Blown for Good: Scientology Exposed
Marc Headley worked at Scientology’s secret desert compound, which houses all Scientology management, for 15 years. The 500-acre property is located deep in the California desert. The local townspeople were told lectures and films were made there. But is that all that was happening? It is the location of a multi-million dollar home for L. Ron Hubbard, built two decades after his death. It is the home of Scientology’s current leader, David Miscavige. So what really happens at the Int Base? Are the stories on the internet true? How does Scientology conduct management of its day-to-day operations? Could stories of armed guards, weapons, staff beatings, and razor wire fences be true? If so, how could a facility like this exist in modern-day America? Hundreds of staff tried to escape over the years. Some succeeded but were never seen or heard of again, and most failed. Why were people kept here? What really went on at the headquarters of Scientology? This is the story of what happened behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology.
Blown for Good: Scientology Exposed
From Gold Base To LA: Mitch Brisker On Narconon, Vaults, And Control - Scientology Secrets #23
The glossy reels say “global help.” The insiders tell a different story. We sit down with director Mitch Brisker to map how Scientology reengineered Narconon after multiple deaths, shifted operations from the secretive International Base to Los Angeles, and used a made-for-TV sheen to mask liability and control. Mitch was there through the rewrites, the SMP launch, and the clampdowns—and he explains how the organization manufactures impact with paid “PSAs,” inflated statistics, and a media pipeline that looks impressive but rarely reaches real audiences.
We pull back the curtain on the Hole and the daily mechanics of punishment: segregated meal times, frog-marched lines of staff, and the phrase “PTS to the middle class” used to shame normal life choices. Mitch charts the rise and fall of key enforcers, including leaders who went from running a 300-person studio to sewing buttons in a laundry building. He also walks us through the film lab that out-resolved Hollywood with Kodak’s help, yet sat underused because it served only in-house projects—a perfect metaphor for a system obsessed with control over outcomes.
Then there’s the archive project: CST vaults sealing Hubbard’s writings on etched plates and lectures on gold records, complete with a hand-cranked, solar-capable player. The goal was legitimacy and permanence; the result feels like doomsday optics. Meanwhile, AI models learn from what the world actually watches, which means critical reporting increasingly shapes public understanding while official channels stagnate. If you’ve wondered how Scientology really works—from Narconon lawsuits to SMP’s internal culture and those mountain vaults—this conversation connects the dots with first-hand detail.
Enjoy the episode, share it with someone curious about high-control groups, and leave a review to help others find the show. Subscribe for more deep dives into the stories mainstream PR won’t tell.
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Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. Welcome to another episode of Blown for Good, Scientology Exposed. Today I have a special guest, and that is Mitch Brisker here. Join, please welcome him to the video. Hey Mitch.
SPEAKER_03:Hey Mark, great to see you.
SPEAKER_00:Good to see you again.
SPEAKER_03:But for you, anything.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you. If you're joining us, uh this is that we're gonna we're recording this as a video, so this is gonna come out, but we do like it for people to let us know where they're watching from. So if you want to jam in the comments uh where you're uh watching from today, we'd appreciate that. And then um today we have uh basically we did a two or three videos on the int base, the Scientology International Headquarters over the past month or so. And um, and Mitch saw one of those videos, and um we covered a video that he participated in when he was still working at Golden Air Productions for Scientology, and um, and we covered some of the people that appear in that video and how the videos basically it's make-believe. There's not a lot the people that are doing things in that video, they don't normally look like that, they don't normally act like that, they're not running around the property uh in the middle of the day going for runs. And um, and Mitch uh sent me an email and he said, Oh, uh uh, I wanted to update you on all these things. So we figured we'd just go through that and cover that uh all the updates that he had. And um when did you when when did you move from that property uh down to Los Angeles? Or did you was there sort of like a uh transition or did you go back and forth, or how did that work?
SPEAKER_03:Uh it was a weird kind of no, I moved down in uh 2013. Okay. I was working out of ASI, uh, I was working on the Narcanon program with Miscavige, uh, which was a hoot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, like videos and films for Narcodon?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so I will no, the entire program was being rewritten from the ground up. So wow. I was rewriting all of the films they were getting done at gold. I I just I didn't go up there for obvious reasons because if you could avoid going up there for any reason, it's a good reason. Yes. And you know, I uh ASI was seven minutes from my house, so it was like really nice. I think I wrote 27 films. I was down there for and then I did a bunch of other stuff. You you know the these these uh you know the the uh what do you call it?
SPEAKER_00:The the um the Scientology TV no the IS event, which is just happened, I guess, because it's how yeah, we're recording this on October on Halloween on October 31st, and uh and they they just had the uh International Association of Scientologists event in England. According to the videos that they did that that I just saw that uh Alex uh apostate Alex posted, they had like 2,000 people showed up. It was like abysmal, like the lowest ever. Yeah, if they're not doing two business.
SPEAKER_03:I wanted to acknowledge that. But so you know, and then I while I was down there working at OSI, I would write these ads for the IES event, like I would the the short videos. The the whole event is organized around some uh first there's an intro, which I had never had anything to do with, which is a bunch of fake statistics. Yeah, you used to help make those things, yeah. And and then we would do something about the volunteer ministers, and then something about uh CCHR, and then something about I don't know, uh oh uh a sort of an aggregate one of all of the incredible help Scientology does. You know, Mark, I have one of those. They're called How We Help videos.
SPEAKER_00:How we help?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I have one of them. It's two minutes long. We should do it sometime because it's one of the videos that they sell that they show at the IS event, which gets everybody. I mean, and the statistics, I looked at it yesterday, I forgot I had it. Yeah. Statistics are like 50 million people shown their human rights. Like, you know, 107 million people informed about drugs.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well the insane. Yeah, one of the way they get one of the ways that they sort of add those up is if they if they pass out, like let's say there's a uh a football match in Europe somewhere and they pass out flyers there, they potentially reached, you know, 50,000 people that day. Yeah, because they passed out a hundred flyers.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but I've been there. I I actually witnessed them randomly handing out flyers and they go like this. They shove it at somebody, the person looks at it and they're like, I don't fucking want this, and then it goes into the trash.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So it's just like no, I mean, I'll tell you about it. Here's that they all start with a kernel of truth, like you just acknowledged that. Yeah, we handed out 50,000 flowers, so there's there's always it starts with something true, and then they launch off of that. The there was a the Youth for Human Rights campaign that we did a bunch of PSAs and they got shown on television.
SPEAKER_00:Announcements for those not in the industry.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, uh yeah, they're not really PSAs, they're public service the the FCC mandates broadcasters that they have to donate a certain amount of time for public service announcements.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But what Scientology does is they buy ads and then they call them, they tell their people their PSAs.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Because they consider their public service announcements.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's like when they shot a um what was called an infomercial at the time.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They didn't want to be lumped in with infomercials and and then like cheesy sales and on so they called it a documental, which is a documentary commercial.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:They like to re they like to rebrand it for internal use, even though no one really cares.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. By the way, a little bit off topic, but uh, I've noticed on Facebook Marketplace there's a a hot AI influencer who's selling uh a code for buying a Dianetics book on Facebook Marketplace. Yeah, no, it's fully sanctioned. This is one I'll send it to you later, we'll deal with it. But so to answer your question, so in 2013, or a few months before that, Miscavige had pulled me aside and said, I'm leaving gold, I'm never coming back because too many people effed me over here, right? And uh, you know, later I found out that he was uh, you know, obviously concerned because he had abused so many people on that base, that there's always that concern that someone is gonna lose it and just get a weapon and kill you. And so, you know, he was living in that sort of that that kind of dangerous environment where you just you you don't know if people are gonna retaliate against you. I uh and so I kind of consider that that's why he left. And then I also found out later from Mike that uh he was very concerned about an FBI raid. He wanted to get out of there. So he moved to LA, and then a few months later, I got a message go down there and see him, and then we met, and he's like, Hey, I got this massive lawsuit of these four deaths at Narconon, and so we got to redo the whole program because um so we don't get sued, you know, not to make it safer for the people that they're servicing, but to make it less of a liability for them because you know that's it's all about reduce the liability, reduce the liability.
