It might seem strange to call a filmmaker a writer of perfect essays, but that’s an apt description of Alex Gibney. The director consistently turns out potent work that brims with intelligence and never loses its precision despite the great passion propelling it. Having just followed up a documentary about one popular storyteller (L. Ron Hubbard) with a film about another one (Steve Jobs), Gibney did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
Have any Scientologists done anything in retribution for Going Clear to you personally? I thought it was a great documentary by the way.
Alex Gibney:
They have tried to make my life uncomfortable through online harassment and occasional in-person confrontations. But it’s what they are doing to the subjects of the film that is really terrible. Those who appeared have reported harassment by PIs, economic and physical threats and lots of on-line vilification.
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Question:
My question is about Going Clear. At the end of the film, you display a list of high ranking Scientologists who refused to be interviewed or never responded to your interview requests. Among those is Tom Cruise and Captain David Miscavige. What would you like to have asked these men, if you had been given the opportunity?
Alex Gibney:
I would have asked them both about specific aspects of the story. For example, I would have asked Cruise detailed questions about the Nazanin Boniadi episode. I also would have asked him how it is that he can defend the allegations of human rights abuses that have been confirmed by so many. Re: Miscavige, I would have asked him detailed questions about the battle against the IRS and also about the hole and the Cruise wiretap and so much much more. I find it instructive that Miscavige won’t permit anyone to ask him questions.
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Question:
Do you see Scientology continuing to have tax exempt status, or do you think the “religion” is on the way out?
Alex Gibney:
I fear that the IRS doesn’t have the courage to take on Scientology. I think they should lose their exemption because they are really a money-making organization disguised as a religion and because the church has an appalling human rights record. Why should we subsidize that? I wrote a piece about this in the L.A. Times.
Question:
Isn’t that pretty much true of all organized religions?
Alex Gibney:
Depends. I don’t have any problem with subsidizing anti-poverty programs. But I think the exemption should be based on that – which in theory it is supposed to be – rather than on belief in a deity.
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Question:
What do you make of Pope Francis and his tenure as Pontiff? Shockingly, MEA MAXIMA CULPA gave me more respect for Pope Benedict, and I lost a lot of respect for Pope John Paul II.
Alex Gibney:
I am truly impressed by Pope Francis. I love his principled stands on the growing disparity between rich and poor and the destruction of our environment. He has changed things more than I ever thought possible and acted as a moral force for change for everyone. I find it appalling that prominent wealthy Catholics suggest that he should not involve himself in economic issues. If a Pope can’t talk about morality and economic justice, he shouldn’t be Pope.
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Question:
What were you most surprised to learn about Steve Jobs?
Alex Gibney:
Three things. 1) I was fascinated to find out about his interest in zen. What CEO has a monk as a spiritual advisor? 2) I was surprised to learn how much the teams at Apple took care of invention of the actual products. Steve was more of a storyteller.
Speaking about Going Clear, Andrew O’Hehir a new Salon Q&A with Lawrence Wright. Many religions begin as bizarre cults and only survive if they can (mostly) shed the weirdness and stabilize, the sideshow far from the middle ring. Wright believes that could happen with Scientology. An excerpt:
Andrew O’Hehir:
You just said that you think this film could provoke a crisis that might help Scientology. I think it’s useful to point out, as you have done many times, that you did not actually set out to do a gotcha or an exposé.
Lawrence Wright:
Why bother? It’s the most stigmatized religion in America. An exposé, so what? But it is really interesting to understand why people are drawn in to the church. What do they get out of it and why do they stay? If you can understand that, in reference to a belief system that most people regard as very bizarre and has a reputation for being incredibly vindictive and litigious, then you might understand other social and religious and political movements that arise and take very good, kind, idealistic, intelligent, skeptical people and turn them into people they wouldn’t otherwise recognize.
Andrew O’Hehir:
The larger question here that you’re beginning to hint at is what makes a religion a religion? What does that word mean? The IRS has its own ideas, but …
Lawrence Wright:
Let’s start with the IRS because they’re the only agency empowered to make this distinction. It’s not exactly stocked full of theologians either. The way they determined that Scientology was a religion was to make a deal, because they were under legal siege of 2,400 lawsuits. Essentially, Scientology bludgeoned them into this tax exemption, which now denominates them as a religion. Previously, they were seen as a business enterprise and that’s the way they are seen in some European countries. Also, they are seen as a cult or a sect in Europe. But we call them a religion and I’m willing to accept that. It stretches the boundaries, clearly, but if you think of a religion having a set of scriptures – well L. Ron Hubbard still holds the Guinness record for the number of titles by a single author, as far as I know, more than 1,000. It’s a record that’s very hard to eclipse. Everything he wrote is considered a scripture by Scientology, even his novels.
