Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(125)
Archer had a particular reason to feel aggrieved: Haggis’s letter had called her son a liar. She could understand the pain and anger Haggis felt over the treatment of his own gay daughters, but she didn’t think that was relevant. In her opinion, homosexuality is not the church’s issue. She had personally introduced gay friends to Scientology.
Isham was especially frustrated. He felt that they weren’t breaking through to Haggis. Of all the friends present, Isham was the closest to Haggis. They had a common artistic sensibility that made it easy to work together. Isham had won an Emmy for the theme music he composed for Haggis’s 1996 television series, EZ Streets. He had scored Crash and Haggis’s last movie, The Valley of Elah. Soon he was supposed to start work on The Next Three Days. Now both their friendship and their professional relationship were at risk.
Isham had been analyzing the discussion from a Scientological perspective. In his view, Haggis’s emotional state on the Tone Scale at that moment was a 1.1, Covertly Hostile. By adopting a tone just above it—Anger—he hoped to blast Haggis out of the psychic place where he seemed to be lodged. Isham made what he calls an intellectual decision to be angry.
“Paul, I’m pissed off,” he told Haggis. “There are better ways to do this. If you have a complaint, there’s a complaint line.” Anyone who genuinely wanted to change Scientology should stay within the organization, Isham argued, not quit. All of his friends believed that if he wanted to change Scientology, he should do it from within. They wanted him to recant and return to the fold or else withdraw his letter and walk away without making a fuss.
Haggis listened patiently. A fundamental tenet of Scientology is that differing points of view must be fully heard and acknowledged. But when his friends finished, they were still red-faced and angry. Haggis suggested that as good Scientologists, they should at least examine the evidence. He referred them to the St. Petersburg Times articles that had so shaken him, and to certain websites written by former members. He explained that his quarrel was with the management and the culture of the church, not with Scientology itself. By copying them on his resignation letter, he had hoped that they would be as horrified as he by the practices that were going on in the name of Scientology. Instead, he realized, they were mainly appalled by his actions in calling the management of the church to account.
Haggis’s friends came away from the meeting with mixed feelings—“no clearer than when we went in,” Archer felt. What wasn’t said in this meeting was that this would be the last time any of them would ever speak to Haggis. Isham did consider Haggis’s plea to look at the websites or the articles in the St. Petersburg Times, but he decided “it was like reading Mein Kampf if you wanted to know something about the Jewish religion.”
After that first meeting with friends on his back porch, Haggis had several lengthy encounters with Tommy Davis and other representatives of the church. They showed up at his office in Santa Monica—a low-slung brick building on Broadway, covered in graffiti, like a gang headquarters. The officials brought thick files to discredit people they heard or assumed he had been talking to. This was August 2009; shooting for The Next Three Days in Pittsburgh was going to start within days, and the office desperately needed Haggis’s attention. His producing partner, Michael Nozik, who is not a Scientologist, was frustrated. Haggis was spending hours, day after day, dealing with Scientology delegations. He resorted to getting members of his staff to walk him out to his car because he knew that Scientology executives would be waiting for him, and he wanted to give the impression he was too busy to speak—which he was. But then he would give up and let them into the office for another lengthy confrontation.
During one of these meetings, Davis showed Haggis a policy letter that Hubbard had written, listing the acts for which one could be declared a Suppressive Person. Haggis had stepped over the line on four of them.
“Tommy, you are absolutely right, I did all those things,” Haggis responded. “If you want to call me that, that’s what I am.”
“We can still put this genie back in the bottle,” Tommy assured him, but it would mean that Haggis would withdraw the letter and then resign quietly.
Although Haggis listened, he didn’t change his mind. It seemed to him that the Scientology officials became more “livid and irrational” the longer they talked. For instance, Davis and the other church officials insisted that Miscavige had not beaten his employees; his accusers, they said, had committed the violence. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Haggis responded, “okay, let’s say that’s true, Miscavige never touched anyone. I’m sorry, but if someone in my organization were going around beating people, I’d know about it! You think I’d put up with it? And I’m not that good a person.” Haggis noted that if the rumors about Miscavige’s violent temper were true, it just proved that even the greatest leaders are fallible. “Look at Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said, referring to one of his heroes. “If you look at his personal life, it’s been said he has a few problems in that area.”
“How dare you compare Dave Miscavige with Martin Luther King!” one of the officials shouted.
Haggis was aghast. “They thought that comparing Miscavige to Martin Luther King was debasing his character,” he said. “If they were trying to convince me that Scientology was not a cult, they did a very poor job of it.”12