SPEAKER_00:It's funny that it's funny that you say that because I was working with uh uh an attorney in Oklahoma, and um, and he basically asked me if I could give him the courses that consisted of the Narcanon program. Yeah. And I said, Yeah, that's easy. They're these Scientology courses are the exact courses they use at Narcanon. They're not, they're not, they're just rebranded for Narcanon.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, they're recompiled. Yeah, exactly. It's the same exact course, it's just the big difference between a prescription drug with a brand name and a prescription drug that's generic. Yeah, like there's no difference.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's the same thing, it just has a different label.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, we even did remember, you know, the remember the purification film that you watch, and it we redid that we we didn't redo it, we did another one for Narcanon so that everybody it was the same film, shot for shot. Everybody had narconon uniforms on the stuff. Instead of Scientology uniforms, yeah. They got rid of all the Scientology stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Uh so yeah, it was pretty crazy. So yeah, I wonder if that was one of the was it one of the attorneys that were suing for the wrongful death.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And there was a, I want to say it was Narcanon Arrowhead.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it was Arrowhead.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, that was the one. And I know I know that it didn't go Scientology's way because um I'm pretty sure they ended up have having to settle with these people that were it was the parents of the people who had passed away on the program and um that was suing it, or the families of these people.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Most notably it was a young girl who tragically died there, whose name was Stacey.
SPEAKER_00:I can't uh Yeah, I remember that's that anybody wants to google.
SPEAKER_03:She was the one they gave her a weekend furlough, she strung out on drugs, they let her go home for a weekend, she comes back in, she smuggles drugs, and she's not being supervised or watched in the detox area. Yeah, she overdoses, right? Yeah, and her and her family were suing because hey, we trusted you to take care of our daughter. And Miss Gabbage was like, Yeah, this is her parents, they're going for a payday, they're running parents, like, look how they raised their little girl. You know, because everything to him is just it's just vile the way he sees the world and talks and so forth. So, yeah, I was down there working with him on the Narconon program. Uh and that's just a whole nother story. You know, when we were done, they were gonna they called every ED from all over the world to LA.
SPEAKER_00:The Narcanon EDs or the Scientology EDs?
SPEAKER_03:No, it's Narcanon EDs.
SPEAKER_00:Everyone, the executive directors of all the different things.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guys who own the franchise, because Narcanon is like McDonald's. I mean, you do buy most of them, you buy it's like a franchise, and then you pay to license that stuff. Yeah. And uh I assume Miscavige would be a small event with all of those guys, and then he would present it to them. And then he says, I can't present it to them because it's supposed to be secular, and I'm C org.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm thinking, oh man, this is part of this whole scam. Like, I'm you're really kind of like, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_00:He shouldn't even be working on any of it.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Not just presenting it. I like how he's like, I can't present it. I did every other possible thing on this to produce it. But I can't, but I can't tell people that we did that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:So then he says, You you why don't you do it? You, yeah, me, Mitch Brisker. Yeah. Did you? Yeah, I did.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_03:I did. I think it's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00:It's such a such a scam.
SPEAKER_03:I know. And me and like uh there was a couple of, I think there was a couple of one SOR guy involved. What's his name? Uh uh Hurtling, Hurtling, what's her name? Um, you know her.
SPEAKER_00:Uh the CMO, the girl in Los Angeles.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, her husband, I can't remember his name. He was involved in it and he spoke, but it's just like it was just crazy town. It was just like Looney Tunes, the whole thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Uh so they got So that happened in 2013, though.
SPEAKER_03:That I think we did the release in probably 2015.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:And then SP opened and I went there.
SPEAKER_00:Scientology Media Productions. That's the old KCE Twitter.
SPEAKER_03:Showpiece. Uh I mean I mean, it is an amazing studio.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I gotta tell you, uh, it really is a remarkable feat. I mean, it's the the only thing that Scientology does that David Miscabage oversees that's actually uh I can't fault him for is well I can, but it it means it's the way they they restore old buildings and take care of buildings. Sure. Because that is their primary, you know, source of value. But they really do a good job. I mean, they get you know written up in architectural historical magazines for doing these things. So yeah, I I actually really enjoyed working there except for the well.
SPEAKER_00:The Sea Org part of it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, well, that you you'll appreciate this, Mark. For about the first four months that the studio was actually operational and we moved over there. Yeah, right. There was no what they call an establishment team. Now that would be your ethics people, your HR people, your your police, all those people. That entire department was not one. And as a result of that, it was almost like having a normal job, almost.
SPEAKER_00:Because they didn't have all the C org bureaucracy kind of surrounding a job.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the hyper bureaucracy. And then this hand-picked, hand super personally supervised establishment team from Flag, that you know, they'd been supervised by Miscavige and picked by him. They showed up and the place become like a Nazi boot camp. I mean, it was these some of these kids that showed up from Flag, they were like the Leibish born, Liebens born, you know, the the the SS that had bred kids. Yeah, that's what they were like, and their job was to their whole statistic was found and handled flaps.
SPEAKER_00:Situation, oh found and handled flaps, or situations found and handled, or flaps and found and flaps.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I seem to remember flaps, but yeah, the language is more accurately said.
SPEAKER_00:Situations found and handled.
SPEAKER_03:That's all all they did. It was sit down, pick up the cams, what the fuck you're up to. You might have, and it wasn't that way at gold. Like there were there, you could do well and you get breathing room.
SPEAKER_00:Well, at Golden Air Productions in Gold, there was usually it it hovered around at the international headquarters at the Int base, it hovered around 300-ish people in Golden Air Productions, and there were usually two or three people that were those people. So it was like, you know, for every hundred staff, you had one person that was one of these situation found and handle guys. So it was a it was it was hard. And also the the property was very, very spread out over 500 acres. So those people they and they didn't none most of those people didn't have motorcycles, so they had to walk to every single place. And because we were where we worked at the what was called the Cine Castle, the cinematography, this castle that had this giant studio in it, it was 25 and like a 25-minute walk from their building to our building. It was they were on one side of the property and we were all the way at the far end of the so they had to walk all the way out there to mess with us. And so for a long for the very first few years we were working there, we almost didn't have anybody coming out there because it was just so far to get there.
SPEAKER_03:No, when when we were working in the city castle, uh I don't even remember seeing anybody from that department. I mean, if they showed up, it was a big deal.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we would know, like there would be like a on the radio, like, hey, they're here.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, because it was a uh a filming facility, you know, you shut the doors, there's a red light, nobody can come in. Yes, and we would just, you know, do what we did.
SPEAKER_00:Hide in there and stay away. Yeah. Um there were many.
SPEAKER_03:So then so then, but real quick, so then what happened was I was down there, I helped set up SP and kind of had the same role I had at gold, and then I got busted for let's just call it disreputable behavior, which means I was having too much fun in my uh uh free time. Okay, I didn't like that because they don't want you having fun. So then they sent me back up to gold and uh things spiraled out of control for theirs uh from there. So that's kind of the whole there was a transition down there and then a rather ugly one up.
SPEAKER_00:And to be fair, uh anything in your personal life that isn't Scientology, they consider other fish to fry, and that you're not dedicated to the cause because you're out. I mean, Tom Cruise said it. You think we can have we can I can just go on vacation? I can't do that, you know, because I know I know we're the only ones that can help. Like a vacation is is not proper behavior of a Scientologist.
SPEAKER_03:They have a wonderful phrase uh that helps create a kind of uh atmosphere of lessening the value of anyone who would have, which is PTS to the middle class.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, potential trouble source to the middle class. So if you're in Scientology and you want to get a new car, like you have an old car and you want to get a new car, then that's considered sort of your PTS to the middle class. You want to be like everybody else in the middle class instead of just have your head down, bum up, and do Scientology. And why wouldn't you give that money to Scientology? What are you wasting it on a BMW uh seven?
