If you’ve read Nancy Many’s memoir, My Billion-Year Contract, you know that she had one of the most amazing careers in Scientology — from working directly with church founder L. Ron Hubbard, to spying for the church on its enemies, to running the Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles, and to being sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force prison detail in Florida while she was five months pregnant.
To our amazement, all of that gets covered in the one-hour dramatization of Many’s life which is airing next week on ID, the true-crime sister network of the Discovery Channel, at 10 pm Eastern. The episode kicks off a new ID series called “Dangerous Persuasions,” which portrays good people manipulated into doing bad things. In Canada, the show debuts on January 18 on the History Channel, and will kick off a new series by the name of “Brainwashed.” Well-acted and produced, the detailed and accurate docudrama also features Nancy narrating the story, as you can see in the teaser video the network has posted.
We have more peeks at the program which demonstrate how carefully its producers re-enacted this troubling slice of Scientology history.
Two great excerpts from Lawrence Wright’s upcoming book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief, have appeared in The Hollywood Reporter today, and they are predictably amazing.
The longer piece looks at Tom Cruise’s relationship with Scientology leader David Miscavige, and Cruise’s wavering relationship to Scientology itself. We’ve taken a stab at those subjects ourselves, but Larry puts everything together in such amazing detail and with such deft touch, you just know the rest of the book is going to be like butter.
The shorter excerpt is about John Travolta, told through his former Scientology handler, Spanky Taylor, who has an amazing story of living through the punishment of the Sea Org’s prison detail, the Rehabilitation Project Force. Wright is the first to get her to speak on the record, ever. Maybe it was his Alabama charm.
Get over there, read those excerpts, and then come back here and give us your thoughts!
Discovery Channel’s true-crime sister network, Investigation Discovery, is airing a 1-hour dramatization of Nancy Many’s amazing life in Scientology next week, at 10 pm on Wednesday, January 16.
Many has been very effective at keeping this a secret, but recently she let us in on it and now that she’s seen the final edit, she’s very happy with how the production turned out.
“Out of the blue I got a request last spring from two separate production companies wanting to put my book in a docudrama format,” Many says, referring to her harrowing account of surviving Scientology’s notorious “Rehabilitation Project Force” and many other experiences in My Billion-Year Contract. She chose a British production company whose executives had some previous experience working on Scientology stories.
Scientology’s “pope” a foul-mouthed, violent bully?
A new book coming out today by BBC newsman John Sweeney makes use of secret electronic communications that portray Scientology’s leader, David Miscavige, berating his underlings in texts with phrases like “You Suck!” and “Counter-Intentional Cock Sucker!” and “You Suck Cock on Hollywood Boulevard!”
Sweeney is famous for blowing up in a temper tantrum while filming his 2007 BBC Panorama special, Scientology and Me, and says he’s wanted for years to write a book about his experiences making that documentary and its followup, 2010’s The Secrets of Scientology.
Now in The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology, Sweeney has done just that, providing a disturbing look at the spying and harassment that he went through making those films, and the electronic communications going on between church operatives as they followed Sweeney and his crew.
Once again, our tipsters have come through and we have a fun collection of Scientology wackiness for you this Sunday morning.
We’re kicking things off with some news from Taiwan, where David Miscavige’s church has been making a major push in recent months.
We’ve seen the boasting about a new Chinese-language translation of Scientology’s essential texts (“the Basics”), but are these books really flying off the shelves?
When you put out materials with the forest-killing fury of Scientology’s high-tech monster printing facilities, what happens when you find yourself with more product than customers?
Count on Scientology to come up with a clever solution.
Scientology’s drug rehab facilities have been much in the news lately for several lawsuits that have questioned the way these “Narconon” programs treat adults who go to them seeking treatment for their addictions. Now, a Narconon center in Nevada is being sued by a family over the experiences of their fifteen-year-old.
On March 8, Mark and Nicole Peet, residents of upstate New York, sent their son to the Rainbow Canyon Retreat, a Narconon drug rehab center that relies on the teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. The young man was back home by May 13. In the lawsuit they filed in Nevada on November 21, the Peets allege that their son (whose name we’re withholding because of his age) went through disturbing mistreatment at the hands of older patients, including “branding” him with a hot iron.
The Peets are suing to get back the $39,000 they paid Rainbow Canyon, and are also asking for punitive damages, alleging that their son was so affected by his experience at the facility, it led to his attempting suicide on September 5.
How’s this for a bonus Friday afternoon post — John Sweeney and Marc Headley driving to Scientology’s Trementina Base in New Mexico, footage that Sweeney has put together as a trailer for his book, The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology.
In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard published the book that changed his life, transforming him from a well known writer of pulp fiction into an even more well known leader of a worldwide organization that came to be known as the Church of Scientology.
That book was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, and for some time we’ve had plans to examine it in weekly installments, using a first edition copy of the book that was given to us by researcher Jeff Jacobsen.
Today, we launch that project, and announce the best part of our plans: we’ll be making use of the invaluable help of ex-Scientologist, Bay Area lawyer, and writer Vance Woodward.
A tip of the hat to Jane White, who spotted this disturbing photo at the Facebook page for Clear Ghana, which describes itself as a “group of Scientologists working…to bring this technology to as many people of Africa as possible.”
That apparently includes presenting the standard Sea Org contract to a couple of youngsters who don’t look much more than 10 years old. The sad truth is, we’ve documented cases of children that young signing the commitment form, which asks them to serve Scientology for a billion years.
Scientology is a very small, if wealthy, organization of probably no more than about 40,000 people around the world. But one of the reasons it garners so much attention, particularly online, is the way it repeatedly has taken on the Internet as one of its chief foes.
In the 1990s, Scientology tried to keep its secret teachings off of Usenet, and tried to crush the people who kept putting them there. It also handed out software to its members to keep them from visiting certain websites with negative information about the church. And to this day, members police each other on Facebook, making sure they don’t accidentally “friend” people who have been excommunicated.
In the last couple of years, however, we’ve noticed that Scientology has been making better use of the Internet, and has been encouraging its members to take advantage of its jim-dandy whizzer features.
And now, with a new “IAS sponsored Scientology Internet Campaign,” the church is ready to join the early 2000s!
