Three years on, the biggest mystery remains the ‘rimless zero’ remark.
I couldn’t find it in me to be annoyed at Marty. He had put a lot into the project and I could well understand why he felt hurt when it didn’t turn out to be as uncritical of him as he might have liked. I also tended to see his turning against the film as part of his general disillusionment with the world of anti-Scientology. And in fact in subsequent months and years Marty would blog and post videos attempting to debunk any TV shows and movies that were critical of Scientology.
It was widely assumed that he had been paid off by the Church and was now, in effect, back working for David Miscavige.
The night of the premiere, I rode down to Leicester Square with Nancy in a fancy car laid on by the festival. John and I introduced the film, welcoming everyone and in particular any Scientologists that were there, as they undoubtedly were, and then I skipped out, feeling no need to see it for the hundredth time, and also a little anxious about being exposed so directly to the reaction of the audience. Afterwards we did a Q&A, and I found it difficult to judge the mood of the room. It was only later – when I joined my mum and her husband, Michael, for dinner at Pizza Express, and I saw their reaction and how much they’d enjoyed it and how proud they were – that I felt more confident about the film and its prospects.
Over the next few days reviews appeared, all positive, and I looked forward to a distributor imminently buying the film and giving it a wide release. What I didn’t expect, though perhaps I should have done, was another pushback from the Church of Scientology.
It began in an almost comical fashion with a visit, one Sunday morning, by a pair of police officers. I’d been making pancakes for the kids, and I invited the two men into the kitchen. In the incongruous setting of our disorderly toy-strewn house – me wearing my pyjamas and dressing gown, with the two big boys watching The Dumping Ground in the other room, and Walter in his playpen – I heard one of the PCs say, ‘We’re here because a serious threat has been made against you, which has been passed on to us.’
‘Right,’ I said, waiting for the words to make sense.
‘The threat was made in an anonymous phone call by a Mr X. It was made – as we understand it – in a phone call to the Church of Scientology, in East Grinstead. The gentleman in question had seen a film you have made and had taken a negative view of the film, saying it had caused him to wish to hurt you. The Church of Scientology was concerned about your well-being, so we’re here to make sure you are OK. May I ask, have you seen anything out of the ordinary or suspicious?’
As he said this, I realized it had all the hallmarks of a Scientology scare tactic – in the guise of helping, but actually with the intent to cause fear and disquiet, they had invented a fictitious threat. In a weird way, it was almost gratifying to see the Scientologists still apparently working off their old 1970s playbook – like finding a collectable bit of kitsch from the seventies in a junk shop, a Rolf Harris Stylophone or a Speak & Spell. Wow! Remember these? I explained this to the police, though either I didn’t persuade them, or professionalism required them to continue to act as though the threat was real.
‘Any men lurking in the shadows, sir? Signs of breaking and entering?’
‘No, I’ve just told you . . .’
They ended by saying they were putting me on a ‘priority list’ with a special phone number – presumably my calls would ring on a giant red phone on the Police Commissioner’s desk. At the very least, I figured, it might help when there were unruly elements kicking off outside the house and we were trying to settle the children.
But the police visit was, in a sense, a mere tinhorn fanfare for the arrival of a more worrying development.
A message came in from Simon. Something in it made me think it was ominous and I called back, after the kids’ supper one evening, from the quiet retreat of our top-floor bedroom, to hear him say, in a voice that was unusually grave, ‘Yeah so, we’ve had a letter from David Miscavige’s personal lawyers. Apparently you sent a tweet that they consider libellous and they are threatening legal action.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s not good is it.’
‘No. Sorry.’ This was said in a manner so heartfelt and final that it suggested, not just that this threat to do harm really was serious but also that there wasn’t much he would be able to offer in the way of help. It was my Twitter account and if I was going to use it to libel vengeful high-profile figures, that was on me.
