Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [141]
Dave Miscavige later said that his Tom Cruise video was one of the most important videos that had ever been produced. He had no idea how true that was.
Chapter Thirty – Christmas Island
It was late 2004.
I was now the A/V Systems Director Gold. My job was to design and install all the audio/visual systems for Scientology internationally. This consisted of everything from high definition film theaters to introductory video displays. In any single org location, there could be more than 30 different types of systems to install.
Over the past ten years, everything had turned into something audio/visual. No one at the Int Base was knowledgeable in enough different fields to be able to comprehend how any of these systems could be designed, much less produced and installed.
After fifteen years at Golden Era Productions, I had worked in pre-production, shoot production, post-production, manufacturing and had done system installations in orgs all over the world. I had more cumulative experience than anyone at the Base.
Anyone who had anywhere near the systems experience that I had, was blown or long gone.
Russ Bellin, the CO CST, was the only person who could boast to having this much experience with newer more modern types of systems. But Russ Bellin had recently been given the task of designing a few A/V systems and had failed. I got those same systems designed and approved by Dave Miscavige.
I was told by Lisa Schroer, the CO Gold, that Dave Miscavige wanted to have a meeting with me on systems later in the day. I headed over to the Cine Conference room in the Lower Lodges.
Dave showed up as did several other people from CMO Int and CST. Most of the people in the room had attended at least 50 meetings on the subject of systems. Nothing had been getting done on systems for years. I was actually the first person to get any new systems approved in over ten years. In addition to this, there had been more than five different A/V Systems Directors in the last few years and each one of them had been assigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force. So each time a new person went on post, everything would start from scratch.
Dave did his usual recap of everything that had occurred on systems in the last few years and where we stood. This was needed because people changed posts so often that you could have more than half the people in the room with no idea what had happened or what Dave had asked for in the last five meetings on the subject. Well, I had just gotten several Audio Visual systems for the orgs approved by Dave Miscavige and he brought this up as a good thing.
Then he told me what he wanted now. He wanted every single system for every single org designed, built and submitted to him for approval. Once approved, he wanted them built for all orgs. This was huge. One org alone had over $300,000 worth of systems in it. Building all of the systems for all orgs would easily be a 100 million dollar project. I had already mapped out most of these systems and this was known. But I had not formally proposed any of them. Several of them were fairly simple in design and simply needed to be funded in order to be built and proposed. That was it. It was huge, but it was clear cut and straightforward.
After the meeting, the CO Gold met with me to go over what I was going to do. I had already done most of the design work and just needed to build and program the systems and do the overall proposal.
By the end of the week I had a proposal ready for Int Finance that included what I needed to buy in order to get the proposal done. It was all of the equipment components for the individual systems and all of the ancillary items that would be needed to fabricate each system.
While that proposal was up, I streamlined how the new breed of systems would