SPEAKER_03:Or sending your kids to college or building some future.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, all anything that would happen in the middle class is frowned upon.
SPEAKER_03:So it was really, really bad. I mean that was one of the worst things you could be was PTS of the middle class. And so you would do different things to prove that you weren't.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:The number one thing that you could do if you were doing it of your own volition would be join the sea org. That would be the ultimate proof. Oh, I'm not PTS to the middle class, I joined the Sea Org. I mean, that doesn't go for kids or people that were born into it.
SPEAKER_00:You know, the another thing that I I found interesting in the in the email that you sent me was uh you do you spoke about that uh Miscavige was worried about an FBI rate at the base, but also because the only way they could do that is if there were people working and living in the same facility. And so they outboarded all of those functions to other properties, including if they make a video and they sell that video, or if they make a video that sells Scientology, then that can sort of count as that. So they moved all that to Scientology, media productions, all these different facilities. But you said that they turned what there was a building at the at the inner international base called the Manufacturing Building, Building 36. And you said that they were stuffing, they were um stuffing titanium, the titanium plates and capsules for the church of spiritual technology.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. So gold, one of the because it's not that far, you know, it's it's the closest.
SPEAKER_00:The int base is the closest base to the CST base, which is in it's in, it's mentioned, it's called uh the running springs or uh rim of the world, any of those different names for the Twin Peaks location, yeah. Uh which is where they that's sort of the the main church of spiritual technology base, and then they have all these bases that are really just vaults, and so that's where they traditionally manufactured all that stuff over the years was at that property or assembled the manufactured product.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so uh essentially the way it works is that gold, it's like a depot for all of the contents of the boxes. Okay. I don't know who maked the boxes. I know that Angie Blankenship's father had some company that supplied whatever. Maybe they get them made in Taiwan. It doesn't really matter. Yeah, the boxes get shipped there, and then everything that's inside, you know, the gold-plated records, whatever it is, yeah, it all gets sent to gold, and then they kind of stuff the titanium pinata, and then I don't I don't know if they do the argon there or if they do that at the final destination. Maybe they need to check it out to see what's in there. Yeah. They suck out all the oxygen and replace it with argon gas. Yeah. Uh so you know, to make you know, an inert gas. I mean, yeah. I'll tell you the craziest thing, Mark, about all of that for me, yeah, was when we were at SP and and and Miscavige was really on a kamikaze run to get these, you know, these uh documentaries done about ideal orgs, about the preservation project. Because there is, I mean, there is some amazing technology in the preservation project.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's it's like uh all of these things were arrived at in consultation with some of the top experts in the world, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and just so any if anybody doesn't know what we're talking about, we actually did a video about this on our channel that covered all of the church's spiritual technology bases. But essentially what they're doing is they're taking all of L. Ron Hubbard's recorded and written works and they're etching them into stainless steel plates in the case of the books and his courses and his policy letters and his bulletins. And then they're taking all of his recorded lectures that he gave, thousands and thousands of these, and they're mastering them onto gold records. And so that they, as an archival project, to preserve all of L. Ron Hubbard's written and recorded works. And these are in multiple locations in these underground vaults in the side of mountains. And so a lot of the the way, a lot of the people that are in this field, I actually have a lot to do with this field in my work today, because I do a lot of my our company does a lot of uh museums and and facilities that have artifacts and and and archival things that they need to preserve. And you can't have certain lights, you can't have certain materials, you're not allowed to touch anything with your hands because your oil will actually eat etch over a hundred years. The oil from your fingers will etch into these materials. So they're handling all of these things with gloves, and it's it's a special etching process. And they made a a record player that plays these gold records, and it and it has a hand crank.
SPEAKER_03:Well, yeah, but but actually it's not just hand crank, it comes with a solar yeah, accessory solar panel, you know. In case you know, it's not a nuclear winter, you can put up a solar panel, but yeah, it's pretty crazy.
SPEAKER_00:To me, the funniest thing is is that okay, so let's say they do that, they have all these facilities everywhere. If somebody stumbles, if there's a zombie apocalypse or something, if somebody stumbles on one of these vaults and it's filled with all these precious metals, they're gonna be melting all that stuff down for trading and currency.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think they're gonna make-weapons, they're gonna make weapons out of them.
SPEAKER_00:Out of the stainless, they're gonna put those on vehicles, they're gonna take all those plates and screw them onto the outside of vehicles to make them like mad mess.
SPEAKER_03:And uh this is what is so silly about the whole thing. So Miscavige thinks, or Hubbard originally originated this, that once people find this and in in some distant future, post-apocalyptic future, yeah, just just finding it will reboot Scientology, right? I mean, that's the idea. But let me ask you this the Egyptian tombs went undiscovered for thousands of years, and when we find found them, there wasn't some reboot of Egyptian religion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_03:It was just like it was like, oh, look at that. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. So I always imagined that they would excavate these things and they would be at the Museum of Natural History. There would be like the Hall of Oddities. And and you know, like school children would go in there and just go, like, what were these people thinking?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Totally and they put their shit on on etched plates and you know, and put it in a nuke-proof vault. Crazy. But I gotta tell you something. So Miscavige was on a kamikaze run at Scientology Media Productions to make documentaries about these things. And his whole rallying cry was when they see how much trouble we went through to do this, they're gonna know we're not a cult, we're the real thing. And I'm sitting there because this was like, I'm kind of like, by that point, yeah, I'm like, just just make as much money as I can and get the hell out. That didn't work, but that was the idea. Yeah. Um it I and I remember thinking, no, they're gonna think that we're a doomsday cult. That's what they're gonna think. They're gonna think you're preparing for the worst possible catastrophe that could ever happen. So anyway, yeah, it's crazy. And if anybody wants to see that, that just go on to the Scientology, uh, Scientology.tv, I think it is. They they don't do IP addresses, they don't contact people. It's just it's you know, and it's just don't log in, don't open an account. You can watch these videos, and I'm amazed that more people don't watch them. Yeah, uh because they're they're they're more grist for content than standing out front of an org and berating staff members.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, I mean they they are documenting the crazy of what they're doing. Yeah, and that's another point. If you if you stumbled upon these things, like let's just say in the future you stumbled on these things, no matter when it is, and there's a bunch of records of some old fuddy duddy telling weird stories and speaking gibberish on gold records, it's gonna be like, what did these people like? They really thought some 1960s technology level stuff was gonna be useful in the in you know a hundred years or two hundred or three hundred years from now.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's bizarre.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, um of the other things that um we talked about were the birthing buildings. They built these buildings at the international headquarters for like I want to say it was 1,600 people. So the each they had four buildings that would hit that would hold 400 uh Sea Org members each, house them. And um, and because they outboarded and offloaded all of these functions to all of these other facilities, there was uh a few hundred people left at the property. And and and I don't remember who I heard this from. It I know it was somebody who left from the international headquarters. I don't think they ever spoke out publicly, but they said that the entire property was in one building. Like everybody lived in one main building, and then they had the people that were part of the hole or the like the outcast people in trouble, they had all of those people in their own building. Were you there when that was happening?
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's consistent with what I saw, but I wasn't like I didn't know about the whole mark until after I left. I mean, I have to do I gotta do my own reckoning with that because I would walk by uh that three times a week on my way to the music studio.
