Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [103]
As the day of the event approached, the cameras were set up, the production truck was set up, the sound system had been built and giant baffles were installed all around the arena to cancel out the echo that had ruined the prior event in 1993.
The cable cam operator was ordered never to point the camera directly down, and was told that if any breasts showed up in any shot it would be cause for non-payment. The teleprompters were now fully automated with pneumatic risers and tweaked within a millimeter of perfection. The lighting on Dave was to be on him the entire time no matter what and was not to come off him at any point during his speech for fear that any footage might be unusable. Every single detail was being accounted for – or so we thought.
The day of the event arrived. All Gold crew were on pins and needles and again knew that this would either be the best thing to happen or the worst. Based on the prior months and years of experience, most knew what the smart money was on - the worst.
The production truck crew had pages and pages of speeches and most of the visuals that had been prepared were out of order and didn’t match up. So the truck crew knew before the event even started that it was going to be a bomb from their department.
Since I was responsible for both the stage and the projection, I decided that I was going to spend the entire event backstage, directly behind the stage where the main projectors for the event were located. This way I could keep an eye on the projectors as well as any flaps that occurred on stage.
The event started out looking good. The stage looked good, the lighting was decent, the sound was okay and the projection and TV screens were all working fine. The flag procession ran a bit long, but we made it through.
Now came the on-stage flag twirlers. It was about twenty young college girls in tights with huge flags that they twirled around. They did a bit of a dance and marched around the stage flinging the flags around in unison.
While they did this, Dave Miscavige got ready to walk on the stage. The stage manager had instructed him to enter from an exact part of the stage. There were only so many spots from which one could enter or leave the stage. Well, the stage manager had been up for six days straight and might have gotten his spots mixed up. As the girls danced around the stage and Dave stood in the magic spot, he started to become uneasy. He questioned the stage manager if the spot was the correct one and said he thought he was supposed to enter from a different spot. Just as the music crescendoed and the flag girls were about to finish, Dave decided to move despite what he was told. As the girls exited the stage, they threw their steel-tipped spiked flagpoles off stage at the exact spot Dave had been standing not two seconds earlier. (He would later say that as he moved from the spot, he could feel the tips of the flags brush past his hair as he moved away!) Now, normally I would have assumed this was his exaggeration, but this time I had seen the entire thing go down before my very eyes. Dave Miscavige came seconds away from being speared to death multiple times by a bunch of hot college girls wearing skimpy outfits! Talk about girls gone wild! It didn’t happen. But the next biggest disaster of the millennium was now underway.
As Dave began his speech, you could see that every once in awhile the video footage on the side screens was either too early or too late or had nothing to do with what he was saying. But at a certain point in the event, it was pure chaos. The footage was completely random