He ended by suggesting I call Nigel, the media lawyer who’d worked on the movie, which I did. He also forwarded me the letter. It quoted from a tweet – or rather a retweet, since the words had auto-generated when I’d clicked on a button to share an article – that said, and I quote, ‘David Miscavige is a terrorist.’ Yeah. That wasn’t good. I recalled tweeting the article – I’d had some misgivings on account of its overheated content and had wondered about erasing it, but a publicist we’d retained had suggested I didn’t, since apparently that was seen in PR circles as a sign of weakness and would probably only bring more attention. What I didn’t recall – and didn’t think I’d ever actually read – was the wording of the tweet itself. David Miscavige is a terrorist. I pondered all this a little ruefully, then called my agent. In a tone not dissimilar to Simon’s, she said, ‘David Miscavige may be a lot of things but he ain’t a terrorist.’
‘But what do I do?’
‘You need to get a good lawyer and get ready to spend a lot of money. Because I’m telling you now, this could be very expensive.’
A day or two later, another letter arrived from the lawyers acting for Miscavige, filled with more legal sabre-rattling and shield-clanking – ‘false’, ‘outrageous’, ‘defamatory’ – and a demand for an apology. This I might have thought about providing – given that I don’t actually think David Miscavige is a terrorist – except my lawyer warned that the apology would not forestall a claim of financial damages, but in fact, only make one more likely, possibly to the tune of £100,000 or more.
My lawyer advised me to instruct a high-powered QC. A name was suggested, Heather Rogers. She had once been part of the legal team defending the writer Deborah Lipstadt in her libel defence against the historian David Irving, whom she had labelled a Holocaust denier. There were meetings – the QC was as impressive as I’d expected – and as she did her preparation, read the letters, read my tweets, the articles, and viewed the film, and as the bills came in and money haemorrhaged out, I found myself mainly reassured by her level of competence and only slightly distraught at the strangeness of having to pay someone hundreds of pounds to watch a film you’ve made, as research.
Around the same time – towards the end of 2015 – I was making trips up to MediaCity in Salford, where I was appearing on a Christmas edition of the quiz show University Challenge. On the train, I would brood about my own stupidity at sending the tweet and the likelihood of its having catastrophic consequences. I looked up the meaning of ‘terrorist’. You could ‘terrorize’ someone without doing them physical harm, I reasoned. Though, as the Scientology letters pointed out, my tweet had gone out not long after the Charlie Hebdo murders, so I was sort of suggesting that David Miscavige went round stabbing journalists, which he hasn’t done as far as I know.
I did a Twitter inventory to see how many of my followers were real people. It suggested I’d only published the tweet to a million people, not 1.8 million. And in fact only a few thousand had probably seen it. I told this to Nigel, the lawyer.
‘Yes, I’m not sure how helpful that is for us,’ he said.
The case motivated me to do well in University Challenge. I was getting a small fee for each appearance. If my team went all the way, I’d only need another £98,000 for the war chest, though come to think of it that wasn’t counting legal fees.
In the final I got on a hot streak, answering questions on Mad Men, Tennyson, and Pope Linus I. We won. It improved my frame of mind for about
fifteen minutes. Another legal letter came in from Miscavige’s lawyers. We sent one back. Despite all the polysyllables and legal verbiage, it was, I realized, just a more sophisticated and more expensive version of two kids in a playground saying ‘Come on then! If you want some!’ ‘You and whose army! Hold me back! Hold me back!’ but neither of them really wanting to fight.
Still, it was stressful and not helping my equanimity around this time was the sudden onset of a debilitating pain in the groin and the realization, after I checked myself in the mirror, that one of my testicles had grown to roughly four times its normal size. It was a couple of days after Christmas by now. Nancy had made plans for us all to stay with friends in Norfolk, but I showed her the questionable testicle, and she agreed I should get it checked out while they began the holiday. They drove off, and I made my way down to an urgent health clinic and there followed an embarrassing procession around a sequence of A&E departments where a series of doctors stared at and felt my balls – then asked if it was OK to let the trainee doctors sit in and have a look – and tried to figure out why one of my testes was the size of a goose egg.
