Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology (37 page)

4. “Werewolves in London,” the Warren Zevon song from the 1986 film,
The Color of Money
soundtrack, performed/butchered by Elena Rogero. There is no way to explain how bad this was; you had to see it to believe it.

5. “Mondo ’77,” from the 2001 film
Vanilla Sky
. This song has no lyrics so what appeared to be an interpretive dance was performed by three of the girls from Mad Hatter Studios. None of them dance professionally and this was well demonstrated in the video.

6. “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” from
Top Gun
soundtrack, performed by Stacey Francis.

7. “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” from the
Cocktail
soundtrack performed/butchered by Elena Rogero.

8. “Iko Iko,” from the 1988 film,
Rain Man
soundtrack performed by Stacey Francis.

9. “Tutti Frutti,” from
Cocktail
soundtrack performed by Stacey Francis.

10. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” from
Top Gun
, performed/butchered by Elena Rogero.

11. “Take My Breath Away,” [Love Theme from
Top Gun
] performed by Stacey Francis.

12. “Sympathy for the Devil,” from
Interview with the Vampire
butchered/hacked to millions of little pieces by Elena Rogero.

13. “Playing With the Boys,” from
Top Gun
, attempted by Stacey Francis, the song was so far out of her range that she broke into laughter throughout the song when she could not hit the notes.

14. “Mission Impossible” theme, done “Limp Bizkit” style by Chris Maio and the rest of the Golden Era Musicians.

15. “Old Time Rock and Roll” reprise where Tom Cruise got up and sang the song with Stacey Francis, sweaty pits, bad dancing and all.

When the show ended, there was a full minute of applause and a standing ovation.

Tom Cruise stood in front of the crowd and said the following:

“Whoa! ...(laughing)...Thank you! ...(laughing)...I’m just... I am not… I don’t know where I am right now.”

Crowd laughs.

“You know, you have to be there to understand this reality. Ya know how that is? This is incredible, this is just, I will never, this is just, how do I thank you?

“Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

“This was the best, best birthday ever, ever, ever, ever, I mean EVER!”

It was over. It was by far the cheesiest performance ever recorded by seven broadcast quality cameras in the history of the world.

But would Dave be happy? There were screw-ups during the performance and these did not go unnoticed. But Tom Cruise was happy, that meant no matter what happened, Dave could not be that upset. Overall, the gig was a success and Tom Cruise was apparently happy.

The big day had come and gone. The show was put on. We were on pins and needles back at Gold. From all accounts on the ground, it seemed to have gone off okay.

Tom was happy and this would represent itself in many ways. Over the next few days, a lot of the musicians and a few other crew stayed at the
Freewinds
instead of immediately returning home to the Int Base.

Tom was trying to get a theme song nailed down for
Mission Impossible III
, which was in pre-production, and he wanted the Gold Musicians to help come up with some ideas for this. I mean, how could he have not come to this conclusion? Danny Elfman updated the theme in 1996 and it was a huge hit.

In 2000, the band Limp Bizkit totally reinvented it for
Mission Impossible II
and that movie was the most successful of the
Mission Impossible
franchise to date.

If the Gold Musicians could come up with a red-hot theme for the new movie, they would be stars forevermore. Just getting to work with Tom Cruise was considered a privilege. Here he was asking them for their help! But trying to get the Golden Era Musicians to come up with something that was even on the same level as the previous versions was a joke. They knew it and it only took so many hours before Tom would as well. After two days of back and forth with the musicians, Tom Cruise no longer needed their help. They came up with nothing.

In fact, in the process of trying to work out a new theme for the MI3 movie with the Gold Musicians, Tom Cruise was so unimpressed with what they proposed that their ideas were not even remotely considered.

Of course, the person who eventually worked out the new theme for the movie was Kanye West, whose Impossible theme went almost completely unnoticed and did not impress much either. In my opinion, Limp Bizkit knocked it out of the park and there will never be a version better than what they did.

Why, you may ask, were the Golden Era Musicians trying to come up with music theme ideas for Tom Cruise’s movie? Good question.

In 2000, in a meeting with several Int Base Executives, Dave Miscavige explained to us that he and Tom Cruise were figuring out how we were going to get all of the Ideal Orgs purchased and built around the world. It was a no brainer. Scientology was not making nearly enough money to buy any new orgs, while Tom Cruise had already made enough money for him and his next ten generations of family to live in luxury. With Tom’s newfound devotion he was now trying to work out how he could directly contribute to Scientology in a huge way.

Tom had now been producing movies, in addition to just starring in them. With his production company he was able to negotiate foregoing his acting fees while, instead, receiving a much bigger take of the box-office sales on the back end. This new arrangement was netting him a much larger payout on his huge movies. On
Mission Impossible II
, Tom’s production company got 30 percent of Paramount’s adjusted receipts for the film. On a film that made 546 million dollars worldwide, that is not chump change. If Tom could do one or two movies per year and make this kind of money, Scientology would be set. They would be able to buy hundreds of buildings, renovate them and drive the millions into the orgs needed to clear the planet.

In other words, and as Dave liked to put it, Tom Cruise was now going to fund Scientology’s “war chest.”

So, the Golden Era Musicians had one small part to play in this overall plan and they failed miserably. Either way, this was a huge blow to the musicians. They had just spent a week, up day and night, getting ready for the biggest concert they would ever perform. It went great and two days later they were back to being the scum of the earth in Dave’s eyes.

This was enough to have them sent back to the Base in disgrace.

After being posted as the Producer Gold for a while, I had gotten used to what was needed from all areas. Even though I was supposed to be over all production areas of Golden Era Productions, I spent most of my time working in Manufacturing. The manufacturing area was a disaster and was about to have the biggest production demand in history placed upon it.

