going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

to pull the plug and let her die. Haggis faced a similar choice in real life with his best
friend, who was brain-dead from a staph infection. “They don’t die easily,” he recalled.
“Even in a coma, he kicked and moaned for twelve hours.”
Haggis dreamed of directing the movie himself. But as much as studios admired the
writing, the story was so dark nobody wanted to get near it. Haggis began borrowing
money to stay aoat. He turned down another TV series because he realized that his
heart hadn’t been in television for years.
One of his abandoned TV projects still haunted him. The idea sprang from an
unsettling incident a decade before, when he and Diane were driving home from the
premiere of Silence of the Lambs. Paul was wearing a tuxedo and driving a Porsche
convertible. He stopped at a Blockbuster Video store on Wilshire Boulevard to rent some
obscure Dutch lm. When they got back into the car, two young black men with guns
suddenly rushed up to them. The robbers ordered them out of the car and told them to
walk toward a dark parking lot. That seemed like a really bad idea. Haggis pretended
not to hear them. He put Diane in front of him and headed down Wilshire instead.
“Stop!”
Paul and Diane froze. They heard footsteps, and one of the thieves snatched the video
out of Diane’s hand. Then the Porsche roared o. That was the last Haggis ever saw of
it.
Ten years later, Haggis awakened in the middle of the night and began chewing over
this frightening episode once again. He often thought about it. The entire experience
had lasted less than a minute, but it had colored his stance toward life in complicated
ways. Where did these kids come from? They were living in the same city as he, but a
universe of race and class separated them. He could imagine who he was in their eyes,
just some rich white guy with much more than his share of what life had to oer. In a
way, Haggis was on their side. But it could have turned out so much worse; guns always
make things dangerously unpredictable. He was shaken by that thought. The unexpected
coda of snatching the rented videotape was intriguing. Haggis had managed a wisecrack
to the cops at the time. “I think you’ll discover that these men have been here quite
often, looking for that video, and it was never in.”
Specically, what he thought about in the middle of the night was what those kids
said to each other as they sped out of the Blockbuster parking lot onto Wilshire in his
pearlescent Cabriolet. Could he nd himself in them? Haggis got out of bed and began
writing. By mid-morning he had a lengthy outline. It was about the manifold ways that
people interact with each other—how the experience of having someone honk at you in
trac and shoot you the nger can aect your mood, so that you take it out on
someone else at the rst opportunity; or how, alternatively, someone lets you into a
long line of trac, and your day brightens. He saw life in America as a volatile collision
of cultures—of immigrants who fail to read the codes that underlie our system, of races
that resent and mistrust each other, of people coexisting in dierent social strata who
look at each other with uncomprehending fear and hatred.
He had shopped the proposal around to dierent television producers, but they
unanimously passed on it. Now, as he was struggling nancially and artistically,