Andrew O’Hehir:
Really? Battlefield Earth is a work of scripture?
Lawrence Wright:
Yes, it’s all scripture. It’s tax-exempt. There’s a huge body of work, not all of it fiction, having to do with ethics and psychology and so on that the church considers its literature. It functions as a community. Really, a religion is only separated from the rest of society by a circle of beliefs. So in that sense, sometimes the stranger the beliefs and the more exotic, the more bound together the community inside that circle is, and I think that’s true of Scientology. There is an origin story that may be a little bit bizarre, but bizarre beliefs are common in religion because religion is a belief in irrational things.•
A couple of weeks before Alex Gibney’s documentary adaptation of Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear debuts on HBO, here’s a repost of five earlier entries about the religion pulp-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard wrought.
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“A Year Ago, L. Ron Hubbard Was An Obscure Writer Of Pseudoscientific Pulp Fiction”
The opening of Albert Q. Maisel’s highly skeptical1950 Look magazine articleabout a new pseudoscience, something called “Dianetics,” conceived by pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard:
A year ago, L. Ron Hubbard was an obscure writer of pseudoscientific pulp fiction. Today he has:
.. Half a million devout followers.
.. A foundation with a chain of bustling branches stretching from Elizabeth, N.J. to far-off Honolulu.
.. The best-selling nonfiction book since Dale Carnegie discovered the secret of success.
.. A swarm of pop-eyed students, who stand in line for the privilege of plunking down 500 bucks for a one-month course which converts them into “professional auditors,” complete with a couch and capable of outpsyching any ordinary psychiatrist.
.. Even larger and faster-growing tribes who pay $200 each for the 15-lecture short course – or $25 an hour to have their ‘cases opened’ by $500 professional auditors.
.. And a small army of associate members, at a mere 15 smackers each, who gratefully keep up with the whirlwind developments of Hubbard’s new ‘science’ of dianetics through the Dianetics Auditors Bulletin.
Dianetics and the Discovery of Fire
Hubbard, you may gather from the foregoing, has discovered the key to success and demonstrated once again that Barnum underestimated the sucker birth rate.
But that, by Hubbard’s own admission, is probably the least of his discoveries.
Unencumbered by the modesty that hog-ties ordinary mortals, Hubbard starts his book – THE BOOK, his followers call it – with the calm assertion that ‘the creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.’
A few lines beyond, one learns that, with dianetics, ‘the intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psychosomatic ills and inorganic aberrations.’
Farther on, one discovers that these psychosomatic ills, ‘uniformly cured by dianetic therapy.’ include such varied maladies as eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, some heart difficulties, migraine headaches and the common cold.
But you ain’t heard nothing yet.•
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“They Become Fanatics On The Subject, Impervious To Argument, Quick To Cut Themselves Off From Doubters”
The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder spotlighted at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L Ron Hubbard’s voice, deep and professional. It is a tape called ‘Some Aspects of Help, Part 1,’ a basic lecture’ in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.
No one in the intensely respectable Los Angeles audience of 500 — some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in — thought it odd to be sitting there listening to a disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its founder are beyond frivolous question. Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to ‘a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . .’ and ‘for the first time in all ages there is something that ….delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well.’
So much of a credo might be regarded as harmless — practically indistinguishable from any number of minor schemes for the improvement of Man. But Scientology is scary — because of its size and growth, and because of the potentially disastrous techniques it so casually makes use of. To attain the Truth, a Scientologist surrenders himself to “auditing,” a crude form of psychoanalysis. In the best medical circumstances this is a delicate procedure, but in Scientology it is undertaken by an ‘auditor’ who is simply another Scientologist in training, who uses an ‘E-meter,’ which resembles a lie detector. A government report, made to the parliament of the State of Victoria in Australia three years ago, called Scientology ‘the worlds largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ As author Alan Levy found out by personal experience ‘pages 100B – 114′, the auditing experience can be shattering.
How many souls have become hooked on Scientology is impossible to say precisely. Worldwide membership — England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. — is probably between two and three million. In the U.S. offices in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and seven other cities, the figure may now be more than several hundred thousand. What is astonishing — and frightening — is the rate of growth in the U.S.: membership has probably tripled or quadrupled in the past three years.