SPEAKER_00:I was gonna say it's right at it's right next to music.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, you can't miss it. I mean, and so I was literally that video that you guys uh did the reaction to, which you know, I've also I think you linked to mine. Uh yeah. Um so you know, I was like doing my amends project by doing this thing, but we were literally shooting in this in the in the part of the music studio, uh, which is like what 20 yards from the hole?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And it's all about you know how we're saving human rights for the world. It's crazy. I mean, most of that video was shot within a hundred yards of all of you guys in prison. I didn't really know about it. So you know, here's how I sort of found out. I I I knew something was up because a lot of people disappeared. And and it, you know, and it's yeah, and like I'm not gonna you, you know, you're not gonna ask questions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's that's a that's a sure way to get yourself in trouble by being nosy and asking, like, hey, what happened to Body Blah? It's like, hey, you don't have the rank to be asking about Body Black.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and I wasn't trying to stay out of trouble, but I had a job to do and a check to collect every week, and a lot of people depending on me. Uh, and some of those people were having a an improved quality of life by working in film. Yeah, because they it was just a better, you know, it was a better gig there than a lot of other gigs, right?
SPEAKER_00:If you were yeah, and that's true. Over the years, I remember I didn't really even think about that. Over the years, when we were in the cinematography department or the events or whatever, yeah, there was a lot of times where we would get the people that got kicked out of Religious Technology Center or got kicked out of the executive strata or CMO in the Commodore's Messenger Organization International, they would get kicked out of that organization and then they'd have to come and work in the cinematography. That's where Kevin McHenry came from. The the he was the chief grip and then a video producer. That's right, Amber O'Sullivan, Claire's cousin. Oh, and Val and Val Haney, all of these people loved working in Cine compared to that other job. They were it was basically like they got a reprieve, they got a vacation from the insanity mostly in set.
SPEAKER_03:So they're painting all day long, yeah, or they're in the shop building stuff, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Not getting yelled at by anybody.
SPEAKER_03:No, no. And some of them were permanent, like you know, Val and Amber, that they just got transferred. Some of them it was just punitive, like you'd see you'd see like, oh Angie Blankenship, uh Jenny Linson.
SPEAKER_00:They'd come down and clean out paint buckets. I remember when we were in Cine, um, they came. To set, he told us in a meeting. He said, Hey, I'm going to send you some people uh down to Cine. And then when they got there, it was the Angie Blankenship and Jenny Lynch. And I was like, Oh my God. They were working directly for David Miscavige on a personal project the week before. And now they're he's like, give these guys the worst job possible. And I said, You guys are gonna clean out all the Jesus butt buckets in the paint shop. And they were like, Jesus buckets. And I go, Yeah, it's all these paint buckets. We get recycled paint and we mix paints and we just put them in the five-gallon bucket, and we might not pull it out for five years. And they go, Well, why do you call them Jesus buckets? I'm like, open that one up, and you open it up and you're like, Oh, Jesus.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but I'll I'll tell you, so one of the ways that I found out, or sort of there was a big change when people were let out of the hole. You remember when we first met, um myself and some of the other quote-unquote pros of people we weren't, you know, we were NSO, non-C org, we were doing a job. Most of us were Scientologists, occasionally there's somebody who wasn't. And we used to eat in this place called the Tavern, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, and it had like a Knights the Round Table in it, and uh it even had a it had a sword in the stone as you walked into this little tavern.
SPEAKER_03:It was all fiberglass, cheap, cheap, like just like Kmart quality stuff. But and and and you may not remember, but you know, I was rarely exactly on time to the set. I was always at least five minutes late. And then you you I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was being polite and so you may not remember. I was giving you an out, Mark. Thanks for not taking it. Yeah, you may remember that you you your nickname for me was Sir Lay a lot because I Sir Laidolot, yes.
SPEAKER_00:Well, because you were coming from the Knights of the Round, too. I was like, can you tell Sir Laid a lot? Sir Lot we need, we're ready to shoot.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that was my favorite. Yeah, hold on, that's not fair. So, but anyway, uh there was a period where a miscavage, uh a couple years after you guys escaped, there was a period where he was like, All of these guys, these pros, we gotta start cheating them like staff members. So they moved us all back into the main dining room, right?
SPEAKER_00:Massacre Canyon in MCI.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and we were at a little table close to the exit and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, uh, for the staff there, lunch was a pretty exciting, or a meal was a pretty exciting thing because it's like you get in there, you eat, you might only have five minutes depending on the distance you had to walk or uh what pre other pressures were on you. And then, you know, everybody'd run outside uh first the smokers and they'd huddle up and then they would do their muster. But those of us who weren't required to go to muster and so forth, we could then continue our meal until everybody was done, right? Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Because they would muster right outside the dining hall, so you can see everybody lined up out there. Yeah, and you know, that's a funny thing you mentioned that because there is a C org policy that states from L. Ron Hubbard that you cannot give somebody an order at the dinner table. So the dinner table is a safe zone because you're not allowed to receive orders or be yelled at or anything when you're at a meal. So it's sort of like you get a you get a pause from the insanity for 15 or 20 minutes. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. So um I noticed, so when we would leave, there would be that everybody's going back to work, right? But then one day there was like a hundred people as we were on our way out being marched into the dining room by security. Like every security guard. And I'm like, wait, I know a bunch of these people. There's like, you know, Gary Weesey and all these other people, and they're just look like beaten dogs, they're just downtrodden and deflated, and they're being literally like frog marched, you know, into the dining room. Because I and that is the point, I believe, at which they move them out of the hole, move them into the one birthing building, and then let them eat in the dining room after everybody else had eaten.
SPEAKER_00:Well, that I was gonna say that that so what happens is there is two main meals for many years that you would have the gold crew would eat on the first shift. So, like if they ate at noon and they had mustard at 12:30, from 12:30 to one o'clock, the stewards and the the galley personnel, the food service personnel, they would switch over the dining room for the next meal break. And a lot of times, if people were in trouble or people weren't supposed to meet with, they weren't supposed to mingle with the general crew that ate at 12 or at one, they would have them eat during that changeover period so that they would never see any of the other crew on the property because they didn't want, they didn't want them to see their spouses or their friends, or they wanted to keep them segregated from everybody else because of the truck.
SPEAKER_03:They were on parade at the end of the meal when everybody after muster and everybody was leaving. These guys were just paraded in. And I was just like, and I would walk right by them to my car because they would get me down through that parking lot from across the street, and it was just like, you know, do I wave to people I know? It's really awkward and uncomfortable.
SPEAKER_00:And then they you don't wave if you the the proper the proper uh vernacular is say nothing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, procedure.
SPEAKER_00:Like pretend that you're like you can spit on them and you would be like, Oh, look at Mitch, he knows what's up.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, he's keeping their ethics in. Well, I meant like spit on the ground, you know, as discussion. There actually were a couple of them I would have spit at, even if they'd never been in the hall, but anyway. Um I'm not a spitter.
SPEAKER_00:One of the other people that you mentioned was there was a there was a woman that worked there um in the cinematography department. Her name was Lisa Schroer. And Lisa, when I worked in the cinematography department, when I was the shoe crew chief on the film crew that you had headed, right? Um, she was the director's assistant. Yeah. And then over the years. Yeah, she was d the director, Mitch's director. Yeah. Um, and then she became the cinematography division head. She became the head of the cine division, the cinematography division. And then she be, and I during that time I was the pre-production director. So she was my boss. That was the first time she was actually my boss legitimately. But then she became the producer of Golden Era Productions, and then I became the assistant producer, and then she became the commanding officer of Golden Pro Golden Air Productions, and then I became the producer. So she was my boss for many, many years. And you said that she ended up working in the laundry building at the birthing building.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so when everybody got let out of the hole, and I still didn't know about it because I didn't know the specifics until I left.
SPEAKER_00:Just when people just started to show back up.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, they just started to show back up on a regular basis, and I knew that they were all that line of people that I would see marching being marched to meals, I knew they were in some kind of god-awful trouble. Because I'd been there for 25 years, I'd never seen anything like that. This kind of en masse, you know, I've seen a person or two, or maybe three, like marched off by ethics people, but not like a hundred people. It was insane. And so, you know, some of them, Lisa and I had had uh, I mean, when she was my assistant, she managed to photobomb the birth of both of my kids. I mean, uh, you know, in these precious family photos, I have this Lisa Short, you know, like it's like I've had to go through and like Photoshop. I it was just because she would go right a get permission to like, oh, we're gonna bring some baby gifts to Mitch. And you know, you know, Dave Miscavige was all, yeah, that's great. You know, because it's to love bomb him, keep him love bombed, you know.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Uh so yeah, so I remember I have a picture.
