Out of Frame: Scientology and Hollywood

In preparation for Monday's episode on War of the Worlds (2005) Chris and Lizzie explore the history of Scientology, the wave of religious movements in early 20th century Los Angeles, and set the table for Tom Cruise's disastrous publicity tour leading up to the release of the film. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

  12 celebrities, one Don, and cold, hard cash. From the producers of The Traitors comes The Mob, a new Hulu original series now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+. In this unique new reality competition show hosted by the iconic Parker Posey, 12 celebrity contestants are about to become members of a powerful family. For two weeks in a lavish Italian villa, they'll shake down and hustle to win a share of up to $250,000. And every good mob needs a Don. Whoever they choose to lead them will have absolute power deciding who stays and who gets taken out, who makes money and who walks away with nothing. In a game of power where loyalty and trust are the currency,

• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

  will the most powerful reality contestant in TV history be able to keep the family happy? And if they're overthrown by the mob, who will step up and become the new Don? Let the games begin. Watch The Mob, now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers. Terms apply.

• 1:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone to make a good one or any movie at all, whilst one scrubs the deck of the Sea Org. I'm Lizzie Bassett, one of your hosts here, as always, with Chris Winterbauer, and I'm really, really excited for today's episode. Chris, what have you prepared for us?

• 2:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Today, Lizzie, we are diving into a unique phenomenon, or so I thought, of Hollywood, which is a religion very closely associated with Hollywood, which is Scientology, which is important to tee up because it becomes an important aspect of our coverage of War of the Worlds, which comes on Monday. So this is, you could call it an out of frame, you could call it a primer. I am going to call it an exploration of Scientology and how perhaps it is not as fringe as we might think relative to many a strange gathering that has taken place in Los Angeles over the years.

• 3:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't want to just regurgitate what people have seen in Going Clear, for example, either the book or the documentary, although we are going to talk about those things briefly. What I really want to do is kind of put Scientology in context historically, and then try to explore where Tom Cruise fits in briefly to lead us into really the early 2000s, getting into the release of War of the Worlds.

• 3:33Lizzie Bassett?

  And I did watch Going Clear in preparation for this. I'd seen it before, but I happily watched it again.

• 3:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and so if you would like to skip today's episode and just dive into War of the Worlds, completely understand, but I hope that we will give you guys some new information here that will be helpful in the exploration of belief and truth that's going to come on Monday. So without further ado, Lizzie, let's dive in.

• 3:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, when did you become a Scientologist?

• 4:02Lizzie Bassett?

  The minute I moved to Los Angeles, Chris.

• 4:05Chris Winterbauer?

  You did move to Los Angeles, how, 15 years ago, 17 years ago? 15 years ago, and I'm guessing one of the first buildings you noticed was...

• 4:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Scientology has, it actually has many centers across Los Angeles. But the two big ones, there's a...

• 4:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Across the world?

• 4:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, across the world, but has a big physical presence in Los Angeles, most notably with two buildings. One is an enormous...

• 4:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Hideous cobalt blue.

• 4:34Chris Winterbauer?

  It's called Big Blue unofficially.

• 4:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That sort of looms over East Hollywood. And my first ever apartment, which I loved, was on the corner. I said it was in Los Feliz. It was really in East Hollywood. So it was kind of triangulated almost as the, the third prong in a triangle that featured the main Scientology Center. And then my personal favorite, the Celebrity Center was very, very close to my apartment. And the thing that I always remember was that we used to get brunch at one of the restaurants right across the street from the Celebrity Center. And I don't know if they still do this, but for a time period, I know that they would have these like lavish brunches set out on the lawn of the Celebrity Center. And we always were kind of looking across the street being like, do you think like it is, it looks free.

• 5:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Could we?

• 5:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. You're like the little, the rabbit looking at the trap, you know?

• 5:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I know. We never did.

• 5:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So it's, it's Scientology has an enormous presence in Hollywood and the world is very aware of it in large part, thanks to Tom Cruise. So sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to Going Clear Scientology Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright, A Piece of Blue Sky Scientology Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed by John Attac or Attac, Barefaced Messiah by Russell Miller, and a number of videos, interviews, retrospectives, in particular, videos and footage of Tom Cruise and L. Ron Hubbard and David Miscavige, who currently runs the church. Now, in case you aren't aware, Lizzie, Scientology has been back in the news. Are you aware of the current trend of Scientology speedruns?

• 6:15Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 6:16Chris Winterbauer?

  No, this is not trying to climb the bridge of, uh, we'll get into it in a second. It, as quickly as possible. This is people, content creators, filming themselves running through a Scientology building to see how far they can make it before being kicked out.

• 6:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh. It's not a good idea.

• 6:36Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it started in Hollywood, then spread to New York, Sydney, Vancouver, London, and beyond. As we mentioned, Scientology has large property holdings across the world.

• 6:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It started with a viral video posted by an 18-year-old shot with his Meta Ray-Ban glasses. He apparently ran into another content creator who happened to be a vocal critic of Scientology. That creator gave him an overview. "This organization is a cult," he said. The original content creator thought it was funny. He goes into the church, he films a staffer selling him a book. That mundane interaction went viral. He realized Scientology is an easy way to make money, to generate views. Another creator says, "Hey, let's run through the building together." The trend is born, and other people start doing it more aggressively. They're wearing masks, they're blowing air horns, they're forcing entry, they're damaging property. To be clear, the original creator says he regrets posting the video.

• 7:29Chris Winterbauer?

  And it's interesting, because on the one hand, Scientologists have said, "This is basically a form of harassment. This is a hate crime." If any other religion was suffering through this, right? If somebody was rushing through a synagogue, if they were rushing through a mosque, if they were rushing through a church, people would condemn this. But you think it's funny because it's Scientology.

• 7:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't believe I'm going to stand up for Scientology, but I think that's technically correct.

• 7:54Chris Winterbauer?

  It's interesting, yeah. And Jenna Miscavige, who's the niece of current Scientology leader David Miscavige, posted an Instagram video saying, quote, "I'm proud of these kids for doing something that the government is too corrupt and chicken shit to do." And the question is, Lizzie, are the videos helping anyone inside the church? If there is abuse going on inside the church, which we will get to, are they helping, or are they just another form of exploitation? Leah Rimini, who I'm sure you know of, Lizzie the actress, perhaps most famous for King of Queens, who is a former Scientologist, she left the church in 2013. She said, "I spent decades on the other side of this, and if I had been confronted by people running through the Scientology buildings and harassing me or staff, it would have pushed me further into Scientology."

• 8:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's what I was going to say, because the whole... Ethos of it is victimization to a certain degree. Like, like the way that all of the, I'm sure we'll get into this, but that the tax exempt status was framed and everything was that, you know, everyone is out to get us and we are just trying to practice our religious freedom. So if you're having people coming in and doing this, which like clearly is just to get views and is, you know, harassing people, hurting property, like disrupting your day, I don't think that's going to get anybody to leave. If anything, that gives them more fodder for, you know, how the church itself is being attacked.

• 9:17Chris Winterbauer?

  So what I've always found most interesting about Scientology is less the specifics of belief, because I always find those unusual in every religion, from Islam to Christianity to Judaism.

• 9:29Lizzie Bassett?