Finally, late in the day, with the light gone outside, the last doctor said with a smile, ‘Yes, just an infection. Orchitis is the medical name. Antibiotics should sort that out, but you can’t be too careful. I hope you don’t mind me saying, I do like your documentaries. Anything new in the pipeline?’
I took the train to Norwich, where I joined Nancy and the boys, and the following morning I pushed Walter’s pram around a hillside that overlooks the city, conscious of my testicle jostling in my trousers like a spiteful troll. The next night was New Year’s Eve. We visited my old friend Adam Buxton and his family at their converted farmhouse, staying up and toasting the year ahead while I wondered inwardly whether I’d be remortgaging the house, and should I just apologize, or did that, as the lawyers claimed, lay me open to massive damages.
The next day we drove across to the easternmost edge of Norfolk, a little village called Sea Palling, whose buildings were mostly washed away in disastrous floods in 1953 that had killed seven people. Nancy and I and the boys whiled away the hours in an arcade filled with machines that cascaded two-penny pieces and spat out long snakes of tickets that you could trade for prizes, and I tried to forget about the legal case.
After a few days of antibiotics, the testicle returned to its accustomed size, presumably a little wistful about its brief visit to the big leagues. And by a strange quirk of fate, the Miscavige infection went down a few weeks later – finally succumbing to the weeks of high-dosage legal correspondence. Afterwards, along with the relief at the situation having gone away, I had the feeling of having been initiated, and that maybe this was the price of having been credited with more bravery than I deserved. Perhaps on occasion you had to weather misfortune that was undeserved – or at least, unglamorous, unexciting, and ten times more worrying than an angry glistening wrestler with nipples like rivets or an exasperated Klansman caught out with Nazi figurines.
Other than occasional attempts to hack my emails, which may or may not have emanated from Scientology, or the News of the World, or a Russian troll farm, things went largely quiet. Which was welcome, but there was still the question of whether anyone would ever get to see the film.
Chapter 33
Half Old, Still Confused
I try not to be too worried about the success or failure of programmes when they go out on TV. You figure you made the show you wanted to make, and it does what it does. Feature films turned out to be a different story. Mainly the problem is that, if the distributors don’t like the film, they won’t buy it and the film won’t go into cinemas.
After the success of the premiere and the great reviews and word of mouth, I was expecting a smooth passage for My Scientology Movie into cinemas across the UK and then the world. But something strange happened . . . nothing. Well, maybe not quite nothing; there was occasionally some little whisper or micro-step forwards. A sales agent came on. An invitation to another festival. But the nothing soon returned. I found it hard to decipher the nothing – whether it was a genuine nothing, or the nothing of bad news that I was being spared having to hear, or whether the nothing was itself the bad news. There were screenings for potential distributors, then what sounded like the mumble of something but turned out to be more nothing.
In early 2016, our film showed at Tribeca Film Festival. John Dower and I flew to New York and did a day of press in an airless office with a procession of reporters from online outlets whose enthusiasm for our film persuaded me it might find an audience in America. There were more good reviews – including a glowing write-up in Entertainment Weekly – followed by a couple more months of basically mumbles and nothing. So far I had been trying not to be too interested in what was happening as I thought it was probably annoying to Simon and definitely uncool to have too much staked in the film’s success, but at this point I couldn’t help myself. I pressed John to account for the lack of interest.
‘It’s weird,’ he said, ‘but I think there is a portion of the more high-minded docs world that can’t help seeing you as a TV commodity. They’re thinking, “It’s not cinema.” And it’s bollocks but it’s the way a lot of these people think.’ He described meeting a high-end docs distributor at a Tribeca dinner. ‘She was all sniffy and I asked if she’d seen how it plays to an audience. She hadn’t even seen the film.’
I felt demoralized. I thought about all the small films and modest TV docs that get short runs in cinemas. Couldn’t we just get a little art-house release for a week in a handful of cities? I lobbied Simon to do anything to get the film out there.
