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Another Scientology video you aren’t supposed to see: ‘The Command of Theta’

CommandThetaA couple of weeks ago we started a new series here featuring Scientology videos that a source is making available to us which demonstrate some of the nuttiness of L. Ron Hubbard and his “technology.”

This week’s offering should also get you scratching your head. It’s titled “The Command of Theta,” and it involves some of the strangest (and hard to follow) analogies and metaphors that we’ve heard from Hubbard, who loved figurative language.

Give it a look-see, and then we’d love to hear your impressions in the comments.


 

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We can’t wait for someone to explain that grain of wheat analogy.

“Space is space!”

Epic.

We were curious about the production of this video, so once again we consulted Marc Headley, who worked at Gold Base until he defected in 2005. He told us that in the initial scene, the auditor is played by Kenny Seybold. The preclear, who then goes wandering through the rest of the video, was played by Chris Maifeld.

Kenny Seybold was the security chief at Int Base for a while and assisted on many escaped employee recoveries. When I left in 2005 he was the Sport Fields I/C and mostly mowed lawns. He also has a side job of being the guy that takes care of David Miscavige’s workout equipment and expensive bikes. I know he showed up in a couple of the AnonOrange picket videos from a few years back. In those videos he can be seen standing very serious looking in the background while protesters talk about David Miscavige. Kenny was used for a ton of video and still shoots. He is tan, muscular and fit. He was used as the model Scientologist in the Scientology Handbook and countless other publications. I am sure we will see more of him if any more of these videos see the light of day.

Chris Maifeld is the Lighting Director Gold and is in charge of the lighting for the films and used to do all of the lighting for Scientology events. He will become a huge part of Scientology’s history in the coming years. Chris was probably used as the main actor for this video, because he was on the crew and in anything we shot, we always cannibalized the shoot crew because we could. At the Int Base, it is an L. Ron Hubbard Int Base Policy that all base staff are double-hatted as actors and are required to be in film shoots when called. And just like everything else in Scientology, even though Hubbard’s words are sacred, they are often ignored. It was a constant struggle to get staff to be in videos and more often than not, we used the crew that were supposed to be behind the camera as “actors.”

This video was mainly shot in the film studio at Gold, and I remember thinking we were very clever on how we shot this one with camera tricks. I’m pretty sure we ripped the idea off from a Target or breakfast cereal commercial or some such thing. You could always steal a good idea for a Scientology video or film from TV because no one at the base ever watched TV and had no clue what was out there.

Thanks again for that help, Marc.
 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on January 3, 2014 at 07:00

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