Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [96]
(Author’s Note: As I write this in 2009 the Super Power Building has still not opened. Over 100 million dollars has been raised to fund the construction of it — and continues to be raised, although more than double the budget has already been collected. The Empire State Building took a year to build! The only thing released from the above list of materials are the “Basic Books and Lectures”.)
Chapter Eighteen – The Great Outdoors
We had to shoot a film so that it could be released at the Auditor’s Day event coming up in September. The film that needed to be shot was Technical Training Film #1 - TRs in Life.
Mitch Brisker was a professional director who was hired on to direct the films and all other staff that produced the films were Sea Org members. Mitch Brisker had been a Scientologist for many years. The story went that years back he used to routinely do drugs and one day he woke up with his dead (cocaine overdosed) girlfriend next to him in bed. He ended up doing the Purification Rundown and years later he would become a commercial director and then somehow he ended up at Gold directing all of the Tech Films that needed to be re-shot. They needed to be re-shot because the existing films were so low quality as to be completely unwatchable and embarrassing. (Note: Dave Miscavige was on the crew that shot the crappy films and only one film that he worked on is being shown in organizations today.)
The rest of the Shoot Crew were Sea Org members. There were about 25 of us. This was the Camera, Lighting, Make-up, Costumes, Props, Sets and Talent staff. An equivalent Hollywood crew doing the same type of film shooting would have had at least three times the number of people we had.
We had four vehicles that all staff and equipment had to fit in. We had a 1979 GMC lighting truck (that routinely broke down somewhere). We had a 1979 GMC Camera truck, a Chevy “dually” with trailer and a white 15-passenger van. There were only five of the twenty-five staff that could or were allowed to drive these vehicles.
In the Sea Org at Gold, there are specific requirements that have to be in place for you to be able to drive. Very few staff met all the requirements:
1. You have to have done Car School, a course that requires you attend study time for a full month at 2.5 hours per day so that you can learn about how a car works and learn how to drive.
2. You have to have a current valid driver’s license. One in every twenty Gold staff had a current valid driver’s license.
3. You CANNOT be on the Potential Trouble Source (PTS) list. This is a list generated by Perimeter Council. Since all mail going to and from Gold is opened and read by Security, any bad indicators or critical remarks towards Scientology by any relative or friend would land you on the PTS list. Until you formally handled or disconnected from this person, you would remain on the PTS List. Also, if you got sick in any way, you would be added to the PTS list until the person suppressing you was located and handled or you disconnected from them.
4. You have to have read the manual for the vehicle you wished to drive and another person had to quiz you on specific points of the manual until you were able to answer any question they posed.
5. You could not have any accidents or tickets on your driving record. If you had an accident or ticket, you had to redo Car School and pay for the accident or ticket fees to get back “on the road.”
6. You have to be insured on the vehicle you wish to drive. If it is a personal vehicle, then you have to cover the insurance costs out of your $40/week pay. If it is an org vehicle, you must get approved to drive it and get added to the overall insurance plan.
As I said, very few staff made the Okay to Drive list; out of twenty-five of us, we had five and that was doing real well. In some parts of