Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (28 page)

Super Power and the Running Program were not the only things that needed to be released:

• We still had all of the Basics Books and Lectures to be redone.
  
• The new Mark VIII Ultra E-Meter – 30,000 already produced and sitting in a warehouse in Los Angeles. Only cost $40 each to make but we would still sell them for over $3000. Would not require being sent in for service. Could be updated over the Internet. All public would be made to buy two and we should be able to sell out in the first year. We only ever made 30,000 Mark VIIs so we knew there were at least that many people that would need the new E-Meter.
  
• New E-Meter Books – new E-meter would require that all these books be re-done.
  
• New Grades – with new E-meter we could then re-release the Grades that were incorrectly modified and made 10 times longer than they were supposed to be.
  
• Key to Life and Life Orientation Course had to be redone as they were not done based on what LRH said to do and took too long to complete.
  
• Would the Saint Hill Special Briefing Course be released on CD? All those 400 plus lectures had to be re-edited and checked, transcripts had to be re-done. Packaging had to be redone.
  
• Would the Ls need to be fixed? The issues being used were Board Technical Bulletins written by David Mayo — a past Senior Case Supervisor International who used to be LRH’s auditor and was now a declared suppressive — among others. How would we fix these since they were the best money maker, but not written by LRH? How do we solve this?
  
• Any auditor courses that had references to the E-meter had to be updated. All of these things affected each other. You could not change one without changing another. If you released one thing you might have to re-release four other things as well.
  

These were the things that had to be figured out. END OF MEETING.

Dave Miscavige then spent 2 more hours telling us how he was the only one who could do any of the above things and how he had to redo all of the new Basics books himself, he had to redo the PTS/SP Course himself, he had to do all of the Golden Age of Tech himself with a few people working directly for him. Then after all that, he had to redo the policies himself and would inevitably have to redo all the Tech Bulletins and new Tech Volumes himself. Everything that had not been redone in the last few years ALL had to be redone because there would be so many new things that the old things would not match up at all, wouldn’t make sense and would contradict each other.

The meeting went until about 1:00
 a.m.
and we all went back to our work areas. Of course, I left out all the name calling, people getting smacked by Dave, sentences laced with vulgar profanities and Dave Miscavige sending people out of the meeting because he no longer wanted to “look at their faces” while talking.

You may wonder how I could sit and recount this in such detail. Well, seeing as this exact same meeting happened at least 30 times in some form or another over several years, I remember it like it happened earlier today. More or less the same people were there and the same things were gone over since Dave had told us to do them on hundreds of occasions—he was the only one who could do these things and any work done by someone other than him was uniformly rejected, so why bother?

Every so often, one of the hundreds of things he had talked about would finally get done and it would be one, single thing that we would no longer have to hear about. Even sometimes that thing we would hear about again, since later on, Dave would decide that it was now flawed based on some new thing he had decided should be a certain way. For example, a book that went with a certain set of lectures and it had been mistakenly paired with the wrong set when re-released.

One would think that a Book Editor would have to have certain skills to edit a book. Well that being the case, can you imagine Mike Rinder (the head of Office of Special Affairs, the Scientology Intelligence operations branch) editing an LRH book while getting no sleep? How about Ray Mithoff (Senior Case Supervisor International and former Inspector General for Tech), the same guy that was declared a Suppressive Person by Dave Miscavige in the year 2000 for the out-tech on KTL and LOC? What about an Audio Mixer, Rick Cruzen, whose sole qualification that got him assigned to edit LRH’s books was that he had read all of them — while on the Rehabilitation Project Force for several years! All of these individuals were editing LRH books, the basic books. Dave Miscavige says he ended up re-editing all of the basic books himself. So how in the world could the Super Power Building be completed and filled with staff and public?

(Author’s Note: As I write this in 2009 the Super Power Building has still not opened. Over 100 million dollars has been raised to fund the construction of it
—
and continues to be raised, although more than double the budget has already been collected. The Empire State Building took a year to build! The only thing released from the above list of materials are the “Basic Books and Lectures”.)

