Well, just a month and a half ago I was waving farewell and then along came one of the sweetest months I have seen in the decade since I left the cofs. I am sure that Monica, Warrior, Jesse and other ex-SO people have been relishing what the atmosphere must be like in ASI nowadays. They have tried every PR trick that Hubbard allows them to try and still the theater going public has not been conned.

There have been some very courageous and outspoken critics that have posted on ARS throughout the years that i have been reading and posting here but I have to say that IMHO not one of them, nor any of us minor critics, have had one tenth the impact that ASI's blunder is going to have on Scientology.

The strategy for Battlefield Earth (and I hope Jesse will be able to confirm my recollection of this) has ALWAYS been to divorce Hubbard's name from its association with the very tainted word "scientology". The theory was that if Hubbard's name could be resurrected as purely an "author" and, particularly a science fiction "author" then the 1950 Dianetics "boom" could be recreated with Hubbard's scientology books being promoted to legions of sci fi buyers.

The trouble with the approach has been two-fold. Its a bad book (always a hindrance) and secondly no-one would touch it with a ten foot pole as a movie except for Travolta. The problem (as they have just discovered) is that by hvaing Travolta produce and star in it they have inextricably linked the movie, the book, Hubbard and Scientology. As the movie has tanked so has Hubbard's name and 20 years of strategy.

Forgive me a little digression - this little piece of imagination is aimed at all of us who have had experience in dealing with the CMO/ASI/DM etc.

For the last year or so I can imagine that there has been a highly confidential little area in ASI, called by some acronym or other which has been the operations center for the projects surrounding the movie. I am sure the name was something cryptic (COBOL or something) and that the people in it (Fran F?) were very puffed up about being in on somehting so exciting and confidential - special missions flying up to Montreal to check the set, progress reports on the movie, people from Gold being flown up to critique Christian's work against Hubbard advices, sec checks for all involved, financing, getting sock puppets set up to promote the movie - a veritable hive of activity with DM getting glowing reports about what a breakthrough it was going to be.

Wonder how those guy are doing now? I would guess that the PAC RPF has had a few new recruits in the last two weeks - probably with more to come.

end of imagination.

There are a couple of questions and points that I wanted to make - the first point is that I have to say that my respect for Travolta as an individual has increased over this episode (not, I hasten to add, as an actor of course) but at least Travolta has had the guts to publicly nail his colors to the mast and defend his Hubbardness and the bad writing. Unlike the legions of little shills who have been swarming over AOL and Deja attempting to a) disguise the fact that they are scientologists and b) trying to breathlessly and ardently promote the movie, he has publically proclaimed his allegiance - at great personal cost to him. I admire that.

The second point is a question - I notice that Christian in his interview with some british newspaper said that "foreign pre-sales" that were done before the movie was ever released guaranteed something like 20 mill - and I wondered if this was a loophole that was used to guarantee the backer's investment - after all IAS has hundreds of millions of untraceable dollars, DM is in charge of the IAS (and ASI) and would have no problem guaranteeing a 20 million insurance. If anyone in Europe has a way of checking how the financing was done for the overseas sales this could prove to be a fruitful line of investigation.

It has been funny to watch the shills disappear form the newsgroups and from the AOL message boards since last Thursday - it almost makes me wonder if there is not some eval being done right now to try and drum up a new strategy - perhaps to make Battlefield Earth the top grossing movie in Somalia and Uzbekistan or something.

Semper ubi sub ubi

Go Back