  But it is, it is so recent that, you know, that I think that's what makes it, it's kind of like Mormonism. That's actually a lot of similarities to Mormonism also in terms of the way that the truths are revealed to the Creator. But yeah, I think that's all it is. It's just that it's more modern and people think you probably should come up with a more realistic story, I guess, if it's going to be, you know, nowadays. And L. Ron Hubbard said, no.

• 9:54Chris Winterbauer?

  We're going to talk a lot about story. We're going to talk about why it's so modern. We're going to talk about what it was birthed out of. But what I find so interesting about it is that it almost feels like this mollusk on the underside of Hollywood's belly in a way. And Hollywood is slow to embrace a lot of religious films. I think a lot of Hollywood stars are reluctant to speak out about their religious beliefs for fear of alienating a portion of their audience. Of course, there are exceptions. And of course, as we've discussed on the show, there are big religious movie going audiences out there that some studios, Angel Studios, for example, are trying to cater to. Yet here we have this fringe religion that exists in the heart of Hollywood.

• 10:34Chris Winterbauer?

  As you mentioned, Lizzie, Big Blue at 4833 Fountain Avenue is an enormous former hospital converted to a Scientology center that features in, you know, a sign the size of a movie screen, the word Scientology across its roof. It stands out. But the truth is Scientology is not an outlier in Los Angeles history. And I didn't know that.

• 11:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats. And I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&Ms, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles. But they also have salty snacks, easy-to-make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispie treats and peanut butter M&Ms, and because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all-time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's Original Ready Rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q.

• 11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Mars knows he needs a celebration too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice Dental Chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited-time Halloween offerings. We recently moved into a new house and realized that our bedding desperately needed a refresh. So I took my own advice, and before spending all our money on a luxury bedding brand, I went to Quince. And let me tell you, we now have the crispest, coolest, most beautiful organic percale sheets and duvet covers that we've ever had. I've bought quite a bit of bedding from Quince, and it's all super high-quality and has lasted for years without paying the brand markup.

• 12:28Lizzie Bassett?

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• 13:14Chris Winterbauer?

  L.A. has long been a hotbed for new religions and religious revivals. And no, Lizzie, I'm not just talking about the counterculture movement of the 60s and 70s. We talked a little bit about Children of God, for example, when we were discussing the River Phoenix episode. Let's go back, though, 60, 70 years prior to the early 1900s. So if you were to think of L.A. back then, it's far more homogeneous than it would eventually become. It's got a large population of white mainstream Protestants with roots in Europe. Many have migrated from the Midwest. Then the population exploded. There's 100,000 people in L.A. in 1900. That grows to 570,000 by 1920.

• 13:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 13:56Chris Winterbauer?

  And then doubled to over a million in 1930. A lot of this is, obviously, the development of Hollywood. For example, Hollywood moved from Florida to Los Angeles around the, you know, early 19 teens into the 1920s. The major studios are being formed, and as Hollywood's being built, so is L.A.'s religious economy. So the city's packed with a very ethnically diverse group of people all of a sudden, which means it's also far more religiously diverse. And the last thing a few of these Christian sects felt they needed was to lose ground to some of these other faiths. They're like, "They're taking our congregation." The Economist once argued, "Looking back, L.A.'s most successful export is not Hollywood, but Pentecostalism." Do you know the definition of Pentecostalism? I did not.

• 14:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't. When I think Pentecostal, I think Pentecostal churches in the South. I think like snake handling and, you know, things that began as tent revivals.

• 14:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Tent revivals, yeah. Like, it's basically, it's a movement within the evangelical wing of the Protestant Christian community.

• 14:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 14:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's a couple of important aspects to it. It's more complicated than this, but basically, they emphasize direct personal experience of God through baptism with the Holy Spirit. So obviously, this is very different than Catholicism. And they adhere to the inerrancy of the Bible, which means the Bible's 100% right, every word is right, this is the Word of God, and the necessity of being born again. Now, the Pentecostal Church has important roots in LA. A key figure was preacher William Seymour, who set up a church on Azusa Street. It's now known as Little Tokyo. He was a student of Charles Param and took on the mantle of speaking in tongues, per your revivalist comment from earlier, Lizzie. The rich were also getting in on it. So Lyman Stewart, founder of Union Oil Company, funded the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in 1908.

• 15:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, are you aware of Biola University?

• 15:42Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 15:43Chris Winterbauer?

  That's Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

• 15:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Biola, it sounds like a payola scam. They could have rethought that, but whatever.

• 15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Have you seen the Jesus Saves sign at the top of the Ace Hotel downtown? That was originally made as for Biola University. It was moved around. It got put on the top of what was formerly the United Artists Building, and then was eventually converted into the Ace Hotel. And that's how you have a Jesus Saves sign on top of the Ace Hotel, which is very unusual. So during the roaring twenties, film and religious fundamentalism are thriving in LA, and they're overlapping. And this is when we get, Lizzie, what some historians have called the heyday of biblical epics. So you've got the Ten Commandments, King of Kings, Noah's Ark, Ben Hur, Tale of the Christ, the MGM film that would eventually be remade with Charlton Heston that we covered. And preachers were coming to Los Angeles looking for an audience.

• 16:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So a couple of examples. Amy Semple McPherson, she established the Church of the Four Square Gospel. Sounds completely real. She was called God's Best Publicity Agent. Some historians describe her as the first religious celebrity of the mass media era.

• 16:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 16:50Chris Winterbauer?

  She was kind of like a religious influencer, right? She was theatrical. She used radio, print, and film to spread her message. And she had friends in high places in Hollywood, like Charlie Chaplin, who reportedly told her, "Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal, half due to the props and the lights." And so I do think like Hollywood and religion share an affection for theatrics, let's say.

• 17:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's necessary to both. And I think it always has been necessary to religion. You know, obviously, there's a huge difference between when we're talking about Protestant or especially fundamentalist Christians and something like Catholicism, except that they both love the theater of it all.

• 17:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, absolutely. So as early as 1913, one New York magazine described Los Angeles as susceptible to, quote, "spiritualists, mediums, astrologists, phrenologists, palmists, and other breeds of esoteric wind jammers."

• 17:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Nothing's changed.

• 17:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Can we bring wind jammers back?

• 17:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Chris Winterbauer?

  That is the best. Also, do you know what phrenology is?

• 17:53Lizzie Bassett?

  That's not the thing with your skull, is it?

• 17:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Yeah. It's the belief that the shape and measurements of a person's skull indicate their mental faculties and personal traits. If that were true, I would be the richest man in the world. My forehead is a seven head. So, anyway. There was also the Mazdasnan, Mazdasnan Society. They were a cult of sun worshippers, and they engaged in self-torture. There was Mount Helios, led by a woman who claimed to have control of a thousand men, which she may have, for all I know. She also had some interesting ideas, or they did, like free childcare, profit sharing, free public transportation for working people, and free trade. So...

• 18:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Those are crazy.

• 18:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Wasn't all bad. I mean, for the time, yes, burner at the stake. Now, the Blackburn cult was a mother-daughter team who claimed to have had visions of the archangels Michael and Gabriel, who divinely ordered them to write a book and promised them coordinates to oil and gold around the world. Reminds me a little bit of Mormonism and the Angel Moroni and whatnot.

• 18:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know if you ever watched The Righteous Gemstones, but my favorite sequence in the whole thing is, I think it might have been in season three, where Uncle Baby Billy sings "There Will Come a Payday," and they wrote this song for the show. If you've never seen this, look it up on YouTube. His outfit alone is the reason to watch it. But the whole thing is like, "I'm only doing this because there will come a payday. Hallelujah, what a payday."

