Scientology fight fever
John Patterson
Friday May 19, 2000
If I wanted to make a skipful of money I'd start a religion. And if I wanted to make really serious cash - the kind that can finance jihads and subdue nation states - I'd start a religion in Hollywood, California, the perfect location for an aggressive young belief-system with something to prove.
The basis of any wised-up religion is simple: forget redemption, the do-unto-others, the life ever after, and all that crap. These days what you need first is a state-of-the-art drug-rehab programme, or better yet, a "Regimen" (it sounds holier) that uses strongarm nursing staff, heavy leather restraints, and forced mental realignment based on a combination of extreme self-loathing and vigorous cheque-writing.
Just ask the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who cashed in nicely after he dreamed up his Nation of Islam on the back of a good detox programme. Once you've broken an addict's will, you can make him believe anything - even the fantastical nonsense Muhammad was selling about a mad scientist named Dr Yacub who cooked up an evil race of white devils in his laboratory.
Your next requirement is an endless supply of gullible people, some with low self-esteem and heavy drug habits, and this is where that Hollywood location starts to make so much sense. They say that all the loose nuts inevitably end up in California, and they're right.
First there are the intelligent nutters ranging from the deadly to the odd who dream up these rubbishy religions - Charles Manson and his coming race war, the Helter Skelter; the suicidal castratos of Heaven's Gate; the flying-saucer fanatics known as the Unitarians and of course, Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, known to his craven adherents as "Ron". And then there are the benighted masses from whom they recruit their flocks: people prepared pay through the nose for a shot at redemption.
For most people, Scientology is an abstraction. In Hollywood, it's local, something like a pillar of the community. Anyone who thinks the church of Scientology will one day be legislated out of existence by the US government or discredited to death by tabloid revelations should consider its profile in Los Angeles, where it has been edging slowly towards respectability for more than a decade. This city is the world capital of manufactured perceptions, and the appearance of respectability is worth much more here than the real thing.
Hubbard had a street - well, a service alley - named after him a few years ago, and though the mayor didn't show up for the christening, he did send a representative, an unmistakeable sign of acknowledgement from the city's political establishment.
Through the sumptuous Celebrity Centre on Franklin Avenue, the church has strengthened its links with the city's other power centre, the movie business. Hanging out with Tom and Nicole and John Travolta must beat the hell out of working in a leper colony or nursing crack babies. No arcane rituals, no Bible, no guilt-trips about sex or money, just a lot of career networking, beautiful people and purchasable salvation.
No wonder Hollywood loves this stuff. Given that the church has been a fully tax-exempt religious organisation since 1993, I predict that it will be assimilated into the realm of political and religious respectability within the next 10 years. After all, the Mormons have been legit for decades, notwithstanding their one-time predilection for polygamy.
Like them, the Scientologists no longer publicly parade their core beliefs - which include a healthy serving of little green men and flying saucers - preferring instead to emphasise their good works and allegedly benign intentions. This isn't bad going for a former pulp sci-fi novelist who once wrote a short story about a man who founds a religion in order to get rich quick.
And it was in his capacity as sci-fi writer that Hubbard hit our screens last weekend. The John Travolta-produced adaptation of Hubbard's last major novel, Battlefield Earth, failed to topple Gladiator from the top spot. And no wonder. Look at the reviews: "It's a battle not to walk out"; "a hunk of junk"; "a ludicrously bad film", and my favourite, "Apocalypse? No!"
The cheapo paperback movie tie-in (published by the church) is an astounding 1,048 pages - you could beat someone to death with it if you sneaked up on them from behind.
Appropriately, this is the experience that watching the movie most resembles. Director Roger Christian (who, just to confuse us, is a Buddhist) did second-unit work on The Phantom Menace, and Battlefield Earth is strongest when it relies on special effects. When it has to depend on Hubbard's dimwit dialogue and situations, it's lost in space.
Travolta plays Terl, the villain, the 10ft tall head of security for the Psyclos, an evil race that has enslaved the human race. He's dressed up like a praying mantis in dreadlocks and exudes cartoonish horridness. Ranged against him is Barry Pepper, the god-bothering sniper from Private Ryan, as Johnnie Goodboy Tyler (I shit you not) the apple-cheeked young feller who'll save the world.
I felt my brain cells dying at a worryingly rapid rate while watching Battlefield Earth. Not since Forrest Gump have I seen a movie that made me feel stupider with every passing minute of screen time. If I write another word about it, I'll start forgetting my alphabet and soon they'll have to water me twice daily.
For non-believers there still was the madly successful Gladiator, the new sword-and-sandal epic from Leni Riefenstahl - I mean Ridley Scott. One question I find useful as a movie writer is this: "How much would Hitler like it?" And much as I enjoyed Gladiator, I couldn't help thinking that the Fuhrer would have liked it all too much, especially Scott's kitschy, biscuit-tin aesthetics, and his computer-generated Ancient Rome, which bears an eerie resemblance to Albert Speer's blueprints for the rebuilding of Berlin. Still, everyone on the screen was a pagan, thank God, with not a Scientologist in sight.