‘We could just stick it up on YouTube,’ I said. ‘Let people pay to download it.’
Even as I was saying it, I reminded myself of a character in the film Sideways, a know-nothing who advises his writer friend, ‘Publish it yourself! Get it in libraries! Let the public decide!’ Judging from Simon’s reaction, it was a risible suggestion and may partly explain why I am a TV presenter who specializes in getting out of my depth and not an Oscar-winning producer.
As months went by and there was still no sign of a distributor buying our film, I felt baffled and impotent. In July, with everything still quiet, Simon suggested we shake the bushes by taking the film up to Sheffield for the documentary festival. This would be our third major festival – I worried a little about whether it seemed a bit desperate. It reminded me of an elderly man I once saw in a bath house in west London. I was with my brother in the sauna and the man kept sauntering past and ‘accidentally’ letting his bathrobe fall open and then standing there with his willy out. (In this analogy, in case you are wondering, I am the elderly man and the Scientology movie is the man’s genitals.) But I deferred to Simon’s greater experience and agreed to go, let slip my bathrobe and dangle my willy-movie one more time.
By a happy coincidence, I heard Michael Moore would also be at the festival, promoting Where To Invade Next?, his latest film. Simon had thought it would be helpful for our film if we could get Michael to watch it and support it, and I also had my own reasons for wanting to meet up, and so through a mutual acquaintance I engineered a meeting.
He was crossing the foyer of Sheffield’s Showroom Cinema when I spied him. He had a small entourage around him, opening doors, carrying bags. It was the first time I had seen him in the flesh in twenty years. He looked older, a little heavier, his face was retracted into his neck, and I noticed how he shambled, his legs folded in at the knees – he moved them almost without raising them – and I worried about his health.
We found some seats in a corner of an empty bar. He apologized, he hadn’t managed to see our film, he said, and then without me having thought about it, I heard myself, as an opening gambit, burbling incoherent appreciation for what he’d done for me by taking me on as a correspondent all those years before. ‘I never really had a chance to say thank you for taking the chance and putting me on the show,’ I said. ‘You changed my life
and nothing that happened later would have happened without you.’ To my surprise, I realized I might be emotional.
‘Oh wow, that’s nice of you to say,’ Michael said. ‘I’ll never forget when you first came on board. I saw you around the office doing the photocopying and I said, “That British intern has something about him. We should give him a chance on camera.” ’
This recollection was at odds with my own memory, which told me I’d never been an intern at TV Nation, or done photocopying, but I didn’t like to correct him and spoil a moment of bonding.
We moved to a crowded Italian restaurant across the road – Michael had shaken off his retinue and a seagull swarm of British TV executives. It was just him, me, and John, my director. Michael ordered a Kahlua and cream and a spaghetti carbonara and we talked, reflecting on the time that had passed. We were both old now. Both divorced. Well, I was kind of half old and half divorced. He remembered Sarah, recalling one of the few times we’d all socialized together – he’d invited us to a fundraising dinner for the magazine The Nation and Sarah had accosted him about my habit of going off on assignment on short notice, as though it were his fault.
We moved on to the subject of Trump, who was defying polls and emerging as the Republican frontrunner. Roseanne Barr, an old friend of Michael’s and at one time a leftie – was among those climbing aboard the Trump train and endorsing right-wing conspiracy theories. Michael saw the whole phenomenon as symptomatic of the political class, right and left, turning its back on working people – he decried the lack of connection between the Democrats and the blue-collar folk in the Midwest who were showing signs of lining up for Trump. I was listening and trying to keep up, and say something relevant, but nothing much was coming to mind about Wisconsin and Michigan swing voters, and I had the feeling of trying to fall in and jam with a band on a tune I didn’t know that well. With that same sense of wanting to impress him and make him laugh but feeling a little out of my depth, I reflected that nearly twenty-five years on, it wasn’t so very different to that first ever meeting for a job interview at the Brill Building.
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