• 19:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, some of these were inclusive, some of them were antagonistic, like Joe Jeffers of the Kingdom Temple. He said he heard the voices of Noah and Jesus and had power over people's fates. And he was actually part of the anti-Semitic Christian identity movement, and he condemned Catholics and Jewish people in Hollywood. During the 1930s, there was a decent Nazi presence in Hollywood that we discussed briefly on Casablanca.

• 19:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 19:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And in the 30s, there was also the I Am movement, or the Mighty I Am Presence, founded by married couple Guy and Edna Ballard. Edna said she was a medium. Guy said he had a spiritual awakening on Mount Shasta, met the great ascended master, who was a god. They went on a voyage through time and space. They astral projected to visit ancient cities. They explored past lives, and they met guests from Venus. And then they wrote a series of books called Unveiled Mysteries, or Starting with Unveiled Mysteries, which they sold during the Great Depression. There's always like a commerce angle to most of these

• 20:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 20:11Chris Winterbauer?

  religious movements. Not all, but to most or many of them.

• 20:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Can I pitch a possibility as to why Los Angeles, I think the thing about Los Angeles is, and you hit on this, the speed with which it grew was insane. And the vast majority of the people who lived here were not from here.

• 20:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 20:31Lizzie Bassett?

  So you've got a bunch of people coming with the hopes of making it big, making it rich, you know, finding a purpose in their life. They probably don't know that many people. So one of the things that they're going to look for immediately is community, which is something you can always get from religion. And the other thing that they're going to look for is somebody telling you, oh, I can explain why this isn't working for you, because it will not work for the vast majority of the people that show up here. So you've got a population of people who are just extremely vulnerable to this kind of organization. It makes total sense that this would be a breeding ground for religions, cults, everything.

• 21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  And like you said, Lizzie, I completely agree. For many people, certainly not all, there are a lot of industries in Los Angeles. It's a misnomer to say it's a one industry town.

• 21:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 21:18Chris Winterbauer?

  But many people come here attempting to break into the seemingly impenetrable institution known as Hollywood. And so if another institution grants you passage, acceptance, in fact, says you're special, you have a purpose, you're meaningful, that's an incredibly seductive and powerful sales pitch. And so the point is, as you've expertly diagnosed, by the time the Church of Scientology shows up in the 1950s, LA is a breeding ground for a lot of unusual gurus, practices, and followings. And in fact, as we've explored, Scientology was tame in comparison to many of these. And it seemed, or may have seemed, more legitimate. The only problem was, it wasn't.

• 21:59Chris Winterbauer?

  And to understand why, we need to talk about Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, or L. Ron Hubbard, and the book that led to Scientology, known as Dianetics. So L. Ron Hubbard, and we've talked about him briefly before, Lizzie, but let's dive back in. He was born in Nebraska in 1911. And say what you want about L. Ron Hubbard, and you could say a lot about L. Ron Hubbard, the one thing I think everybody would agree on is the fact that he has an incredible and inexhaustible imagination. Across his life, a lot of what's written about him focuses on fact checking the stories he told about himself, because he contradicted himself a lot. To be clear, much of what he said about his childhood, his education, his time in the Navy.

• 22:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna say, his war hero slash war crimes.

• 22:49Chris Winterbauer?

  There's a funny portion in Going Clear where basically, he claims he was blowing up submarines, but the reality was, he was just killing whales with depth charges. The Navy said, "You cannot have access to any more depth charges," L. Ron Hubbard. The point is, much of this doesn't match what his family and colleagues have offered in comparison. And in fact, he even contradicts himself. He contradicts his private journals, in many cases. A Superior Court judge who ruled against Hubbard in 1984 once described him as, quote, "virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, backgrounds, and achievements." At the same time, it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents, end quote.

• 23:36Chris Winterbauer?

  So Lawrence Wright, author of Going Clear, which was made into the documentary that we've discussed of the same name, has spent a lot of time investigating Hubbard's life. And he argues that the "tug of war" between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard's biography has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world's greatest con man. Those are the two ends of the spectrum. He even argues that the discrepancies between what Hubbard says about himself and what others say about him is "overshadowed the fact" that he genuinely was a fascinating man: an explorer, a bestselling author, and the founder of a worldwide religious movement.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  But above all, I am a man.

• 24:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I love that scene so much. I love The Master. It's my favorite Paul Thomas Anderson movie. I absolutely love it. I do want to note that Hubbard was a bit of an explorer, and it started young, but not just of the world, of the mind. So when he was roughly 12 years old, he went on a cruise from Seattle to DC, and one of his fellow passengers was a man named Joseph Thompson, who was a member of the Navy Medical Corps, who studied under Sigmund Freud.

• 24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 24:50Chris Winterbauer?

  So Thompson really apparently "beat Freud into him."

• 24:55Chris Winterbauer?

  "You want to have sex with your mother. You want to have sex with your mother." It's like, "I know."

• 25:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And he said that he wanted to follow out this work, but his dad said that he was going to be an engineer. So he went to college and he studied engineering, but he did not have a knack for it. He got really bad grades. He didn't graduate. But it's not to say that Hubbard was unintelligent. He had a superpower, and that was writing. Writing prolifically.

• 25:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 25:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, we talked about this when we covered Battlefield Earth, but by the time Hubbard's in his twenties, he is churning out stories for Pulp Magazine, sci-fi adventures, westerns. He would write to the point where he was dripping sweat. He would write on a roll of butcher paper. So when he was done with one story, he'd just tear it off and continue on the next one while it was delivered to the publisher. He had to write under pseudonyms because the magazines didn't want the readers to keep seeing L. Ron Hubbard's name popping up multiple times. Times in one issue. So you got Mr. Spectator, Captain Humbert Reynolds, Rene Lafayette, Winchester Remington Colt, which is just three guns in a row.

• 25:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Guns, yeah.

• 25:57Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was self-conscious, or may have been a bit self-conscious, about the speed at which he wrote. He came across at one point some praise of another writer, where the reader who wrote in said that this writer was, quote, prolific, but a genius nonetheless, as if being prolific was a bad thing.

• 26:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 26:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He then wrote, quote, "Just why is it, pray tell, that John Public and Hollywood," I think that's an important thing that he includes there, "dwells in the dark about a fast production writer? If a man writes one story a year, everybody says, ah, he must be an artist. No merit to a man who works himself bald and into an early grave, putting out repeated bits of The Marvelous." He didn't go entirely bald, but he went a little bit bald. I also was like, oh, is that personal? He then name checks Oh Henry, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and he more or less says that his brain is like a shark. If he stops swimming, he dies. And then he says, you know, "The layman would faint from shock if they witnessed the speed at which the true literary heavyweights, quote, rolled out the yardage."

• 26:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So he's a little bit defensive. And he, again, to be clear, he is remarkably prolific. Actually, he's the most prolific writer in history.

• 27:05Lizzie Bassett?

  He has a Guinness World Record.

• 27:07Chris Winterbauer?

  He has the Guinness World Record for the most published works by a single author. 1,084.

• 27:14Lizzie Bassett?

  If at first you don't succeed, try 1,084 times again.