Recruits to Scientology are most often young, intelligent and idealistic. They become fanatics on the subject, impervious to argument, quick to cut themselves off from doubters. Many young people have been instructed by their Scientology organizations ‘orgs,’ they are called to ‘disconnect’ from their families. ‘Disconnect’ means exactly that: sever all relations. Such estrangements can be deep and lasting, leaving heartsick parents no longer able to speak rationally with their children.
Scientology is expensive.”•
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“They Take The Best And Brightest People And Destroy Them”
“By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help ‘philosophy’ group he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. ‘We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,’ Lottick says. ‘I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them.’ The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to ‘clear’ people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner.”•
What initially brought Burroughs to the Scientologists?
David S. Wills:
Well that’s the first half of the book right there… In a nutshell, he was a deeply disturbed man. He was abused as a child, troubled by his homosexuality, accidentally killed his wife, and was hooked on drugs for decades. He sought out many “cures” for his problems and despite being obviously intelligent in many ways, was incredibly gullible. Ultimately, he came to Scientology for a magic fix, and for a while, he actually believed he was getting it. In fact, as late as 1994 (3 yrs prior to his death) he was convinced of some of its merits.
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Question:
I heard many rumors that scientology cures you of being gay that many high profile celebrities join to get cured of gay. Any truth to that?
David S. Wills:
Long ago, L. Ron Hubbard listed homosexuals as among the lowest forms of human beings (this has subsequently been changed in his books). I have no idea about the rumors of other celebrities… but it is highly likely that Burroughs sought a “cure” for his homosexuality in Scientology. He went through periods of feeling it was a handicap and remarked on a number of occasions that Scientology (temporarily) cured him of various “handicaps.”
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Question:
What is a misconceptions that you had about Scientology that later changed?
David S. Wills:
I thought that the whole Xenu/space opera thing was of more importance. The tabloids and South Park really play it up, but it didn’t get incorporated until later, and even then it was for the high-level members. Really, for the average Scientologist, that wasn’t even a part of it.
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Question:
Did they try to convert you?
David S. Wills:
No. Most Scientologists and ex-Scientologists I talked to were pretty open but not pushy. They were willing to explain concepts but not force them upon me. Interestingly, I did speak to someone who had letters from a Scientologist who’d used Burroughs to convert young people in the 60s.•
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“Their Allegiance And Devotion To The Mysterious Man Is Total”
L. Ron Hubbard interviewed in 1968 about his embattled tax shelter, during the period when he spent much of his time at sea.
Before hefound religionin the non-profit sector, L. Ron Hubbard garnered some acclaim as a writer of pulp fiction, his first full-length work a Western. Below are the positive Brooklyn Daily Eagle review of that 1937 book; the paper’s dyspeptic 1950 take on Hubbard’s psychotherapy treatise, Dianetics; and a best-seller list from when the latter had begun to make its mark.
“The lights in the hall go dim, leaving the bronzed bust of the Founder spotlighted at center stage. From the loudspeakers comes L Ron Hubbard’s voice, deep and professional. It is a tape called ‘Some Aspects of Help, Part 1,’ a basic lecture’ in Scientology that Hubbard recorded nearly 10 years ago.
No one in the intensely respectable Los Angeles audience of 500 — some of whom paid as much as $16 to get in — thought it odd to be sitting there listening to a disembodied voice. Among believers, Scientology and its founder are beyond frivolous question. Scientology is the Truth, it is the path to ‘a civilization without insanity, without criminals and without war . . .’ and ‘for the first time in all ages there is something that ….delivers the answers to the eternal questions and delivers immortality as well.’
So much of a credo might be regarded as harmless — practically indistinguishable from any number of minor schemes for the improvement of Man. But Scientology is scary — because of its size and growth, and because of the potentially disastrous techniques it so casually makes use of. To attain the Truth, a Scientologist surrenders himself to “auditing,” a crude form of psychoanalysis. In the best medical circumstances this is a delicate procedure, but in Scientology it is undertaken by an ‘auditor’ who is simply another Scientologist in training, who uses an ‘E-meter,’ which resembles a lie detector. A government report, made to the parliament of the State of Victoria in Australia three years ago, called Scientology ‘the worlds largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ As author Alan Levy found out by personal experience ‘pages 100B – 114’, the auditing experience can be shattering.
