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

That was when he was preparing to direct the Scientology commercial that was
ultimately rejected. At rst glance, it seemed like a spa, beautiful and restful; but he had
been put off by the uniforms, the security, and the militarized feel of the place.
“At the top of the church, people were whacking folks about like Laurel and Hardy,”
Haggis said. He was embarrassed to admit that he had never even asked himself where
Rathbun and Rinder had gone. He decided to call Rathbun, who was now living on
Galveston Bay in South Texas. Although the two men had never met, they were well
known to each other. After being one of the most powerful gures in Scientology,
Rathbun was scraping together a living by freelancing stories to local newspapers and
selling beer at a ballpark. He gured that South Texas was about as far from Los
Angeles and Clearwater as he could hope to get. Haggis was oored when he learned
that Rathbun had had to escape. He was also surprised to learn that other friends, such
as Jim Logan, the man who brought him into the church so long ago on the street corner
in Ontario, had also ed or been declared Suppressive Persons. One of Haggis’s closest
friends in the church hierarchy, Bill Dendiu, told Haggis that he had escaped from Gold
Base by driving a car—actually, an Alfa Romeo convertible that Haggis had sold him—
through the fence. He still had scars on his forehead to show for that.
“What kind of organization are we involved in where people just disappear?” Haggis
wondered.
He also came across a number of anti-Scientology websites, including
Exscientologykids.com, which was created by Jenna Miscavige Hill, the leader’s niece,
who joined the Sea Org when she was twelve. For her and many others, formal
education had stopped when they entered the organization, leaving them ill prepared
for life outside the church. Jenna says that for much of her early life, she was kept in a
camp with other Sea Org children and little adult supervision. They rarely saw their
parents. “We ran ourselves completely,” she recalled.
For several years, Haggis had been working with a charity he established to set up
schools in Haiti. These stories reminded him of the child slaves he had encountered in
that country. “They were ten, twelve years old, signing billion-year contracts—and their
parents go along with this!” he said of the Sea Org children. “And they work morning,
noon and night.… Scrubbing pots, manual labor—that so deeply touched me. My God, it
horrified me!”
AFTER TOM CRUISE’S BEHAVIOR on Oprah and the Today show, Sumner Redstone, the chairman
of Viacom, which owns Paramount Studios, chose not to renew Cruise’s deal. “He turned
o all women,” Redstone explained. “He was embarrassing the studio. And he was
costing us a lot of money.” Cruise and his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner,
worked out a deal with MGM to resurrect the struggling United Artists studio. Soon after
that, Wagner approached Haggis, oering him a very generous deal. He wrote one
script for them, a big-budget children’s movie, but the studio was so nancially pressed
that it couldn’t afford to produce it.
In January 2008, just as it seemed that the derision that was directed at Cruise was