• 27:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And he was coming up during the golden age of science fiction. He's born at the right time for this. He wrote for Asounding Stories under editor John Campbell, and he was friends with other famous writers, including one of the fathers of that golden age, who we've talked about, Robert Heinlein, who would write Starship Troopers. Now, he sniffed around Hollywood. We do know that Columbia optioned one of his stories, and they made it into a serial movie, The Secret of Treasure Island. But the question is, how did L. Ron Hubbard go from science fiction to fictional science?

• 27:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And to explore that, we got to get into World War II and its history in the Navy. So he served in the Navy and ultimately, after he'd set off a billion depth he wound up in the hospital. And medical records show that, you know, he greatly exaggerated his condition. And L. Ron Hubbard, he was just, he is a fabulous, like, that's what he does. According to his diaries, though, it seems like he truly believed that he was in a, quote, "hopeless" state. So this is from his personal diaries. "Blinded with injured optic nerves and lame with physical injuries to hip and back at the end of World War II, I faced an almost nonexistent future. I was abandoned by my family and friends as a supposedly hopeless cripple."

• 28:35Chris Winterbauer?

  To be clear, his first marriage fell apart and he did struggle for years mentally, physically and financially. And in 1947, he wrote to the VA, Veterans Affairs, to ask for help. Quote, "I am utterly unable to approach anything like my own competence. My last physician informed me that it might be very helpful if I were to be examined and perhaps treated psychiatrically or even by a psychoanalyst. I avoided out of pride any mental examinations, hoping that time would balance a mind which I had every reason to suppose was seriously affected. I cannot myself afford such a treatment. Would you please help me?"

• 29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the aversion to psychology and psychiatry is so interesting because, you know, as many are quick to point out to his face, what you are selling seems to be a version of psychoanalysis. And he's so quick to say, no, no, no, that's for crazy people. And I don't know if it's because it was rejected by, like, the Board of Psychologists or what the deal is there, why he's so afraid of it.

• 29:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It's interesting. I think this was definitely a time, as we'll get to, when people were skeptical of psychiatric and psychological treatments. And Hubbard, it seems, didn't get the help he sought at first because he was too proud and then because his prayer or letter was not answered. And he falls in with a different, far more fringe crowd. Ordo templi orientis. So this is a black magic cult that traces back to German-speaking occultists and then was taken over by Aleister Crowley in 1910. The gist of it is, this particular sect of this cult was obsessed with the idea of impregnating a woman with the Antichrist, basically.

• 30:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and it was based in Pasadena. Hey, shout out.

• 30:30Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He then experimented with hypnotism. And according to some sources, he wrote a document called The Affirmations or The Admissions, where he basically tried to therapize himself with a list of mantras. Quote, "The purpose of this experiment is to reestablish the ambition, willpower, desire to survive, the talent and confidence of myself." I feel like there's just this interesting portrait of this person who really felt like he maybe had a purpose and he had willpower and desire and a place in the world. And then after World War II, he is completely destabilized and he is just trying, he's grasping at a lot of different straws. So eventually he claims, at least, that he started volunteering in a psychiatric clinic.

• 31:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And he wrote some letters to Robert Heinlein, claiming that he was curing patients of physical ailments. So for example, "One week ago, I brought in my first asthma cure. I have an arthritis to finish tomorrow," and so it goes. This is at a psychiatric clinic. So he's making claims that basically many of these physical ailments are in people's heads and I can solve them through...

• 31:39Lizzie Bassett?

  So it's not like a laying on of hands? It's like, these are psychosomatic conditions that I am...

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  No, he was very much in, as we'll discuss right now, his method, he was adamant, is science, not religion.

• 31:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Because he's writing a book about this method and he's and he really believes it works. In fact, he believes it works on kids. He said, quote, "I took a scared little kid who was supposed to be stupid and was failing everything and worked on him about 35 hours just to make sure. That was last month. So now he turns up this afternoon with all A's and all of a sudden he's reading Shakespeare." We should remember later on, Tom Cruise, for example, would claim that Scientology cured his dyslexia. So Hubbard calls this book "dianetics," which in the book, it says it's pulled from the Greek "dia," meaning through, and "nos," meaning mind. I also read it was pulled from the Greek word "dianoya," which means intellect or mind. It doesn't really matter. The point is, the book presents

• 32:37Chris Winterbauer?

  itself as irrefutable science. I bought a copy. I was reading through it, reading through the beginning. This is not a theory. This is not religion. This is fact. This is proven fact. In fact, these concepts have been around for thousands of years and nobody has ever been able to distill them or bring them together. You know, we've gotten close a couple of times. When were those times? Don't worry about it. But I have figured it out. How did I figure out? Don't worry about it. How does it work? Don't worry about it. It's a lot of just definitive declarative, "this works" statements without a lot of, "this is the process through which I came to these conclusions." But let's talk about the core concepts. The first one is the idea that all people have two minds. There's the analytical

• 33:20Chris Winterbauer?

  mind, which is logical, conscious, self-aware, records and stores information, solves problems, and the reactive mind, which houses fears, insecurities, and painful sense memories. Quote, "It does not remember. It records and uses the recordings only to produce action. It does not think. It selects recordings and impinges them upon the conscious mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of the individual."

• 33:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, this is not particularly far from Freud.

• 33:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So these subconscious recordings of painful memories, he calls "n-grams," and they cause, quote, "psychosomatic illnesses." Individuals can uncover, re-experience, and refile these n-grams via dianetic therapy with a trained auditor, who could be a therapist or just a friend. And with enough therapy, you can reach your highest, most stable form known as going clear.

• 34:04Lizzie Bassett?

  With enough auditing, Chris.

• 34:05Chris Winterbauer?

  With enough auditing. Yeah, you can reach clear. Like you mentioned, Lizzie, it mixes therapy speak with things like transcendental meditation. He is pulling, it is, it is the George Lucas, right?

• 34:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Chris Winterbauer?

  It is a pastiche master, right, at, at play here. So he sells an excerpt of the book to his old editor Campbell, who says, great, I will publish this in astounding science fiction, which seems like a perfect fit because it's kind of science fiction. But to be clear, Campbell's saying this is not science fiction. This is real. I want to read part of the introduction that he wrote. This article is not a hoax, joke, or anything but a direct, clear statement of a totally new scientific thesis. I know Dianetics is one of, if not the greatest discovery of all man's written and unwritten history. It produces the sort of stability and sanity men have dreamed about for centuries. And Campbell wasn't just being a supportive friend or an outlier. Dianetics, the modern

• 35:00Chris Winterbauer?

  science of mental health, was published in May of 1950, and it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 28 weeks. It was part of a bigger trend. So post-World War II, there's a large therapeutic culture that's developing, that's blending religion with psychology.

• 35:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, but to be clear, this is not being positioned as religion at this point.

• 35:20Chris Winterbauer?

  No, but it's taking elements of that and it's putting it with therapy into what's really being born is self-help in a lot of ways.

• 35:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not just the public that's interested in these ideas that seem far-fetched. You know, you've got institutes that are dedicated to ESP and PK exploration, both privately and publicly. You know, the Soviets and the United States government have launched respective programs that are exploring anomalous mental phenomena. And a lot of this was spurred by the discovery of Himmler's research into the occult, you know, during World War II. It's all tied together. But unlike the US government's pursuit of knowledge from military superiority, Hubbard's positioning Dianetics as a means to, quote, "denuclearize the world." He says, "Dianetics addresses war because there is in fact a race between the science of the mind and the atom box." There may be no future generation to know which one.

• 36:18Chris Winterbauer?