SPEAKER_00:We were shooting um a trailer, it was a game show trailer for one of the films.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And um your wife and at least one of your children came to the set, and I actually think I have a picture of me carrying around one of your kids on my shoulder. And you I remember your wife at the time, she gave me a whole bunch. She gave me a ration because I was riling him up. I was like, hey, come on over here, let's go do this. And she was like, You're just you're just making him, you're just winding him up that for what I'm gonna have to deal with later. You're gonna, he's gonna, we're gonna be like, we're shooting everybody out, and then I gotta deal with this kid that you've been playing around with for two yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's why my kids have very fond memories of you, and that is about so yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I was I I loved to have it when your kids came. I was like, let's let's party. Come on, kids. What do we got? Yeah, because you were sort of, you know, David Miscavige um had a high opinion of you, and when we were doing good, um, and when you were doing good, then if we kind of were hanging out with you or doing something with you, then it would be like, Yeah, we have a little bit of air cover if we're with you.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, that that was I but you know that was like that's a whole nother story, but it's kind of part of the trap of my being there because you know love bomb. Yeah, but it's like there were some people, you, Claire, Mike, there were people that I really genuinely liked and had trouble rationalizing what would happen if I let them, and plenty of others, yeah, you know, but and there was a lot of people that I wouldn't want across the street to you know pee on if they were on the air. But uh so yeah, yeah, fun times, fun time. So yeah, Lisa, I I mean she she became my assistant pretty soon. Uh it was I was in my office one day, and uh Greg Wilher, who was a big muckety mug.
SPEAKER_00:He's the one who set up the he was in charge of many of the Tom Cruise girlfriend and divorce projects.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, oh yeah. And and then he popped in my in the office one day because there was a lot of attention on you know making sure that I wasn't messed with and that you know I could do my job. And you know, Jackson and I have laughed about he was like, Yeah, I was in charge of making sure that and the crew was all before you showed up, um we worked before we worked together, the crew was all yes, sir, no, sir, Mr. Brisker. And I was like, what the fuck? And I had to kind of reprogram them to kind of you know have uh redefined our relationship. But I had a Jackson and a couple of other people say, Oh no, no, no. That was like we were lined up and told, no small talk, no personal talk. Yes, Mr. Brisker. And for me, it was like, what the hell is going on? I mean, that would that red flag, you know, I should have paid more attention, Mark.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's all good. It is what it is. Hindsight's 2020. You know, I don't know if you know this or not, but um you used to have a software company and you um you were really amazing at um programming Excel, Microsoft Excel documents. Yeah, and you taught me a few little things on how to do an Excel. And I tell you, I am a master Excel programmer these days. I have all software spreadsheets that I use for bid bidding projects and designing and and hardware lists and IP automation lists, and I use it, I use all that Excel stuff to this day.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I I don't do that so much anymore. I know I know, but uh yeah, but yeah, there was I was actually I created a piece of software for commercial production and I was actually part of the Microsoft Developers whatever thing. I was in there, but whatever. Yeah, that was fun, and and also because there's so much downtime on the set, I used to sit there on a laptop and literally write, you know, visual basic code and shit, and it was like whatever.
SPEAKER_00:Good memories. Yeah. Um okay, so what are some of the other people that you talked about? We got Lisa, so she was in, so but she basically was working in the in the laundry building.
SPEAKER_03:She was in dry cleaning? Yeah, I ran into her one day, uh-huh, which was weird because I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, and and there was no catch-up, no like, no, nothing. Just from right now at this moment, it was like, hi, how are you doing? Great to see you. Like she's saying this to me. Um Hey, I'm working in the laundry building now as a seamstress, so like if you ever need any buttons or mending, this is the woman she was in charge of all of Golden Era Productions for many, many years.
SPEAKER_00:And the one commanding opposite, yeah, and one of David Miscavige's henchwomen. Like she would deal out the punishments and the and the and the horrible things that David Miscavige was directing, and she would do it happily and zest with zest. And that's what she was sort of famous for in the end when she was the commanding officer. Yeah, she would get stuff done because she would she would have a reign of terror over people to make sure that whatever David Miscavige wanted, it got done in it within Golden Era Productions and sort of outside on the events and other things as well.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, but her ascension into being, you know, uh like uh lady of the flies, because I she couldn't be Lord of the Flies, but her ascension into that really started when she became the commanding officer. Yes. And Miscavige took her under his wing. Yes, and they had like daily tutoring sessions.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, you're exactly right. I remember them. I was there when all this was happening, and it was it was it was kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, she became a really horrible person. Same thing with Henning Bendorf.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, Henning, really sweet kid. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I took him under my wing when his senior hopped the fence and he was an art director, and I was like, dude, we have all these films to get done, and you're gonna help me do it. And over time he ascended to being the same position that I had, except over design.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And he liked the stories I heard about him, was like, Are you fucking kidding?
SPEAKER_00:Like Yeah, it got to be a point where the people that David Miscavige held close to him and that were sort of propped up by being connected to him were carbon copies as much as they could be of him. He he molded them in his in his image. And um yeah, that's kind of wild though, to controlling this massive 300-person organization to sewing buttons after a two-year sort of you know, reprogramming or whatever, because it would have taken a lot for her to be able to go back into the gener Gem Pop at Golden Air Productions and to go back as a as a seamstress in the laundry building. That's a that's a long fall. You can't fall much further.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I but I think it was made somewhat easier by the fact that Miss Gabbage was gone.
SPEAKER_00:Well, sure. I mean it's a vacation now. You're sewing buttons and washing stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and you're eating the same food as everybody else, and you're sleeping in the same quality room and bed and everything. So it's like whatever. I'm sure she was relieved. Yeah, you know, in some way. Um I'm sure she was sure.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, uh there were times where people would welcome getting taken off post and becoming in uh a lawn mower. Or yeah, in the grounds was basically the grounds department. If you ended up in the grounds department, you were set because you're gonna get tan, because you're outside all day picking weeds or mowing lawns, you're gonna get some exercise, you're gonna get tan, and there's no one gonna be yelling at you out in the middle of the west side uh lawns where no one ever goes.
SPEAKER_03:Um the other riding around, you're riding around all day on one of them big ass old tractor, Toro, Toro.
SPEAKER_00:It was like an X-Wing fighter lawn mower. You would drive out there and the the sides would fold out and it'd become like a 20-foot wide mower and just knocked over something. Um anyway, but um who are some of the other people that you had had mentioned in there that I don't have my notes in front of me, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_03:I was only uh it's okay.
SPEAKER_00:The other thing that you had talked about was they moved a lot of the uh obviously they moved like the video production and the editing and well, not all of it. No, but the but for these promotional videos or sector videos in Los Angeles. The direct TV and these things that they're putting out to the world.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, absolutely. Uh um, so it kind of broke there was there was a huge amount of chaos at first because nobody knew which org which uh entity uh Scientology Media Productions or Goldener Productions or what they were gonna produce. Everybody knew the events which you used to produce. Yeah, those events were gonna be at Scientology Media Productions.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:Because if you remember, you know, uh Hubbard set up Goldener Productions to be a film studio to make these training films, that was its only purpose. Yeah, and then Miscavige layered and the chaos there stemmed from that they had not a clue how to do that. Yes, so there was all this chaos, and then on top of that, and then that's why I had such a you know, I don't know how to call it, but a it was a very eventful when I went there because then that chaos stopped because it was like, oh, we know how to make films now, right?
