would have made Tom Cruise the Inspector General RTC, the post second only to COB RTC in Scientology.

Dave Miscavige later said that his Tom Cruise video was one of the most important videos that had ever been produced. He had no idea how true that was.

It was late 2004.

I was now the A/V Systems Director Gold. My job was to design and install all the audio/visual systems for Scientology internationally. This consisted of everything from high definition film theaters to introductory video displays. In any single org location, there could be more than 30 different types of systems to install.