  And a New York Times critic even wrote, "History has become a race between Dianetics and catastrophe." Very smart marketing. This book will save the world. So Americans were also skeptical of psychoanalysis and psychiatry and may have been looking for an alternative that was less European, less Jewish, less expensive, and faster. They're looking for a life hack.

• 36:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Hubbard claimed that he could accomplish in 20 hours what psychoanalysis took years to achieve.

• 36:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's looks-maxing self-help.

• 36:51Chris Winterbauer?

  Also psychiatry was, to be fair, experimenting with some questionable methods, including lobotomies and electroshock therapy. Hubbard's also offering certainty. He compared Dianetics to the discovery of fire. He said it's simpler than physics or chemistry, but far more useful, and that it is an exact science. He had no medical license. He had no formal scientific data. A lot of psychologists, though, actually claimed that they incorporated some aspects of Dianetics into their work.

• 37:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, look, in terms of asking you to, like, basically re-experience potentially traumatic memories and to, like, allow yourself to be open to the possibility of, you know, things that may come to the surface that you are not aware of, and then to actually walk you back through experiencing them, yes, those are real treatments. Those exist in other forms of, you know, psychoanalysis, and they do, there is evidence to suggest that they work. I don't know that they are entirely original to L. Ron Hubbard at all. And also, when you put them in the context of what he was doing with them, they become an awful lot less legitimate.

• 37:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, so to be clear, most of the scientific community has rejected Dianetics outright, and they did at the time. Lawrence Wright said they saw it as, quote, you know, "psychological folk art." One critic said, basically, Hubbard has started to believe the fiction that he's written.

• 38:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 38:12Chris Winterbauer?

  "Anybody writing several million words of fantasy and science fiction should ultimately begin to internalize the assumptions underlying the verbiage." "Dianetics" was called a cult, a fast-selling mental snakebite remedy, the poor man's psychoanalysis, and it was a major craze. Hubbard traveled the country giving lectures. He would sell $500 professional auditor courses. People started auditing each other at home. This reminds me, later in the 80s, you'd have, like, Yuri Geller, if you remember Lizzie, who would bend spoons famously, and you'd have spoon-bending parties at home. The crowd that was most interested, according to Wright, was young to middle-aged, white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some saw it as a promising new field to work in, others were looking for a new faith,

• 38:55Chris Winterbauer?

  and a lot of people, Lizzie, just had mental and physical issues and were desperate for a cure. And Dianetics comes in as a quick fix. And what industry loves a quick fix? Especially with its persnickety little actors.

• 39:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Hollywood.

• 39:11Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Your actress is having weird confidence problems? Audit.

• 39:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Ah.

• 39:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Your actor is having a hard time with his accent? He needs an audit. One newspaper claimed the three film studios had consulted Hubbard about how to use his method to, quote, "make movie stars better than ever." Hubbard claims to have fixed Kim Hunter's attempt at a southern accent when he was visiting the set of a streetcar named Desire. And then he witnessed Betsy Drake and Patricia Neal—come on, Patricia—auditing one another. He even claimed that Dianetics would cut down on Hollywood suicides and divorces. And he hired Richard DeMille, son of Cecil B. DeMille, as his personal assistant. So Dianetics burns bright. But it burns fast. If you search for mentions of the word "Dianetics" in California newspapers in the year 1950, you get nearly 2,000 results.

• 40:00Chris Winterbauer?

  In 1951, that drops to just under 1,000, and in 52, it's only 118. And even some of Hubbard's closest supporters, like Don Campbell's brother-in-law, who was a physician, cut ties with him when they realized that the science behind it wasn't exactly formal. Plus, as you know, Lizzie, Elrond Hubbard spends a lot of money. He goes into debt, declares bankruptcy. One of his financial backers claims ownership of Dianetics' assets and copyrights. And Hubbard showed that he was far from clear. They go into much more detail about this in Going Clear, but in the two years since the book was published, he kidnapped his own daughter, absconded with her to Cuba, had a bunch of affairs, destroyed his marriage to a second wife, who married him under threat of suicide, and he was abusive towards, physically and emotionally.

• 40:45Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he married again. And also, all three of his marriages overlapped. Technically, he was a bigamist. He was a serial bigamist.

• 40:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Chris, are you a bigamist, though, if you are an operating thetan?

• 40:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yes.

• 40:56Lizzie Bassett?

  No. No. Rules don't apply.

• 40:59Chris Winterbauer?

  But several articles that debated the legitimacy of Dianetics in the early 50s concluded that, if nothing else, it demonstrated the craving of many Americans for improved mental care. And maybe that's why it would survive with a little rebrand.

• 41:14Chris Winterbauer?

  So Hubbard goes to Europe, pivots to something new, Scientology. Which wasn't really a new name. I didn't know this. The name existed before. A British philologist had used it to refer to pseudoscientific theories in the early 20th century. And then a German philosopher who believed in racial hygiene used it again in the 1930s. And Hubbard just said, "Well, nobody's heard it for a while. I'll use it for my thing right now."

• 41:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Chris Winterbauer?

  So Scientology was not at odds with Dianetics. It just expanded it. And this is where we go from kind of pseudoscience self-help book into religion. The core concept that's added here is what you just mentioned, Lizzie. The concept of an immortal human soul known as a thetan, T-H-E-T-A-N. Now, initially, it was not introduced as a religious concept. And Hubbard tried to make it seem scientific. And by this point, he had introduced what's, I think, perhaps the most well-known aspect of Scientology, which is the electro-psycometer, or the E-meter. Lizzie, could you describe, you just watched it going clear, could you describe the E-meter to me?

• 42:10Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't, are people wearing something when they're?

• 42:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it's like one-third of a lie detector test. Basically, you're gripping two metal tubes.

• 42:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, that's right. You grip the rods, essentially. And then someone is operating the E-meter. And what they're doing is they're watching a needle. And they're, they're saying, like, as they see the needle move, they're asking you to, like, return to the memory or the thought that you had, depending on certain movements of the needle. And then the whole point is to release that thought or that engram, right?

• 42:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. The idea is, like, the higher the reading, the more intense the engram that you're exploring.

• 42:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 42:47Chris Winterbauer?

  What we learn, what we're really getting into, or we will get into, is blackmail very, very quickly.

• 42:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Chris Winterbauer?

  But at this point in time, he's expanding all of these concepts. So engrams now include prenatal memories, AKA, quote, "sperm dreams," past lives. And past lives, this was very popular at the time. You know, even in today, there's fascination with the idea of recovered memories, for example. And there's not a lot of science behind that. And it's, like, very debated how valid this is. And you get into issues with, you know, for example, like, a lot of the satanic panic was built around.

• 43:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. There are fame, the famous example of this is Michelle remembers during the Satanic panic. If you're not familiar with what that is, very worth looking at. Also, fun fact, my dad was at a cocktail party at one point and somewhat recently. And I believe a woman started referring to like past life trauma.

• 43:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Lizzie Bassett?

  With him and he, I think exited the conversation relatively quickly.

• 43:43Chris Winterbauer?

  My point is that, you know, it feels, the way that Hubbard packages this feels unusual, but he's again, taking a lot of concepts that have purchase in different, you know, groups and parts of the country.

• 43:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. And I also want to be clear, if something helps you, I don't care. Like do whatever you want. It's when it becomes something you are pushing on other people or using to control or manipulate other people that it becomes a problem.