SPEAKER_00:Well, so to be fair, what happened was L. Ron Hubbard used to be the director when he first wrote these films, he himself was the director, and uh David Miscavige was his cameraman, yeah, and Mark Yeager, who became the commanding officer of CMO International, he was the video IC. And so all of these people Norman Starkey was their producer. That's right. Norman Starkey was like the the film producer, and what happened was Elr El Ron Hubbard, he trained these guys how to shoot films as they were shooting films. Yeah and Hubbard he knew a lot about stuff, but he would just get books, he would tell somebody, get me all the books on this, and then that's how he knew what he knew, but he was not a professional in any shape or form. And so what had happened was he deemed himself the the ultimate professional film uh director, and then he he wrote up all the policies and all the procedures for makeup and props and costumes and sets and all these audio and post recording and mixing, even though he really wasn't that good at any of those things. And so the only thing that those people knew besides whatever textbooks were recommended for their post or their title or their job was what Hubbard had dictated. And a lot of this was from the 70s and the tech from the 70s, and so it was basically like people were people were learning how to do their jobs from somebody who wasn't really that good at doing their jobs, and so when you came in, you actually were a director and you knew a lot about these different uh parts of film production, so we actually got a little bit of real world skills from you, yeah, and you would also tell us, I want this, I want this to be like this. There's a video or there's a film that you can watch that has what I like in it. And then so we we got to watch movies because Mitch said, Oh, you got to watch usual suspects, or you gotta watch this, or and so we'd watch those things and then we'd be like, Oh, we know what to do now because you just showed us a you gave us a blueprint of what it needed to be like. Yeah, and so no one had done that. Like, for instance, the movies that Hubbard recommended for us to watch to learn how to shoot were 200, I might add, 200 movies, yeah. But they were like, what was that one with um the running spring about the girl that goes and she gets uh hit with the rock and there's a bit of a a situation? It's got oh my god, I it's I think it's called it's a it's an old, very old black and white movie. I thought it was called Running Spring or something Spring. But there were but other videos were like Star Wars, the original Star Wars.
SPEAKER_03:Star Wars wasn't on there because he was he never would put Star Wars on there because he was when Star Wars came out, Hubbard lost his mind. No, because he was like, wait a minute, I'm I've been claiming that I invented space opera. Like he was that's why he wrote, that's why he started writing science fiction again.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Was because of that whole phenomenon. I mean, he was like, wait a minute, this is my domain, blah, blah, blah. But uh, Star Wars wasn't on there, but interestingly enough, uh, the science fiction film, uh God, no, I can't think of the name of it. Running, running, uh, uh, running, uh Silent Running.
SPEAKER_00:Silent Running. Yes, that was one of them.
SPEAKER_03:It's actually a pretty good film. I mean, it has a cult film. There was a bunch of films, uh, there was a bunch of decent films on there, but like there was weird stuff. Like, you know, he was a big fan of Eisenstein, who was uh an early Russian film director and theoretician, and he had made this film called uh 13 Days in October about the revolution. And when it came time to compile the list, the person who compiled it, who actually compiled the films, grabbed a documentary about the making of the film. So everybody thought they'd like seen this Eisenstein film, but they'd actually seen the documentary about the making of the film. So there was a lot of crazy things on it. But one of the things that I noticed is like there was this group of people there that were dedicated, they were supposed to be making films, and that they never watched films.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_03:And I'm like, you need to consume some media. So that's when that started. I started recommending films. And then um I on the weekends, do you remember? Like, I I went to Qual, which is their educational department, their training department.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:And I said, These guys aren't watching enough movies, they need to watch more movies. And they said, Okay, tell us which movies. And then for a number of years, I would just give these uh orders, and then the whole crew would get pulled in, and instead of on their study time, they'd get to watch movies.
SPEAKER_00:And I was absolutely doing it because it was like, you know, it was just the right thing to do to kind of so the movie that I was thinking of is called The Virgin Spring, and it has um Max von Sidau in it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was uh Virgin Spring, yeah. Yes, that was one of the videos.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, that was one of the videos.
SPEAKER_03:That's a really noted film, but the thing, you know, without getting down a rabbit hole about filmmaking, the thing that was really missing. I mean, look, the books he picked were some of the top books on any syllables syllabus at any good film school.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, five C's to Ceminatography.
SPEAKER_03:And the you know, the the technique of film editing and the horses lighting books. These are like, you know, you if if it's really easy to find these books. He wasn't some genius. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:No, he literally, I know the woman, I spoke to the woman. He sent her to a bookstore in Hollywood and said, Go get all the books that are the most recommended and most studied books. She just went in and got them and brought them, and he was like, sure, put those on the list.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Uh except for how to shoot a movie story, which I'm sure he came up with himself, which was basically a book about how to shoot your kid's birthday party. So uh yeah, so that was pretty good.
SPEAKER_00:And and also I should note every single film that L. Ron Hubbard did shoot, I think we reshot, except for one.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but then I reshot that after you escaped. Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:So his films were never uh they they're not they don't exist anymore.
SPEAKER_03:Everybody knew they were horrible. Yeah, Miss Gabbage eventually admitted to me that he knew that everybody knew they were horrible, but you could never say it. But he didn't say it.
SPEAKER_00:Because L.
SPEAKER_03:Ron Hubbard shot them and it's like well, and plus they're on your check sheet, right? You do the the courseware in Scientology is you get a check sheet, you complete everything on there, some of the things you need a person to verify that you did it, and then you're done with it. That's how it works. And so there are these films that are one of the other things so you had to do the film, it had information in it you needed for your course, which was entirely separate from whether the film was a piece of shit or not. Yes. So that that was eventually, yeah, they all got redone.
SPEAKER_00:One of the other things that I had mentioned is uh Scientology has this thing where they're sort of a few decades behind the the technology curve. And we had built this big film lab there because we were paying millions and millions of dollars a year to have film developed and um sort of mastered and and reproduced in Los Angeles at a company called Photochem, right in Burbank. And um, and so there would be we would shoot a day's worth of film, somebody would have to gather up all that film, all the cans, and then it'd have to get taken to Los Angeles, get developed, and then somebody'd have to bring it back up once it got developed, and then they'd do dailies at the at the base. And so it was always like we need to build our own film lab, we need to build our own film lab. And they did end up doing that, and but that even that large facility was very, very underutilized compared to what it was designed to originally do.
SPEAKER_03:Well, yeah, I know it was let me just uh give you my perception of my perspective on that thing. It was utilized uh to the maximum that they could utilize it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:But if you build a film lab for developing a printing motion picture film, it's gonna be able to it nobody does that except as a commercial enterprise.
SPEAKER_02:Totally.
SPEAKER_03:They and then you can run a certain amount of film, you can run it, run it, run it. But all they ran through there was their film.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so you were basically it's a very chem, uh it's a very highly technical chemical process of developing film. And so if it would basically be like if you set up if you set up a giant pizza factory and you just use that to make pizzas whenever you make pizzas. Like, hey, I'm gonna make a pizza tonight, and you've got a two giant pizza ovens, and you put one pizza in there, yeah, and then you're but you can't just turn on an oven, one of these giant ovens for one pizza. You want to cook a hundred pizzas in this thing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but I mean, uh you know, here's here's a the typical stupidity of that organization. They set this thing up, spared no expense, because you know, Ms. Gabbage has so much money. He can throw money, he wants to throw money at something. Man, he's got the money to do it. They spared no expense in that. They contacted Kodak, they brought an engineer out from Kodak, right?
SPEAKER_00:I remember this. We we had several actually. But we had from Los Angeles, like the old school guys that used to develop film at Photocam or one of these big labs in LA, deluxe and all these different places. Yeah, they consulted and they trained everybody on, okay, this is how you got to do this.