We had purchased a CD replicator and several printers that could produce the transcripts for the lectures and the covers for the plastic binders that held CDs. We had a mini plant in place for producing just about everything needed for CDs and DVDs.

COB had recently laid out that he wanted all of the “new” LRH books and lectures released by 2005. Now that all of the lectures were being reviewed and re-edited, all of Hubbard’s books were also having the same done to them. For the first time in history, people were looking at all of these items as a whole and when this was done, discrepancies were found between lectures and books, and it appeared that earlier marketing actions had paired up the wrong lectures with the wrong books.

These prior releases were either approved or announced by Dave Miscavige himself. So now he would have to come up with a plan of how to re-release all of these items and sell them newly. His plan was to produce all of them and have them ready, and then when the time was right, release them. A new Mark VIII E-Meter that was being produced in Japan would also somehow tie into this.

We had an exact quantity for each lecture series in each of the 16 languages spoken where there were Scientology orgs around the world. I was asked for a plan on how we would produce all of the CDs in the time frame allotted.

For me to figure out how to produce this huge amount of CDs was not really rocket science. The machines were being run 24 hours per day, the machine could crank out a certain amount in a day and there were a certain amount of days that I had to produce the amount of CDs required.

No matter how I crunched the numbers or no matter how many times I cut down the average amount of weekly downtime on the machines, I still came up short. With the current amount of equipment it could not be done.

I spent hours on this before I finally went and saw Russ Bellin. Russ had been brought in by COB to figure out how to set up Gold’s CD manufacturing line. Although Russ worked for CST, he did all of the research for Gold under the direction of COB. I am not sure how that worked corporately, but Russ knew what was done to work out the numbers and capacities of all machines in the area, so I showed him what I had worked out.

“You need more machines!” he concluded after looking over all of my workouts.

I knew he would say that. That was what I was trying to avoid. After being at the Int Base for several years, I knew the one wrong thing to tell COB was that you wanted more toys. He always nuked the person who asked for more equipment in order to make some target that he had laid out.

Nevertheless, Russ and I sat down and did all the calculations on what additional machines would be needed to make the targeted production quantities. It was not that many machines, but it would come with the hefty price tag of 2.5 million dollars!

I had to make the named quantities and if that meant buying more machines, I really had no other choice than to make that the plan and submit it. The meeting would be any day now and I had to have the plan ready when COB wanted it presented to him.

Later that week, the fateful meeting was called. COB wanted to meet with us in the CMO Int conference room. All the CMO Int Execs were there as well as Russ Bellin and his staff. When COB showed up, he was not in a good mood. I was sure that this would be a short meeting once I opened my mouth. It was. After I explained my plan to him, he went ballistic.

“I ask for production and you say you want to spend money!” Dave yelled. “What is it with these Gold guys? They always try and spend as much money as they can on anything and everything!”

Days later I was taken off post as the Producer Gold because of my plan. Of course someone who has such a destructive concept of production should not be over any areas that have to do with dissemination of Scientology materials. There is actually a policy where LRH says that people that are out-ethics or PTS should not be put on posts that involve dissemination.

Ironically, the department head over the CD manufacturing area would also be taken off post weeks later for a similar plan to mine. Who ended up replacing him? Of course it was me. COB came in to where I was working and told me that I should take the Director of A/V Manufacturing post and get the CDs made. He also said that he had a plan to get all the CDs made.

I took the post. So now I was the one directly responsible for making all of the CDs that I had failed miserably on planning out a month earlier.

In a meeting a few weeks later, COB unleashed his new plan of how we would be able to make all of the CDs needed by his impossible release date. I was sure that he was going to just extend the date and make it workable within the confines of the equipment we had already purchased and set up. I was so far off it was crazy.

His plan was to blow out a whole floor of the manufacturing building. Move all of our storage to a warehouse in Los Angeles. Make the second floor area the printing facility with banks of new printing machines that could print both color and black and white pages. We would also set up our own foil stamping equipment, laminating equipment, paper cutters, UV coating machines, hole punchers, binding equipment, additional CD replicators, you name it, anything you could imagine that would be needed, it was in this plan. Besides thinking that this plan could not be done for less than 15 million dollars, I found an immediate flaw, there were no elevators in the manufacturing building and it would be impossible to get printed items from upstairs to downstairs easily. Of course Dave Miscavige had thought of that. He said that a new elevator would be installed in the building!

His plan would cost upwards of 20 million dollars. And I was taken off post for my 2.5 million dollar plan!

A few weeks later Dave was doing an inspection in A/V Manufacturing. It was like every other inspection he did, he had his usual entourage of people and there were execs from RTC and CMO Int who were hovering as we walked through the different parts of the production line.

I think COB knew that I now thought he was full of crap and taking me off the Producer post was wrong, especially in light of the fact that his own plan was my original plan on steroids. But Dave was in a bad mood today and had obviously had a bad meeting before he showed up in my area. He was angry and asking questions and not even waiting for the answers. I knew he was in a bad mood and I knew that I should have played it safe, but I just couldn’t.

“So Marc, you know you will be able to make the release dates now, right?” Dave asked snidely.

“Well, after we buy all that equipment, we will practically be able to make any dates laid out,” I said, regretting the words as they came out. Although it was a perfectly normal answer, I knew Dave would interpret it as a dig. He did.

As the first fist hit my face I was unsure what was happening. After the second and third blows hit, there was no question. COB was punching me in the face! He literally leapt forward and was punching me over and over again. I was up against a sort of desk/counter area and I had lost my glasses after the first several hits. The frenzy had certainly caught me off guard. I did not go down though. The desk was supporting me and I used my hands to steady my balance and stand up straight.