• 44:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's talk about those other people. So Hubbard starts giving lectures in 52. He starts publishing a series of books, which would later become, you know, The History of Man, Scientology 8-800-8088, The Factors. And he is preaching to a choir. This is the most loyal group of his followers. And he, you know, he needs to turn this into a scalable business. So he introduces the idea of franchising. The idea is basically like satellite organizations are going to pay him for the training, plus a 10% tithe, basically, so they can practice his techniques. And in 1953, he officially converts Scientology into a religion. Why? For money.

• 44:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 44:46Chris Winterbauer?

  This is a quote from Hubbard. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start a religion. Now Hubbard wasn't sure how people would react to the religion angle. He even asked his secretary for her opinion. In early 1953, he wrote to her, I await your reaction on the religion angle. In my opinion, we couldn't get worse public opinion than what we have had or have less customers with what we've got to sell. I sure could make it stick. I think he viewed the religion angle as necessary to the financial future of Scientology. And it turns out he's pivoting at the right time because the US is experiencing another post-war religious boom. Hubbard creates the Hubbard Scientology Association of America. He opens churches in New Jersey, California, DC.

• 45:27Chris Winterbauer?

  He encourages franchise holders around the country to convert their Scientology and Dianetics. ...into independent churches. And if you guys have seen the Going Clear documentary, you may be familiar with the Scientology strategy or term fair game. Basically, anytime the church is attacked in any way, attack back with force. Think Sean Connery's speech in The Untouchables. And Lizzie, you could do a better accent than me. But you know, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. You send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue. That's the Scientology way.

• 45:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 45:56Chris Winterbauer?

  So as early as 1955, he's writing to his followers that we should be very alert to sue for slander at the slightest chance, so as to discourage the public press from mentioning Scientology, which is not exactly a turn-the-other-cheek methodology. But while he wanted to keep Scientology out of the press, he did want attention from one specific group. Lizzie, who did he want attention from?

• 46:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Hollywood.

• 46:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Hollywood.

• 46:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Hollywood was a key part of Hubbard's strategy. In an early issue of Scientology magazine called Ability, he described Project Celebrity. I can't remember if he talked about Project Celebrity in Battlefielders.

• 46:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I think we did.

• 46:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Just to recap, celebrities are key to the success of Scientology. When they talk, America listens. And the goal of the operation is to stalk these, quote, "prime communicators" and pressure them into an auditing session. He's looking to make an army of influencers. He included in the magazine a list of celebrities, and he told the reader to pick one and, quote, "Write us at once, so the notable will be yours to hunt without interference. It will be up to you to learn what you can about your quarry and put yourself at every hand across his or her path, not permitting discouragements, or no's, or clerks, or secretaries to intervene in the days, weeks, or months. These celebrities are well-guarded, well-barricaded, overworked, aloof quarry. If you bring one of them home,

• 47:17Chris Winterbauer?

  you will get a small plaque as your reward." Which, like, that's not a big prize for bagging a fish like these. Do you want to hear some of the names?

• 47:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Chris Winterbauer?

  These are, this is a list of published names in this magazine.

• 47:29Lizzie Bassett?

  And sorry, what year is this?

• 47:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It'd be 1955.

• 47:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 47:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Or so, the mid to late 50s. Yeah, 1955.

• 47:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 47:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I'll read some names. Edward Armuro. Ed Sullivan, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Sid Caesar, Liberace, John Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hughes, I feel like you could have gotten him, Billy Graham, Bob Hope, Walt Disney, Milton Berle, Jackie Gleason, Joe Louis, Vincent Price, Groucho Marx, Darryl Zanuck, Cecil B. DeMille, Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo, and many, many more. Definitely, it's male, and it's very high level.

• 48:12Lizzie Bassett?

  It's also just a shotgun blast. There's not a lot of like-

• 48:16Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no strategy.

• 48:17Lizzie Bassett?

  No, there's zero strategy. There's people in there that I don't know that you want advertising your religion, even at the time. And then there's people that make a ton of sense. Ed Sullivan, Bob Hope, like, these people that could really legitimize it. Jimmy Stewart, there's certain names on there. You're not getting Marlene Dietrich. Are you kidding? She would rip your hairpiece off. Like, there's no way.

• 48:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Even, like, Pablo Picasso is-

• 48:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, good luck there, too.

• 48:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the church starts attracting unwanted attention. In 1963, the FDA raided the DC church, and they seized its E-meters because Scientology had claimed they could cure neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, and all psychosomatic illnesses. So, obviously, if you're gonna make a claim that you have a product that can clear- you have to get FDA approval.

• 49:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Chris Winterbauer?

  So, as they grow, Hubbard creates a more formal system. He's got a PR department. He's got an intelligence system that's investigating the communist criminals that criticize Scientology. We discussed this before, Lizzie. He makes the Sea Org, which is his private navy, but it's basically, you know, his clergy, and it's almost a form of slave labor. He introduces the concept of a suppressive person. This is somebody who's, in any way, critical of the church or its practices. The policy of disconnection, which is where you cut off, you know, anybody in your life who is not supportive of your endeavors. Again, this is, these are things that are used in multi-level marketing, for example, very commonly.

• 49:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Very common in cults.

• 49:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And then he formalizes the concept of the fair game law. The fair game law, by the way, is like, everything is fair game when it comes to us dealing with a suppressive person. They can be tricked, lied to, or destroyed.

• 49:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 49:53Chris Winterbauer?

  He also established the structure of paying for subsequent levels of enlightenment along the bridge of total freedom. So the bridge of total freedom is the levels that you go up to reach your clear status, the operating Satan levels. It's, again, multi-level marketing structure, self-help life coaching structure, wellness structure. These are a lot of the same practices used in, in marketing and branding, for example, for these, you know, very manipulative business practices.

• 50:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, and I think something that the documentary does such a good job of explaining is that so much of this becomes sunk cost. Because when you are paying for each rung of the bridge, not a ladder, as you said, you might really like what's in one, and then you get to the next level, and it's really fucking weird. And then you go, okay, well, I already paid for three of these, so I'm gonna see what the next one is. And then it goes on and on and on. And I don't know if you noticed this, by the way, but I know that when you get to a certain level of clear, you get to open the briefcase, and you get to read the, the creation story of Scientology. And all I could think about when they were talking about that was John Travolta opening the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. And I was like, is Quentin Tarantino doing that on purpose?

• 51:06Chris Winterbauer?

  And the whole idea in Pulp Fiction is that it's Marcellus Wallace's soul, right, in the suitcase, which is also interesting with the Satan, you know, I don't know if that was on purpose by Tarantino or not, but it is interesting. I also do want to mention, you know, this does evoke indulgences from the Catholic Church, which was a practice from hundreds of years prior, where, you know, you could reduce the amount of punishment that you underwent for your forgiven sins by paying the church. And it, you know, it started as a way to raise money for charitable causes, and then quickly became corrupted into something gnarly. As most of these things do, you know, they can start with interesting, potentially helpful ideas, or the desire to help yourself or other people, and it can metastasize in kind of gnarly ways.

• 51:51Chris Winterbauer?

  So in part, there is a tendency for key practitioners to break off and start their own sects. So Hubbard introduced also the idea that some levels of Scientology must be kept confidential. So we also get the first rule of Fight Club, don't talk about Fight Club. So the public attention was a double edged sword. Some felt it was doing Scientology more harm than good. But as you mentioned, Lizzie, earlier, others argue that the government raids made Scientology look like an underdog, right? They were able to exploit this sort of victim status constantly. So in 67, the IRS officially revoked their tax exempt status. And by this point, Hubbard's gone back to Europe, settled in England, he's established the Scientology Worldwide Management Control Center. And in the mid

• 52:32Chris Winterbauer?