SPEAKER_03:The guy from Kodak, uh um, he was like a Kodak engineer, helped set it up. So what they ended up with was here, I mean, the way that it works, when you set up a commercial lab, you you're gonna run it for profit, like Technicolor or Photocam or whatever. Uh, and and so Kodak, they published these specifications that you can run for the temperature and the speed. Like if anybody's ever done black and white photography, you can vary the the temperature of the chemicals. Yeah. You can vary the amount of time that it's in being developed. And those are the two variables. So if you're running it commercially, you're gonna run the film uh through the the processors as fast as you can with the chemicals as hot as you can. Bull didn't need to do that. They they could just run it at whatever would get them the maximum quality. So they did this, and they actually achieved 10% more resolution than anybody in Hollywood. But did they brag about this? Did they did they do anything? Like Kodak showed up. Listen, Mark, Kodak showed up and said, You are now a beta testing site for all of our motion picture stocks. This is there's maybe 10 people in the world, and they're all Oscar-winning cinematographers who are beta testers.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:For a short period of time, gold was a beta tester for Kodak motion picture film, and they never exploded it. They never did anything with it because they were too busy just creating all this chaos and this weirdness. So they they the some of you know the like they should have. I I thought they should have exploited that. You know, when I was in and I was part of that whole thing. I thought, yeah, this is like amazing. Why don't you tell people about this out there?
SPEAKER_00:I remember that when there we would, I don't think we a lot of times we would have the film misdeveloped at Photocam. I think that was a very far few between.
SPEAKER_03:There were quality issues.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, there were quality issues, but it wasn't like it was ruined completely a lot of times. But then they also did answer prints and and color prints. They did a lot of other color separations and all kinds of other things in LA. But um, but I remember if the if the people in the film lab, they didn't change like these dust mats on the floor that when you step on, it it would suck the dirt off your face. But it they had a recording that would play every 15 or 20 minutes or hour in the film lab, and it would literally tell them change the mats. And they would somebody would have to go around and peel up one layer of these. These taped mats.
SPEAKER_03:You know, I it's I mean, I everybody in there, they wore these nylon bunny suits, right? And they wear little booties on their shoes and they go through all kinds of cleaning things. It's like they out NASA NASA. Yeah. And I never spent much time in there. Maybe walk in and walk out. And then I I worked on the uh the confidential films, you know, the OT films, which those are the films that need to leak because that would destroy Scientology forever. I mean, if anybody saw these films that Hubbard made at Sa in England back in the 60s, they would be like, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00:This is where he talks about Zenu and the body thetans and space opera.
SPEAKER_03:He makes like a 15-foot-long model of the reactive mine out of clay.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Oh, that's right. It's on all the tables and he's going around.
SPEAKER_03:And he's like, this is a reactive mine. It's so crazy. So I had to go in there because believe it or not, there was hardly anybody at that entire base who had done enough Scientology that they'd be allowed to look at those films.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. There wasn't, I I you know it's funny. On the film crew, I think we had one person that was OT level five, and that was Paul Sarkney, the the guy who did the the video. But in you, but yeah, but nobody else on that crew was uh was mostly like any Scientology processing. We were all like green wings.
SPEAKER_03:And mentally they're better off for it because it's oh yeah, it's a lot to fucking unpack.
SPEAKER_00:It's a lot of nonsense. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, they're lucky. They they're less but well, I so I had to go in there for like eight hours a day, put on a bunny suit for about a week and inspect these films, right? Yeah. They wanted to kind of make them look like they weren't.
SPEAKER_00:When you say inspect, are you talking like frame by frame?
SPEAKER_03:No, no, no. Why just watch them?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, just watch.
SPEAKER_03:Watch them stop it, make a note, watch it, make a note. But I gotta tell you, that being in that environment and wearing one of those suits and working in there, it is hell.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, no, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:What they put the staff through. And the thing is, the normal procedures for keeping a film lab clean. You can show up in Bermuda shirts and a t-shirt and a few flops. Like it's all completely unnecessary.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the guy I remember there was a guy there that came from some lab or whatever, and he was like, You guys are really going over the top. He's like, and I said, Well, what do you guys do? He goes, We make everybody wear a hairnet. That's it.
SPEAKER_02:Hair net.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, wash your hands before you come in. You know, like that's it. Nothing.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I think it's probably probably you're talking about there was uh one of the greatest film uh uh what do you call it when you restoration experts. Yes, he was the guy that his name was uh Paul Ratan, I think. He yeah, he he uh he he taught us how to do black and white film. Yeah, and because we decided to shoot, we wanted to shoot a film in black and white, yeah, which was a lot of fun. But he he had restored the Hard Day's Night and some other really famous films. Yeah, he he thought we were like, but you know, it they're being paid, so they're whatever. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:They're like, I don't care. You guys are paying me$10,000 to tell you how to do this. Yeah, I'm not gonna tell you you don't have to wear that stuff, but you don't.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but they they I mean the lab when I left, and uh the last time I was up there was in March 2020. Uh the lab, you know, they they still shoot the they reshoot the technical training films. That's just an ongoing project. They will just always reshoot them forever. And I thought they were shooting that on digital. They weren't they weren't shooting them on film.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, so the main film crew never switched over to the airy digital stuff.
SPEAKER_03:They did, but not for tech films. Oh everything else they shoot, they shoot on an Air Force. I get it, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I think in one of those things, one of those videos or something, I saw they were using an Aerie Digital. Yeah, and I was like, oh, did they switch to digital?
SPEAKER_03:But I guess Well, there's there's uh in the video, the the the gold video, there's a quick little scene of the crew reshooting. I mean, I always got out of frame when they shot that stuff because I'm like, it's just gonna look weird, guys. I'm not in uniform. So I'm not in any of that footage. But there's a shot of the crew reshooting the professional TRS training. That's right. And that's the you know, the uh ARI 535 or whatever the pre the Yeah, no, they no, they I mean there's the Airy stopped with the 535. They didn't really advance it.
SPEAKER_00:But they were using some AI film camera.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, 535, yeah, which is an amazing camera. I still remember the day they gave uh when that camera came out, the first big film it was uh uh Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Copeland Dracula, and they did all kinds of it was an amazing camera, it still is an amazing 35mm film camera, but uh they gave this 15-year-old girl, Kim. You remember Kim? Yeah, she was like the clapper girl.
SPEAKER_00:Yep, here's your camera.
SPEAKER_03:They gave her a check for$350,000. And they said, this guy's gonna drive you to Burback and you're gonna pick up this camera. And I think to this day, the people at Aerie, because they just lease cameras to studios, yeah. No one's buying. Nobody buys. Yeah, I think they still talk about the day that the little girl showed up from Scientology with a check for three.
SPEAKER_00:I gotta tell you this. Uh we'll we'll end on this. But um, when I left uh Golden Air Productions and the C organization in Scientology in 2005, um, I ended up working back in Los Angeles in the audiovisual uh systems area. And I used to go to a place in Burbank, uh, it was electronics supply place. I think it was called United Electronics or I can't remember the name of it, but Golden Air Productions used that place for you know resistors and potentiometers and stuff like that. I was in there one day and I was buying some equipment for a project, and I hear this guy on the phone. The the guys that take the sales orders are kind of at the front desk. If they're not helping somebody, they're on the phone with a client and placing their order or whatever at the desk. And he goes, Yeah, I know last time you bought these, they were this price, but that was eight years ago when you bought them. And the price has been updated many, many times over. You can't just send us another PO that you sent us eight years ago and expect everything to be exactly the same. Anyways, going on for like 10 or 15 minutes while I'm doing my shopping in there. And then he hangs up and I walk up to the counter, I go, Was that Golden Air Productions? He goes, How could you possibly know that? I go, I used to work there for 15 years. Were you talking to me to Denise or Stevie? He goes, It was Stevie, and I was like, wild. He goes, Yeah, they're redoing that L. Ron Hubbard music studio again. And I was like, Yeah, they do that every five or 10 years, they redo it. But but the industry, they they the Scientology does a lot of things and they buy they buy things and they rent things and they and so everybody in the in LA and in Burbank, where a lot of the film stuff is, that's where Cine Tools is or film tools or wherever these different places you rent gear from. Yeah, they all kind of have these awkward experiences and relationships with Golden Air Productions because they're like, yeah, they they don't order anything for eight months, and then they show up and they're like, we need 7,000 rolls of black gaffer tape. You know, it's just like it's just like what's going on there that this happens. Like they never know that they need to do something until like right before they need to do it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and then and then a hundred people get let out of the hole in a order to make some massive film, and then all of a sudden these orders. So yeah, I mean, we never got to we didn't talk about all the stuff that moved to LA.
