Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [122]
2. A night on the destruction of psychiatry.
3. A night devoted to Preservation of the Tech.
4. A management night on International Scientology Expansion.
5. An awards night that acknowledged various public Scientologists for their application of Scientology technology in the field of business, i.e., whoever donated the greatest amount of money that year.
6. An IAS event night showing what their funded programs had achieved throughout the previous year.
For those of us at Golden Era Productions, we would have to gather up all the past activities of the year and obtain photos or video footage of anything that could be made into something that could be talked about for each of the nightly events. This is the same as would be done for any other event that occurred throughout the year, except that for the June 6th event, we had to have tons of pictures and tons of data because the people who attended these events aboard the Freewinds were financing all Scientology enterprises. They had to be impressed in order to give more money.
Each day at Gold we would have meetings to go over what would be included in each night’s event. These meetings were usually useless since everything that was planned would eventually be thrown out the window as soon as Dave saw the plan. Nevertheless we would spend every day gathering up the photos from around the world, writing speeches, shooting videos and putting together each night’s event.
The staff working on putting an event together normally numbered around 300. People from the following areas contributed to events:
1. COB
2. COB’s Office
3. RTC Execs
4. ED INT
5. CO CMO INT
6. LRH PPRO
7. ED ASI
8. CO IASA
9. CMO INT PR staff
10. IMPR Speechwriters
11. IMPR Scriptwriters
12. Cine Research Dept
13. Cine Scriptwriting Dept
14. Cine Props Dept
15. Cine Logistics Dept
16. Cine Make-up Dept
17. Cine Costumes Dept
18. Cine Sets Dept
19. Cine Camera Dept
20. Cine Lighting Dept
21. Cine Grips Dept
22. Cine Post Production Dept
23. Cine Video Shoot Crews Dept
24. Cine SFX Dept
25. Audio Mixing Dept
26. Audio Music Dept
27. A/V Manufacturing Dept
28. Shipping Dept
So these 300 people all knew that they would be getting 4-5 hours sleep, if that, for the next four weeks while these events were being prepared. Couple that with the fact that the first two weeks of work would most likely be wasted and that the last two weeks would be twice as stressful with even less sleep.
For all of the events put on for the fifteen years I was at Gold there were three main components that made up the event:
1. New releases
2. Speeches
3. Videos
If we were lucky, all three would somehow correlate to each other. So if we were talking about Applied Scholastics, we might have a video that showed a new school being opened and then maybe a new course having to do with Applied Scholastics. That would be the ideal arrangement.
Now when you have hundreds of people all working in different directions on different things and most of them not getting much done, it is unusual for the ideal event combination to occur very often. In most cases, the new releases drove the event. If a release was guaranteed to be done by the event, it was worked into the planning. The speeches and videos were drawn up based on the releases.
This worked fine if there were things that were being completed on a regular basis. Dave was the only one who could approve anything that got done at the Int Base, so not much got done. And when things did get done they might not actually have anything to do with the event that was coming up. For instance, if a new revised Dianetics “How to” video was completed in December, it would sit around and not be released at the New Years or March 13th events but would be “saved” for the May 9th event. Herein lies the problem with the Int Base—nothing was ever done on schedule and because of this, we got to stay up all night and day pulling stuff out of dark holes before an event to come up with something to talk about or show, when we really had nothing.