  70s, he really ups his game by assigning his wife to head Operation Snow White, which is an organized infiltration of US government agencies that were critical of Scientology. Basically, they send Scientologists out to get jobs at the IRS and FTC, for example, and steal files to use as blackmail. It's crazy.

• 52:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So at the same time, he's buying historic LA buildings, the Chateau Elise, is that how you say it, Lizzie?

• 52:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Probably.

• 52:59Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the Celebrity Center now. And Operation Celebrity had started to attract some big names. So Leonard Cohen took classes in New York, Priscilla Presley joined, Jerry Seinfeld took a communication course in the mid 70s, Chick Corea read the Red Dianetics in the late 60s, he became involved in the church.

• 53:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Chick Corea is on the album Space Jazz that is featured.

• 53:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And as the companion to Battlefield Earth.

• 53:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Ann Archer in 1975.

• 53:27Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 53:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, she was formerly a Christian scientist, and then she converted to Scientology. That was a kind of another common thing was like, you know, the more obscure Christian sect or Pentecostal sect, and then you move into Scientology.

• 53:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, now I'm Team Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. What can I tell you?

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, who was the big fish that converted in 1975? We just talked about him.

• 53:45Lizzie Bassett?

  John Travolta.

• 53:45Chris Winterbauer?

  John Travolta at the age of 21. This is the same year he gets his big break in Welcome Back Cotter, Vinnie Barbary. So why were these celebrities attracted to Scientology? We talked about this a little bit earlier, but Jenna Miscavige, niece of David Miscavige, argues that the experience of Scientology for celebrities is much different than the average person. So unlike the average person, they're not going to be hounded for money, right? You can move through the coursework at your own pace. They are not exposed to any of the corruption behind the curtain. So, you know, low wages, poor living conditions, going clear goes into this in more detail. They're offered communication courses that are, you know, catered to their industry. Let us help you feel more comfortable in your auditions. Let us improve your networking, for example.

• 54:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it's hard to express or hard to capture sometimes how insecure it can feel even when you're succeeding in Hollywood. You really feel like you are one false step away from falling all the way back down to the bottom.

• 54:41Lizzie Bassett?

  And also, you know, and they discuss this in the documentary as well, but any major successes you are having at that time, Scientology is really set up to convince you that those are because of Scientology.

• 54:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So. Well, and at least it makes it enough of a question, right? Which is like.

• 54:58Lizzie Bassett?

  What would happen if I dropped this?

• 55:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Like you've got this rabbit's paw, you know what I mean, foot like in your pocket that is Scientology. And you, I mean, again, actors, athletes, anybody who performs, I feel like is perhaps more superstitious in some ways, right? We know this, like, we all, we develop a routine that we don't want to break. And if, and if we do, oh, that's why this, this didn't, this didn't go right. And so this plays into that.

• 55:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. And also, we talk about this on the podcast all the time, but actors are, just by nature of the position, they have potentially the least control over their own careers out of almost any position in Hollywood. And that's not knocking actors, because it takes an enormous amount of mental fortitude to be able to deal with that.

• 55:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh yeah, that has nothing to do with them. It's just the way the system is designed.

• 55:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 55:48Chris Winterbauer?

  They're entirely fungible at the end of the day.

• 55:50Lizzie Bassett?

  So it is not an accident that the people that they are mostly targeting are not creators so much as they are actors.

• 55:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And bad press can destroy an actor.

• 56:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 56:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And so the auditing process, as Lawrence Wright points out, and the church's attitude toward defectors, and the fact that especially under David Miscavige, they film and record these auditing sessions.

• 56:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, sometimes without your knowledge.

• 56:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. This means that sometimes the celebrities who have joined are very vulnerable if they leave. The organization literally has recordings of your deepest, darkest secrets, and their policy is to attack their critics. And to be clear, much of this is illegal. So in 1979, five Scientology members, including Hubbard's third wife, Mary Sue, were fined and sentenced to prison for their involvement in Operation Snow White. And in 1980, just before he turned 69, Hubbard went into seclusion. Two years later, he published what, Lizzie?

• 56:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Battlefield Earth.

• 56:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That we discuss, and Space Jazz, its accompanying soundtrack.

• 56:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Indeed, a space opera.

• 56:50Chris Winterbauer?

  And, you know, it's interesting. It did not get terrible reviews. It got very mixed reviews. Some people said, it's, look, this is kind of nonsense. And other people said, look, this is a fun ride that hearkens back to the golden age of science fiction. What we also know is that the church reportedly pressured members into buying multiple copies of it to make sure it was a bestseller.

• 57:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Chris Winterbauer?

  The New York Times reported that two Scientology organizations bought 30,000 copies of the book at discount directly from the publisher. And it seems like in part that was because they wanted to make sure that somebody would buy the film rights because Hubbard, I think, desperately wanted it to become a movie. But Hubbard would never see it reach the screen. The film rights were purchased, but it wouldn't become a movie until 1999, I believe, as we've discussed in Battlefield Earth. And Hubbard died in January of 1986 at the age of 74, at his ranch just outside of San Luis Obispo. He had a stroke in his sleep.

• 57:39Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he didn't, Chris. He went to a new level of clear.

• 57:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, no, he did. They do say that. I mean, they say that, you know, he will continue his work without his body.

• 57:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Exactly.

• 57:48Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the announcement that David Miscavige made. To be fair, that's kind of what a lot of religions More or less preach and and believe. I think if you think about a lot of the organizations that came before Scientology in Los Angeles, these are such personality driven endeavors in so many ways. And so I think there was a real question as to whether or not Scientology would really last after L. Ron Hubbard. But it has this kind of interesting situation of almost like a dual succession that takes place. Internally, you've got David Miscavige and Lizzie, you know, David Miscavige, you saw just saw him in the documentary. How would you describe David Miscavige to somebody?

• 58:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh.

• 58:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Scary.

• 58:37Chris Winterbauer?

  A Tom Cruiseian intensity, perhaps?

• 58:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, beyond.

• 58:41Chris Winterbauer?

  In a different way.

• 58:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's if L. Ron Hubbard, like, look, does L. Ron Hubbard look like Dr. Finkelstein from Nightman before Christmas? Yes, but when you watch videos of him, there is a certain warmth to him where I think you could understand how his charisma came into play when forming this religion. David Miscavige is completely devoid of charisma. He's like, if you took the the darkness behind Tom Cruise's eyes and gave it 0% of his charm, that's David Miscavige.

• 59:21Lizzie Bassett?

  He reads as so determined, so intent, so deeply sure of himself. He's very scary to watch.

• 59:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a zealot is the way I would describe it through and through. He had been in, he, to be clear, had been a Scientologist since age 11. Miscavige was effectively born into this or brought into it by his parents. This is not somebody who came to this in adulthood. He was raised in Scientology since age 11 and he had been close with Hubbard from a young age. He was, you know, he would assist him as like an assistant cameraman on some of their, you know, internal video productions, et cetera. In 1986, Miss Cabbage takes over, and this is the same year that Scientology attracts its biggest celebrity yet. Lizzie?

• 1:00:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Timmy Cruz.