SPEAKER_00:That was I think we should do another video about that. I like to try to keep the videos right about an hour, but I know you haven't done any videos in a long time, so I didn't want to kind of like I didn't want to burn you out on this one.
SPEAKER_03:I'm I'm good.
SPEAKER_00:But anyway, we should do another one because there's another building. What what we'll do is we'll get Clara, who does a lot of the slide decks and stuff for our channel. We'll see if we can round up um anything for the Sheila building and the dissemination and distribution center and any of these other buildings that got set up in LA. And the and even the SMP thing.
SPEAKER_03:And then um, there's lots of stuff out there.
SPEAKER_00:Totally. And we and it's it's just on the on the internet. One last thing I wanted to say is that Scientology with the all these facilities, the blown for good channel puts out more content that gets more views than all of these facilities combined. They have a TV channel on direct TV, they have YouTube and they have all these websites with videos. No one's watching any of this.
SPEAKER_03:They don't have a lot of eyeballs. They they really don't.
SPEAKER_00:And the craziest thing that I've been finding out over the past few years is that all of the new AI models that are coming out and being developed and and and being, you know, they're adding, you know, 100,000 GPUs and all that, those things are training with the content that's getting watched and and consumed on the internet. And Scientology's content is not getting if AI is not learning with their content, it's learning with our content. So if you go on to Grok or Chat GPT and you ask it about Scientology, it's gonna tell you the truth about Scientology. It's not gonna tell you Scientology's version of Scientology.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah. Plus, I I'll I mean I haven't done it, but I'll bet you if you went onto ChatGTP and you asked it, uh, can you give me a photo of David Miscavige? It would probably be a photo of him screaming or in court, or yeah, or in court. It wouldn't be like, you know, him on the stage, you know, in a tuxedo delivering an event. Yeah, it would be pretty ugly.
SPEAKER_00:If if if anybody watching this is on X, you have Grok, it just comes with an X subscription or whatever. If you go and set Grok to unhinged mode and ask it about David Miscavige and Tom Cruise, you will get a treat because it will go off and it will tell you. It might even talk about some of the stuff we talked about in today's video. Yeah. But um, it is it is insane what these AI models think about Scientology. But um, thank you, Mitch. I appreciate you uh doing this. And we'll uh you know, we we Mitch and I were doing a series probably got two years now, two years ago now, about all the films we did. I don't know how many films we got through, but we do have, I want to say we probably have like six or seven more that we never really did.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, there's 26 of them.
SPEAKER_00:That's true. Maybe we we maybe we did like anyway. We'll make a list. And if you want, I know I've gotten a lot of requests from people saying, I really loved that series that you used to do with Mitch. So we could finish that out if we uh if we kind of got our our our shit together. But um, I'll try to do that if I can. And um otherwise, we're gonna put a link in the description to Mitch's book, Mitch's YouTube channel, um uh all that stuff so you guys can uh and see what Mitch is up to.
SPEAKER_03:And I should mention, even though I've been um AWOL from YouTube, mostly I I am planning on coming back and doing some additional material. Um not you know just as as needed, as I feel that there's something worth saying. Totally. I I do have a lot to fill in between 2020 and 20 uh 2020 and 2025 or whatever. So 2020. I was still interacting with them till 2022. They said they fired me in 2017, but it doesn't explain why I have checks, payroll checks on them until 2023. Yeah, well they they say all kinds of things.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I know. I try to I try not to pay too much attention to what they say.
SPEAKER_03:I didn't, I didn't. It just made me laugh. And you know, and you know, you know, I know we're wrapping this up, but you know, when somebody uh escapes, uh we used to refer to it as jump the fence, yeah, right, or hop the fence because it's like you know, you need a euphemism. Yeah, like we're so-and-so I didn't fence.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And and to be fair, we were we had people that escaped while we from our crew while we were on film shoots.
SPEAKER_03:So like we were we were more transparent then.
SPEAKER_00:Well, yeah, but we were out and about. So like if we were in Hollywood and doing a film shoot and somebody wanted to hop the fence there, that all they had to do was just walk down the block and disappear.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, no, we had, yeah, there was what if some of them were good riddance, I do know.
SPEAKER_00:I was just gonna say, one of those people I know, you were like, Yeah, see ya, wouldn't want to be you.
SPEAKER_03:Not coming back, great.
SPEAKER_00:Perfect less for me to deal with.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, but you know, and then and then the stuff you would hear, and there was no reason for it. I said it's like the somebody who helped uh me onboard somebody from CMO, some woman, and when I first got there, and she was uh she escaped a few, she literally left a few weeks after that. And then people just started telling me these stories about her. I didn't even ask what happened to her. Yeah, they just started originating. Oh, well, she you know, she was involved in an incestuous relationship and and all the it's crazy.
SPEAKER_00:It's well that's their that's their people magazine, is all the the you know, David Miscavige really, we've covered this in many videos, but he loves to sort of craft narratives with people's crimes that they they admitted to or they're they're accused of, even if they're innocent. And he likes to sort of spread the gossip around so everybody knows, oh, that guy was doing this when he got home at night and he was doing that. And you know, it's just like it's kind of weird. He even does it about the the members, the public members. He'll be like, Oh, yeah, this guy was sleeping with a sea or member. And you're like, Why are you telling me this? This is crazy.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, really not the the cut that stuff that comes up anyway. I could do I could do this.
SPEAKER_00:I know that's why we could talk about we could uh you know what I found though is a lot of people that watch this content, besides the Scientologist, we have a lot of Scientologists that watch this content because they're not allowed to know any of these things about any of these facilities. They're not they're secret to to public members of Scientology, not the the paying members, not the Yeah, even though you can look them up on Google, there you can't get within a hundred feet, I mean a hundred yards of the place. Yeah, but they but these people they know they've heard whispers and they know somebody who their their sister's brother worked there, or the cousin or friend or whatever, and then they go, Oh yeah, I heard about that place. And then we tell these things and they go, Oh, that's where my kid works right now. You know, they say they write us and they say, My son works at that place you were talking about. And so they just don't know where it is because they're not allowed to tell them. But um, so there are people, I mean, these aren't this. I don't, this is not one of those videos that's gonna get 700,000 downloads, but the 5,000 people or the 10,000 people that do watch it, there's a there's a several hundred of those are Scientologists that are they're just like they're trying to get answers because Scientology doesn't tell them valuable information, they just tell them the information they want them to have. So some people really do like these. I I appreciate you jam jamming with me to here today to do this. And um, we'll do it again soon. I'm gonna see if I can uh if I put this, I'm gonna see if I can play an end uh an outro here. So um thanks everybody for joining. Thank you, Mitch.
SPEAKER_03:Um great seeing everybody.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, good to see you. And we'll put uh we'll put link links to all Mitch's uh stuff in the uh description if you guys want to check out Mitch's channel and some of the content that he's done over our on uh on is it Scientology Lies?
SPEAKER_03:The Big Lie.
SPEAKER_00:The Big Lie.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um anyway, I appreciate it. Until next time, guys. Thanks for watching. If you'd like to help support the channel, feel free to check out the merch store link in the description. We have Hail Zenu, Xenu is my homeboy and BFG branded mouse pads, shirts, mugs, all sorts of other stuff in there that helps us to bring you new content on a regular basis. You can also pick up a copy of my book, Blown for Good Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology in hardback, Kindle, and Audible versions as well. There's also a link to our podcast, and you can get that on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to watch another video, you could click on this link right here, or you could click on this one here, or you can click on the subscribe button right here. Thanks a lot, until next time.
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