We had to shoot a film so that it could be released at the Auditor’s Day event coming up in September. The film that needed to be shot was Technical Training Film #1 - TRs in Life.

Mitch Brisker was a professional director who was hired on to direct the films and all other staff that produced the films were Sea Org members. Mitch Brisker had been a Scientologist for many years. The story went that years back he used to routinely do drugs and one day he woke up with his dead (cocaine overdosed) girlfriend next to him in bed. He ended up doing the Purification Rundown and years later he would become a commercial director and then somehow he ended up at Gold directing all of the Tech Films that needed to be re-shot. They needed to be re-shot because the existing films were so low quality as to be completely unwatchable and embarrassing. (Note: Dave Miscavige was on the crew that shot the crappy films and only one film that he worked on is being shown in organizations today.)

The rest of the Shoot Crew were Sea Org members. There were about 25 of us. This was the Camera, Lighting, Make-up, Costumes, Props, Sets and Talent staff. An equivalent Hollywood crew doing the same type of film shooting would have had at least three times the number of people we had.

We had four vehicles that all staff and equipment had to fit in. We had a 1979 GMC lighting truck (that routinely broke down somewhere). We had a 1979 GMC Camera truck, a Chevy “dually” with trailer and a white 15-passenger van. There were only five of the twenty-five staff that could or were allowed to drive these vehicles.

In the Sea Org at Gold, there are specific requirements that have to be in place for you to be able to drive. Very few staff met all the requirements:

1. You have to have done Car School, a course that requires you attend study time for a full month at 2.5 hours per day so that you can learn about how a car works and learn how to drive.

2. You have to have a current valid driver’s license. One in every twenty Gold staff had a current valid driver’s license.

3. You CANNOT be on the Potential Trouble Source (PTS) list. This is a list generated by Perimeter Council. Since all mail going to and from Gold is opened and read by Security, any bad indicators or critical remarks towards Scientology by any relative or friend would land you on the PTS list. Until you formally handled or disconnected from this person, you would remain on the PTS List. Also, if you got sick in any way, you would be added to the PTS list until the person suppressing you was located and handled or you disconnected from them.

4. You have to have read the manual for the vehicle you wished to drive and another person had to quiz you on specific points of the manual until you were able to answer any question they posed.

5. You could not have any accidents or tickets on your driving record. If you had an accident or ticket, you had to redo Car School and pay for the accident or ticket fees to get back “on the road.”

6. You have to be insured on the vehicle you wish to drive. If it is a personal vehicle, then you have to cover the insurance costs out of your $40/week pay. If it is an org vehicle, you must get approved to drive it and get added to the overall insurance plan.

As I said, very few staff made the Okay to Drive list; out of twenty-five of us, we had five and that was doing real well. In some parts of Gold, out of fifty people only one or two people could drive. The vehicles were mainly needed to transport the crew when on location shooting and to and from the studio. You see, during this time period Gold did not have its own film studio and the one that was used in prior years was tiny and barely big enough to shoot videos in. Gold did a majority of the film shooting in an abandoned nuclear bunker at the Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino. The Air Force had just moved out and gave a portion of the base to the local San Manuel Indian tribe as part of some government deal. So Scientology paid rent to the Indians and they used the money to build themselves a casino.

Each day we would load up and travel 40 minutes from Gold to this abandoned Air Force bunker located in the middle of nowhere. At the end of the day we would pack up and head back to Gold. There was no operational air conditioning in the building and on some days during the summer it would be over 110 degrees in the studio. There were portable air conditioning units that we brought in to direct at the actors in between takes so that the make-up would not melt off their faces. Yeah, this is the place where 90% of the Scientology Tech films were shot! Now, if we were shooting on location, we would usually have to get up around 3-4
 a.m.
so we could pack up the equipment and travel to the location, set up and shoot. Then pack everything up and travel back to the base.

