Going Clear Movie Part 1 Overview, Hysteria Creation, transcript:
Mark Rathbun: After my experience with Harry Smith (NBC Rock Center) trying to get me to discredit the legitimacy of Scientology’s tax exemption on behalf of Lawrence Wright (see Going Clear, Part 19 – IRS and NBC’s Attempted Ambush), I never heard from Larry Wright. For a year and half I had been fielding continuous phone calls with Wright with him clarifying things we had discussed. I had written my review of the book and posted it, which wasn’t too kind. In late 2012 Mike Rinder said “hey, I’m working with Alex Gibney on this movie about Wright’s book. That was real odd. I had been disengaging for some time from the whole Anti-Scientology business. Rinder wanted to know whether Gibney could call me. I said “sure, he can call me.” So Gibney called late in the year to set a time for an interview. This is my take on the movie, now seeing his final product. First of all, I refer to it as McDocumentary and I refer to Gibney as a sort of McDocumentarian. I did look at two previous documentaries he’d done which I knew something about the facts of. One was Enron, The Smartest Guy in the Room. I had read the book. And the other one I was familiar with was the pedophile priests scandal. I thought Gibney’s movies on they were some of the most lazy, boring things I had scene. So I wasn’t really impressed. So when I saw Going Clear, I was kind of taken aback by how emotional he made the whole thing. I mean, he couldn’t have made the Catholic pedophile priest scandal more mundane, banal and boring. And yet you had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of children being violated and continuing to be violated. So, I was kind of shock to see in the Scientology movie to really make the story – which by then to me, I’ve gone through the book with you – Gibney makes it this super melodramatic, emotional thing. And that is why at event on the movie that I spoke in Austin I referred to Gibney as an auteur. To me, it was like he dramatized the whole thing. He wound up dramatizing Wright’s work which supposed to be a work of non-fiction. After the movie came about, because the only things in it that hadn’t already been published before were uttered by me – and that was a very small body of stuff – I was the only one the media wanted to talk to. So, they are up at the Sundance Film Festival (where it was initially released). I hadn’t heard from these guys in forever. All of the sudden I’m getting all these text messages from Mike Rinder and Gibney’s people. Now they are all frantic, because they are all up there taking bows on the stage and nobody wants to talk to Rinder, they don’t want to talk to Marc Headley, they don’t want to talk to Tony Ortega. And all these guys are up there at Sundance, trying to jump into the spotlight. So, I got sort of thrust into this thing. I did a little media at the outset. Because my face was out there connected with the movie. And I started getting emails because this was an unprecedented amount of exposure for an anti Scientology piece. And I started getting emails from all over the place from people connected with Scientology. I found myself having to defend Scientology because these people were just hysterical. That was the effect that the movie had. Like I’d get this stuff about children because Spanky Taylor says in the movie that something happened; and they have no idea that she was talking about 1978. I mean, put aside whether it is exaggerated, put aside whether it is true. The one thing I do know is that it happened in 1978. The people who watched the movie had no idea. They think that whatever she is griping about is happening right now. So, I’m having to calm people down, “now, wait a second, that particular thing that has got you so tied up, that happened in 1978. Scientology has not even had child care facilities since the mid-eighties. Ok, that’s thirty years ago.” I mean, these are the types of responses I’m having to give people. “Calm down”, right? I mean, paranoid things. A lot of them were former members who were like completely convinced that phones were being monitored. And I’d look at the circumstances of the person, I’d say, “Look man, first off they aren’t doing any of that stuff, but second of all, you are the last person on earth they would be interested in.” I mean this is like he just created this hysteria. Because there hasn’t fresh accusations about Scientology in the past ten years, the Anti Scientology people are just rehashing stuff. And they are rallying around this idea about ‘disconnection’; saying it is the most horrendous thing, this policy of disconnection, which is basically shunning. A lot of messages and calls had to do with that. So there business connections and family members who had connections with Scientology who were all in an hysteria about “I’ve have to resort to something radical to either get the person out of Scientology, or disconnect so they can’t hypnotize me in some way.” It really was shocking to me. I’d been out for a long time and I have sort of involved in the anti Scientology area, and I’d never seen such hysteria before. So, I just handle every inquiry, the person in front of me, one by one. So, I literally found myself having to put things in context for people. The impression created to people at large was, they cherry picked the most sensational accusations from 50 years – because they indicted L. Ron Hubbard from the age of 12 – or from 40 from the inception of Dianetics itself, all the way up to present time and communicated it such a way as to say “this is all happening now and it is a clear and present danger to you.” And if you go down the roster of the people who are creating the most hysteria, they are 35 years before, 50 years before, and 65 years before the present respectively. And they are people talking about things that happened that many years ago. So, accuracy be damned, or accountability for hype and exaggeration be damned, all that stuff is highlighted then thrust on you. It created an impression. I know from first hand because I was sort of becoming the point person for those so effected. And literally to a one I found myself trying to get people to calm down, “hey, that’s not happening.” Whether it did or didn’t happen before, it was mainly about putting things in time sequence. I ultimately came to the conclusion that Gibney is a fantastic propagandist. Because he created this emotional and deep guttural fear and terror of something that does not exist.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 