• 1:00:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Timmy Thomas.

• 1:00:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Mappathor.

• 1:00:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Mappathor.

• 1:00:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Chris Winterbauer?

  The second, or third, or fourth.

• 1:00:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Tom Cruise.

• 1:00:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't remember. Tom Cruise. He'd been introduced to the religion through his first wife, Mamie Rogers, and he had just starred in Top Gun. Tom Cruise is one of the biggest stars on the planet at this point, and his star will only continue to rise for the next 10 to 20 years. He developed a close relationship with Miss Cabbage, and he later credited Scientology with curing his dyslexia. Now Scientology, to be clear, is under increasing pressure at this time. There's a class action suit from former members. They were ordered to pay $30 million to another former member, although I did read that they appealed and settled that out of the court. And Miss Cabbage was trying to clean up the church's image. So a 91 Time Magazine article called Scientology "a ruthless global scam that was aiming for

• 1:01:04Chris Winterbauer?

  the mainstream." According to the Cult Awareness Network, "No group prompts more telephone pleas for help than does Scientology," and they were still battling the IRS for tax exemption. So according to Lauren's right, thousands of Scientologists simultaneously sued the IRS and individual IRS employees.

• 1:01:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:01:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Which contributed to the IRS eventually granting Scientology tax-exempt status in 1993. The story goes, basically, you know, "We'll make these lawsuits go away if you give us our status." And it becomes this huge win. You can see the video. Lizzie, you saw it.

• 1:01:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:01:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like, you know, Miss Cabbage announcing to a stadium full of Scientologists that the, quote, "war is over."

• 1:01:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you know what's amazing about that announcement, though, is that he doesn't say, "The war is over because we have been recognized as a legitimate religion." What he says is, "The war is over. We are officially tax-exempt." Sir, at least fake it. Like, I understand all you care about is the money, but...

• 1:01:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you know what he says? It's like, you can, finally, you will get tax deductions on all the donations you make to Scientology.

• 1:02:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:02:08Chris Winterbauer?

  It's interesting. Yeah, it's all about the business.

• 1:02:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Chris Winterbauer?

  But then their best soldier goes a bit MIA.

• 1:02:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Because of one tall Australian drink of water.

• 1:02:18Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He meets and marries Nicole Kidman. He met her working on Days of Thunder. Her father was a well-known psychologist in Australia, AKA by his very nature, an SP, a suppressive person. So Kidman gets labeled a PTS, potential tall, no, potential trouble source. So former members claim that there was a coordinated campaign to drive Cruz and Kidman apart. But I actually think in what is such an odd and tragic and ironic twist, it may have been Stanley Kubrick, who was most responsible for ending their marriage, and in a way, returning Tom Cruise to the very religion that had attracted his daughter

• 1:03:01Chris Winterbauer?

  away and caused an estrangement between Kubrick and his daughter Vivian. So Vivian had become a Scientologist in the 90s, and she and her father had stopped talking. So at the same time, the shoot is, you know, again, this is a troubled shoot. We covered it on this podcast, Lizzie, and just how much it may have contributed to Cruz and Kidman's marital issues, we will never know. There is an incredible amount of speculation, but we do know that they divorced in 2001.

• 1:03:27Lizzie Bassett?

  I want to say this because I feel like we grew up in the era of there being so many stories about Tom Cruise, which I'm sure we'll get into. And many of them were that, oh, Tom Cruise is secretly gay. And like, that's the thing that Scientology is hiding and that, oh, this marriage to Nicole Kidman was entirely arranged. I just want to say, that makes zero sense. I 100% believe that these two were in love with each other, that like, there's, he had no, there was nothing advantageous for him about being with her from the perspective of Scientology, which he was extremely embedded in. And it made it very hard for him. Like, I, I think they, I think they were absolutely real. And I understand the appeal on both sides.

• 1:04:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree with you. And this brings us kind of, we're coming up now to War of the Worlds and where we're going to touch off on Monday. So I'm not a fan of religion, as our audience knows, any religion, it's just, it tends not to be for me. But I went to a memorial last weekend, and so I was back in a church, I don't often go into churches, and I was reminded of the power of, of these institutions. You go into a church, and I mean, there is something. A bit awe inspiring about it, you know, there is something about being in a space where everybody's facing the same direction and dedicated to the same thing and you're not on your phone and there is something solemn and spiritual about it.

• 1:04:50Chris Winterbauer?

  I find it so fascinating that at this exact moment, so Cruz of the 90s, you look at the roles that he's taking, right? And it culminates in 99 with these two fascinating roles in Magnolia. And Eyes Wide Shut.

• 1:05:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Both of which feel about as far from the image that they had been crafting for him as you could get and are two of his best performances.

• 1:05:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Two deeply flawed men with shattered ideas of masculinity in very different ways. He and I, I think the Kubrick shoot, he would never say anything bad about Kubrick. Cruz never says anything bad about the people he works with for the most part. I think that shoot like was incredibly disillusioning for him at working with his hero and not having it go well famously. Infamously Kubrick was extremely positive toward Kidman and supportive of her performance and then made Cruz do everything 100 times. And I think it broke Tom Cruise's brain as an actor. And what I find so interesting then is that if you look at his transition into the early 2000s, he goes back into the fold with Scientology.

• 1:05:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And almost all of the movies that he starts taking in the early 2000s are big budget action hero movies.

• 1:06:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Very safe.

• 1:06:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Not all of them, but many, and you know, we're talking Minority Report, The Last Samurai, Mission Impossible 2, I know Collateral's an outlier in that he plays the villain in that one. His star rises in the world of Scientology and he gets put in a way on this collision course with War of the Worlds where on the one hand, it makes complete sense that he's going to tackle a movie that has so many things to do with the golden age of science fiction and given his, you know, relationship with L. Ron Hubbard. And it makes complete sense that he and Spielberg are going to team up again. But all of the worlds that Cruz had so expertly kept separate from one another in a lot of ways. Collide in a very spectacular fashion with the release of War of the Worlds,

• 1:06:47Chris Winterbauer?

  which we will get into on Monday. So, Lizzie, that's really concludes our coverage of, you know, the history of Scientology, how Tom Cruise came into it, and where the organization stood when we were heading into the early to mid 2000s.

• 1:07:03Lizzie Bassett?

  It really is interesting because, and we've talked about this with Tom Cruise before, but the roles that he took prior to this turning point, and it really is, the divorce with Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut really is an enormous turning point for him, both personally and professionally. It's a turning point in the way that he is perceived, which I think goes in a direction that he did not anticipate when we get into, you know, Katie Holmes and everything. But what it looks like to me is that he experienced one of the most destabilizing situations in his life, both on that movie set and in the

• 1:07:46Lizzie Bassett?

  dissolution of his marriage to Nicole Kidman. And what Scientology then offers him is absolute certainty. If you watch these videos of him being awarded, and this is all after, you know, of him onstage with David Miscavige, there will always be a place at that point that he can go where he knows exactly what he's going to get, and it's going to be, you know, total adoration and power, and that is the Church of Scientology. Now, we don't know how aware he is of, you know, the price that he and others are paying, but it sure looks like he's okay with it. I mean,

• 1:08:31Lizzie Bassett?

  it's, if you're someone who is deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty, I totally understand the appeal of what he is being offered by the Church.

• 1:08:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And we will get into what he offers in return with our coverage of War of the Worlds on Monday.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom Podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.