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Dharma & Greg. Allen Barton, who had become a teacher at the Playhouse, wrote Elfman
a letter in June 2004, begging her to relent. He called the movement against Katselas
“Scientological McCarthyism,” harking back to the blacklisting of Hollywood celebrities
in the 1950s because of their supposed Communist sympathies. “As Scientologists, are
we now a group that blacklists, that casts aside friendships and alliances on the basis of
how fast someone is moving up the Bridge?” he wrote. “If we as a group are going to
take on the billions of wogs out in the world, how can we disconnect from each other?”
Elfman never responded.
After Cruise rallied the Scientology celebrities, a group of students demanded that
Katselas make the Playhouse a “WISE” business. The acronym stands for World Institute
of Scientology Enterprises. Katselas refused, even though he lost a hundred students in a
mass Scientology walkout. Many of them went to another school, the Acting Center,
which was founded in 2006, based in part on Scientology techniques. Katselas died of
heart failure in 2008, and the Beverly Hills Playhouse is no longer connected with the
church. The long line of protégés that Katselas left behind cemented the association
between the church and the Hollywood acting community, but in the end he was
ostracized by the very people whose careers he had nurtured.
Tom Cruise was now considered the unofficial Ethics Officer of Hollywood. He was the
embodiment of Hubbard’s vision of a church with temples dedicated to celebrity rather
than God. Cruise’s intensity and commitment, along with his spectacular ambition,
matched Miscavige’s own. It was as if Miscavige had rubbed a magic lantern and Cruise
had appeared, a genie who could open any door. He was one of the few people that
Miscavige saw as a peer. Miscavige even wondered if there was some way to appoint
Cruise the church’s Inspector General for Ethics—Rathbun’s job. “He’d say that Tom
Cruise was the only person in Scientology, other than himself, that he would trust to run
the church,” one former Sea Org member recalled. Rathbun observed: “Miscavige
convinced Cruise that he and Tom were two of only a handful of truly ‘big beings’ on
the planet. He instructed Cruise that LRH was relying upon them to unite with the few
others of their ilk on earth to make it onto ‘Target Two’—some unspecied galactic
locale where they would meet up with Hubbard in the afterlife.”
HAGGIS HAD ALSO BEEN folded into the celebrity recruitment apparatus. He had put his
money and his reputation in the hands of the church. He, too, was serving Scientology.
But he rarely spoke about his aliation to his employees or associates. Even his close
friends were surprised to learn that he was in the church. “He didn’t have that sort of
straight-on, unambiguous, unambivalent view that so many Scientologists project into
the world,” Marshall Herskovitz observed.
For years, Herskovitz and several of Haggis’s closest non-Scientology friends
participated in an irregular Friday get-together called Boys’ Night. They met at an
Italian restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. The actor Josh Brolin usually
attended, along with director Oliver Stone, producer Stephen Nathan, and a peace
activist and former priest named Blase Bonpane, among others. One night an attractive