Scientology doc 'Going Clear': Five takeaways
Director Alex Gibney's controversial documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, airing Sunday on HBO (8 p.m. ET/PT), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. USA TODAY's Claudia Puig was there and offers these key takeaways:
1. The church engaged in harassment and torture. The scathing exposé directed by Gibney (The Armstrong Lie) is based on Lawrence Wright's riveting 2013 bestseller, Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief. Among the bombshells asserted by eight former church members: Scientology intentionally broke up Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; it tortured some of its members in a prison known as "the hole" and subjected others to hard labor; and it harassed those who left the organization and forced their family members to cut off all contact.
2. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard wasn't the nicest guy. The film offers an intimate portrait of founder Hubbard (or LRH, as he's referred to by members) and follows the rise of current leader David Miscavige, accusing him of misusing his power and physically abusing several members. It also claims Hubbard beat and threatened his first wife and kidnapped their daughter, leaving her in Cuba in the care of a mentally disabled woman. Going Clear also details Hubbard's elaborate cosmology incorporating space aliens, invading spirits, volcanoes and other elements his sci-fi writing had contained.
3. The film questions Tom Cruise's knowledge of abuses. Marty Rathbun, one of the former Scientology members interviewed, was the second-highest-ranking church official before he defected. He says Miscavige didn't approve of Kidman because her father is a well-known psychologist in Australia, and Scientology vehemently opposes psychiatry and psychology. The film goes on to explore the close friendship between Miscavige and Cruise, and it questions whether Cruise is aware of church abuses. The filmmaker essentially calls upon Cruise to renounce Scientology.
4. Extensive files are kept on church members.Going Clear says actor John Travolta won't leave the church out of fear that his personal life will be exposed. Reams of information are kept on each member as they go through the process of "auditing" so they become "clear" of all problems, worries and bad memories. Spanky Taylor, a former publicist and friend of Travolta's, details how her infant daughter was taken away from her and left in a urine-soaked crib and unsanitary conditions. Meanwhile, Taylor was forced to do arduous physical labor while she was pregnant, she says. Fed up, Taylor took her child and escaped the church.
5. The film reveals that the church has ewer than 50,000 members worldwide but more than $1 billion in assets. The former members interviewed, including screenwriter Paul Haggis, and others high up in the organization describe how they turned over vast sums of money to the church. They use terms like ''brainwashing'' and expressed remorse and chagrin over their involvement with the organization, which was granted church status by the IRS in 1993, making it tax-exempt. Scientology's fight against the IRS is detailed, as is a lavish celebration thrown by Miscavige and Scientology officials when the "war" with the federal government ended in the group's victory.