Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [84]
Upon being told about the disastrous occurrence with the video footage, Dave Miscavige wanted to review the video tapes himself and verify what was being said. He went down to the editing bay to review the footage. While he was waiting, he noticed the footage from the cable cam at the event. One of the operators in the bay tried to get him to come over and look at the footage he had been waiting to review. Dave Miscavige would have none of it. The poor video editing staff member cringed. This staff member had already watched the tape that Dave Miscavige was now watching, so he knew what was coming. The cable cam operator was doing the sweeping crowd shots of the arena and the stage and then after the shot he would point the camera straight down, bring the camera back up and do it again. Well the cable cam guy had given himself a bit of a challenge. There was a halfway good looking woman sitting in the front row of the crowd wearing a long flowing dress that was low cut in the upper frontal region. The cable cam guy would point straight down and get a really close up shot of her breasts, focusing right in on them before going onto the next shot. After two hours of practicing this, he had gotten very proficient and some would say that he had it down to an art. It really was art after all. Too bad the woman in the front row was Shelly Miscavige, Dave’s wife. Anyway, so there was Dave, at the end of the tape and watching his wife’s breasts up on the screen in video editing. By the time Dave finally turned around, the editing staff had braced themselves for the inevitable onslaught of profanities that ensued. To top it off Dave Miscavige was assured that the footage of his monumental phrase “The war is over” was in fact completely unusable.
Dave Miscavige said that unless they fixed the footage, no videos of this event would be sent out to the Scientology organizations. This was a big deal as usually Gold made video tapes the week after the event and had them sent out to all organizations around the world to play at events that had already been scheduled.
Something like this always happened at events and it was routinely a problem getting the videos edited and sent out for the organizations to play for the local public. COB would want all the speech flubs fixed, bad live edits fixed and a plethora of other errors corrected in the “final” copies that were sent out. Most organizations were supposed to have their local events the week after the live event but usually they were told to hold off for weeks and sometimes months until they got their video copy of the event.
One day I was sitting in my office on my computer. The computers we used in the Sea Org at the Int Base in 1993 were completely state of the art - for 1980! They were green monochrome monitors that were connected to a giant, room-filling VAX/VMS mainframe system. We had our own super fruity word processor system that had been upgraded to be able to print on Laser jet printers! We had a primitive message system that would spit out reports on you if you did not answer someone within a certain amount of time. And you could also get telexes on this super high-falutin’ system.
I got a telex from one of the organizations in Los Angeles. They were writing to me to report that their video copy of the recent event was low quality. This did not make sense. Dave Miscavige was in the video editing bay screaming and yelling because no videos were ready to send out and here I was reading a telex from LA about a video they were watching that was low quality. I had to drive to LA to check some laser discs that were being made, so I made a note to check into this further.
The next day, after checking some laser disc masters in Pioneer’s plant in Carson, I made my way over to the organization I had received the report from. I went into the lobby where they had a big screen TV with VCR set up. Sure enough, they were playing a video of the recent event! I was amazed. The event was playing on the TV but not one