How many souls have become hooked on Scientology is impossible to say precisely. Worldwide membership — England, South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.S. — is probably between two and three million. In the U.S. offices in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and seven other cities, the figure may now be more than several hundred thousand. What is astonishing — and frightening — is the rate of growth in the U.S.: membership has probably tripled or quadrupled in the past three years.
Recruits to Scientology are most often young, intelligent and idealistic. They become fanatics on the subject, impervious to argument, quick to cut themselves off from doubters. Many young people have been instructed by their Scientology organizations ‘orgs,’ they are called to ‘disconnect’ from their families. ‘Disconnect’ means exactly that: sever all relations. Such estrangements can be deep and lasting, leaving heartsick parents no longer able to speak rationally with their children.
These three classic 1950 photos of pensive, unsmiling people were taken at a Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, with the shadowy L. Ron Hubbard himself leading the meeting. Hubbard and his $4 self-empowerment book were largely ignored by the mainstream press until the title became a mammoth bestseller. From a 1950 Look magazine article about the rise of a new belief system, which initially took root most strongly in Los Angeles:
“Of all the dianetic centers, Los Angeles is the most exuberantly expansive and enthusiastic. There the Hubbard Foundation moved into a suite of modest offices last July. In August, it took over a two-story building housing a lecture theater and 20 ‘processing’ rooms. A few weeks later, it had to expand again – this time into a 110-room building where swarms of student auditors raptly attend Hubbard’s lectures and practice processing one another.
Still more recently, there have been instituted a series of weekend sessions at the swank Country Club Hotel in Hollywood. Here, taking over 20 or 30 rooms, a band of student auditors and pre-clears meet under the guidance of professional auditors for ‘intensive auditing with chemical assist.’
Hubbard and his associates insist that this use of drugs has nothing to do with narcosynthesis. They claim that ‘chemical assistants,’ purchasable in California at any drugstore, aid in helping resistant pre-clears to achieve dianetic reverie and to dredge up their basic-basic engrams.”
The opening of Albert Q. Maisel’s highly skeptical 1950 Look magazine article about a new pseudoscience, something called “Dianetics,” conceived by pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard:
“A year ago, L. Ron Hubbard was an obscure writer of pseudoscientific pulp fiction. Today he has:
.. Half a million devout followers.
.. A foundation with a chain of bustling branches stretching from Elizabeth, N.J. to far-off Honolulu.
.. The best-selling nonfiction book since Dale Carnegie discovered the secret of success.
.. A swarm of pop-eyed students, who stand in line for the privilege of plunking down 500 bucks for a one-month course which converts them into “professional auditors,” complete with a couch and capable of outpsyching any ordinary psychiatrist.
.. Even larger and faster-growing tribes who pay $200 each for the 15-lecture short course – or $25 an hour to have their ‘cases opened’ by $500 professional auditors.
.. And a small army of associate members, at a mere 15 smackers each, who gratefully keep up with the whirlwind developments of Hubbard’s new ‘science’ of dianetics through the Dianetics Auditors Bulletin.
Dianetics and the Discovery of Fire
Hubbard, you may gather from the foregoing, has discovered the key to success and demonstrated once again that Barnum underestimated the sucker birth rate.
But that, by Hubbard’s own admission, is probably the least of his discoveries.
Unencumbered by the modesty that hog-ties ordinary mortals, Hubbard starts his book – THE BOOK, his followers call it – with the calm assertion that ‘the creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.’
A few lines beyond, one learns that, with dianetics, ‘the intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psychosomatic ills and inorganic aberrations.’
Farther on, one discovers that these psychosomatic ills, ‘uniformly cured by dianetic therapy.’ include such varied maladies as eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, some heart difficulties, migraine headaches and the common cold.
“By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 in cash, virtually the only money he hadn’t yet turned over to the Church of Scientology, the self-help ‘philosophy’ group he had discovered just seven months earlier.
His death inspired his father Edward, a physician, to start his own investigation of the church. ‘We thought Scientology was something like Dale Carnegie,’ Lottick says. ‘I now believe it’s a school for psychopaths. Their so-called therapies are manipulations. They take the best and brightest people and destroy them.’ The Lotticks want to sue the church for contributing to their son’s death, but the prospect has them frightened. For nearly 40 years, the big business of Scientology has shielded itself exquisitely behind the First Amendment as well as a battery of high-priced criminal lawyers and shady private detectives.
The Church of Scientology, started by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard to ‘clear’ people of unhappiness, portrays itself as a religion. In reality the church is a hugely profitable global racket that survives by intimidating members and critics in a Mafia-like manner.”