For the TR#1 (Training Routines in Life) film, we had around 30 sequences that needed to be shot. Most sequences would take a full day to shoot. Mitch, the Director, had decided that about half of these sequences he wanted to shoot on location as opposed to in the studio. This meant that we had to stagger the shooting so that one day we would shoot on location, the next day we would shoot in the studio. This would allow for the sets crew to switch out sets while we were on location and so on.

Well, Dave Miscavige wanted to release the TR#1 film for Auditor’s Day and that was in September. It was the end of June, and based on how much time it would take to edit the film, get the music and final mix down done, he had arbitrarily decided that the film had to be shot by Sea Org day (early August). That gave us about a month to shoot 30 sequences. Every day that passed was a lost day and starting filming right away was a must. We began within a few weeks after location scouting, budgets and designs were all done and approved.

Our daily shooting schedule went something like this:

DAY 1 - We got up at 6:00
 a.m.
and left for Norton, we would shoot all day and got back to Gold around 10:00
 p.m.
We then had our meetings and went over the next day’s shoot, which was a location. We went home around 11:00.

DAY 2 - We got up around 4:00
 a.m.
to leave for Norton. Once at Norton, we packed up the gear and drove to our location. We shot all day and got back to Gold around 10:00 if we were lucky. Had our meetings, and went over the next day’s studio shoot. Went home around 11:00. At least we got to sleep in until 6:00 the next morning!

DAY 3 - Repeat DAY 1 schedule.

DAY 4 - Repeat DAY 2 schedule.

And so it went for a full month. By the time we got to the last week of shooting, crew were falling asleep standing up, driving, you name it. Most crew could sleep whenever we were traveling. But, as there were only five drivers and four vehicles, most of the drivers slept 2-5 hours a night on a good day. Some nights we returned from a location shoot at 1:00
 a.m.
and had to be at the studio at 7:00 the next day.

Well, we got to the end of the film and this is where things became a bit tricky. The end sequence of the film contains all the actors who appear throughout the entire film. So you had 30 plus actors who all needed to be available to drive out into the middle of nowhere and spend six hours on a set that was 100 degrees. Add to that, the script from LRH called for a camera move that was nearly impossible to achieve and had not even been done on the previous version of the film. This sequence was re-shot four times. Each time it was reviewed, Dave said that it was not okay and could not be used in the film. So we would shoot it one last time. We finished very late that night at the Studio and dropped the film off at the base. It was Sunday night and Tuesday was Sea Org day. We were finally going to get a day off and the film was done!

We came in Monday and the shots were reviewed. They were not okay. Dave was pissed. His plan was foiled and the film would never get done in time now. What did this mean? What were we going to do? Organizing another shoot was out of the question as we now had actors out of town, on other projects, etc. We had already shot the sequence four times and some of the actors refused to come back again no matter what. And they were the Scientologist actors! We demanded that, amongst the four times the end sequence had been shot, there must be enough footage to be able to cut together a full sequence and be able to finish the film. No, this was not an option. Dave Miscavige himself had stated that without the end sequence properly shot, the entire film was a bust and could not be completed. We did not know what was going to happen, but we knew it could not be good. We were puppets waiting to be put into motion. Well, no matter what happened, we knew that Dave Miscavige would be pulling the strings.

That first tug happened soon enough. Naturally, first on the list was for all of the Dept Heads to be heavily security checked by RTC staff. This included any and all suspected activities that we could be involved in. Hookers? Theft? Sex with the actors? Goofing off? Sex with each other? Gambling? You name it, we were asked it. We were asked the exact same questions over and over again, worded differently, anything and everything was thrown at us. This went on for at least eight hours straight. We had screwed up the filming of this one sequence four times and there must be some real crimes below this. No one wanted to hear about us not sleeping for a straight month. No one wanted to hear about the crew pooling their own money to pay for gas for the org vehicles. No, the only thing that was wanted was for us to admit to committing the most heinous crimes imaginable and then it would all make sense. Dave Miscavige said we had crimes so we did, and until we admitted to those crimes, it would not stop.