Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [101]
It was about two months before we were allowed to return to our normal duties and return to our own beds to sleep. Not one of us ever did admit to any crimes and nothing ever came of anything. The TR#1 film was completed and Dave Miscavige himself sat in the editing bay with the Chief Editor and used all of the shots we shot from all four times we shot that last sequence and managed to do what we had suggested before any of the extreme mental and physical torture had taken place. We were given no explanation as to why we were allowed to go back to post, no nothing. Just go back to your life as if nothing had happened.
Oh, but something had definitely happened. Several individuals had been emotionally scarred for life. To this day I think that the night we were being chased around the Int Base by motorcycles in the dark is the only time that I have even entertained the idea of suicide in this lifetime. Only years later, after I had become one of the highest executives at the Int Base, would I find out what had happened and why we were eventually allowed to return to our normal lives.
It turns out that after Dave Miscavige had ordered us out into the tents and for the guards to run us all over the property and so forth, he got involved in some big legal suit and totally forgot about us. He went off to LA and was working on other matters. Because he never ordered us to go back to post, we never went back. Some weeks later, the subject of the shoot crew came up in some meeting and to his supposed “amazement”; we were still out in the tents and scrubbing toilets all day. We were then ordered back into production like nothing had ever happened.
Chapter Nineteen – Now, This Is Fun
It was 1999 and Dave Miscavige had been writing down to Int Executives all year about making sure that the New Years 2000 event was the biggest event in all of Scientology’s history. Dave even wrote a dispatch to CO CMO Int on January 1st, 1999, telling him that it would take all year to get the next year’s event properly planned.
So of course when October 1999 had rolled around, nothing had been done all year to prepare for the New Years 2000 event. Dave had been asking about this event all year and was assured that it would be taken care of. So he did what he does best, he created havoc.
Now keep in mind that the 1999 IAS event had just been held in England and was a complete wipeout. At the start of the event, the 35 mm film projector that was meant to show the opening film went out. Then the backup projector went out and then later in the event during a video, the video projector went out. In addition, somehow the translations got screwed up and the live translators simply gave up trying to keep up with Dave Miscavige’s verbose and speedy delivery and just quit midway. Being a predominantly foreign language-speaking crowd from all around Europe, the event was officially classified as a proper disaster. The entire event crew was still reeling from this and the projector guy got an express ticket to the Rehabilitation Project Force. He also just happened to be one of the Gold Visual Effects guys and they were already undermanned before his absence.
Based on the dismal performance in England, and the fact that the entire Int Base had ignored him all year regarding this next event, Dave Miscavige directed that every single person on the entire Int Base work on getting the New Years event produced. Normally there would be a crew of a few hundred up for a few weeks before an event. This time it would be the entire Int Base. Every single, last person was to work on getting the event done and if it was not a huge success then it would be every single person on the Int Base’s fault, (except Dave’s, of course!).
The New Years 2000 event would have