In 1952 the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, an immigrant from Korea, founded the Unification Church. Christ had evidently asked him to complete his task on earth although not everyone was welcome. Moon said the Holocaust was God’s revenge on the Jews for killing Christ and referred to gays as “dung-eating dogs.” Rev Moon likes mass wedding ceremonies – he claims he married 450,000 people on February 12th 2000 and to have four and a half million followers.
Less populus was The People’s Temple founded by the Rev Jim Jones in the 50s. To an extent it achieved its aim as 914 followers set out on their journey to the Planet of Bliss on November 18th 1978 by committing suicide – not all of them voluntarily.
Tom’s eye, however, fell on the Church of Scientology which was formally established in the United States in 1955. The founder was Lafayette Ron Hubbard a former naval officer turned science fiction writer. Curiously it was in the May 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction – the magazine had on the cover a hairy alien with piercing yellow eyes who was the evil Duke of Kraakahaym from the Empire of Skontar – that Hubbard first outlined his new science of mental health: Diantetics. The object of this was well intentioned – to make you a healthier, happier person. By a two person question and answer therapy the ‘auditor’ would seek out painful memories – ‘engrams’ – in your subconscious and this can cure illnesses, both physical and mental, and even increase your intelligence. It was quite a long process as you had to get rid of engrams from previous lifetimes before you reached the eighth level and could be pronounced ‘clear’.
In book form, Dianetics sold amazingly well; Newsweek reported that two months after it was published not only had 35,000 copies been shifted but 500 Dianetic groups had been set up across the States.
Hubbard later said that he had conducted years of intensive research into the nature of human existence and to arrive at Scientology. He had found the soul in a human being and what Scientology was was an applied religious philosophy that promised to improve the condition of the human spirit which he called the ‘Thetan’.
All of this had considerable appeal, especially to young people. They went along to Scientology centres to be tested by an ‘E-meter’. This consisted of two cans, which the person held, attached to a metal box which had a dial on it. It could read your mind. Hubbard demonstrated this in a Wichita Hotel in 1952 by taking a member of his audience, getting him to hold the cans and pinching him. The needle flickered. This Hubbard asked the man just to imagine the pinch and the needle flickered again. This, he said, proved that his invention was capable of measuring emotions and was able to give the auditor a deep and marvelous insight into the mind of the ‘pre-Clear.’
Further benefits of Scientology were that it helped people overcome doubt and ignore rejection. That is why it proved popular with some actors, notably John Travolta whose star was in the ascendant after ‘Staying Alive’ and ‘Perfect’. "Before Dianetics (the philosophy of Hubbard's from which Scientology evolved), if people said negative things to me or about me, I would cave in easily," Travolta says. "Being a man, that wasn't a very appealing quality. Some people would say, 'The boy is too sensitive.' But many times I had suppressive people around me who would cave me in on purpose. I was sort of like a minefield."
Since auditors would have to clear Engrams from previous lives, this could make the process of getting through the eight levels of Clearance interminable – and expensive. In a book – he was a prodigious writer – ‘Have You Lived Before This Life?’ Hubbard recorded that one Scientologist had witnessed Vesuvius destroy Pompeii in AD 78, another had been a fish and another a walrus. Several people had been Jesus Christ, and others had been Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth the First and the Venerable Bede (673 – 735) who is buried in Durham Cathedral.
But most outstanding was Lafayette Ron himself who, he claimed, had visited heaven – although he later said this had been a humorous remark. When he took to life at sea as he grew older, he spent time circling the Canary Islands off the coast of North Africa and obliged his adherents to search for gold that he had buried in previous lives. He was able to draw maps to show where it was but after such a long time it was probably many fathoms deep in silt.
The reason Ron had settled for life on the ocean wave was because many governments were not too keen on Scientology, fearing that their credulous citizens were parting with regular sums of money for a process that was neither scientific nor logical. The Australians were first. The Australian Board of Inquiry into Scientology was published in October 1965. It ran to 173 pages and was pretty straightforward in that typical Ozzie fashion. ‘Scientology is evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the community medically, morally and socially; and its adherents sadly deluded and often mentally ill.’ The church was outlawed in the State of Victoria.
Three years later the British Minister of Health announced a ban on Scientology students coming to Britain. He said that “Scientology was socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other. Its authoritarian principals and practices are a potential menace to the personality and well being of those so deluded as to become its followers. Above all, its methods can be a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them.” Scientology students were banned from coming to Britain and so was Ron, himself, whom the Home Secretary classified as an ‘undesirable alien.’ (Nevertheless the movement still flourishes today in its East Grinstead mansion and its recruiting station on London’s Tottenham Court Road is prominent and well-staffed.)
In July 1977, 134 FBI agents stormed the Scientology offices in Washington and Los Angeles, taking away 48,149 documents. In August 1978 a Federal Grand Jury in Washington indicted nine Scientologists on 28 counts – largely consisting of espionage in government offices. Mrs Hubbard got five years in jail and her co-defendants slightly shorter terms. Operation Snow White revealed the extent of their infiltration. The Church has since said it has cleaned up its act.
Tom appeared to have given Scientology the benefit of the doubt in the matter of these governmental attack as he must to the famous words of L. Ron to a Newark science fiction convention in the summer of 1949: “If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion.”
Although Cruise says he choose to join Scientology after reading about religions in books, it is impossible not to believe that he was subsequently influenced by his wife, Mimi, who was not only a Scientologist herself but the daughter of Scientologists and who had actually been married to Jim Rogers who was a Scientology Counsellor. Kirstie Allie, who shared an apartment with Mimi when they were starting out, was another prominent convert to Scientology.
Scientology has worked well for Tom Cruise. “There are tools that can use to help to understand yourself more, understand the world and things that you can do to help people. The incredible study technology that L. Ron Hubbard developed has been very helpful to me in my life.” He even claims that it cured his dyslexia.
Despite the exhortations from Dustin Hoffman to stay committed, it looked less and less likely that the ‘Rain Man’ would go into production for at least three months. Tom does not like kicking his heels so he quickly agreed to a movie to fill the gap – ‘Cocktail’ – and approached the part with his customary thoroughness - studying barmen. “You serve all the pretty women free drinks, because that gets the guys coming into the bar. If a girl is in there on a date, you make sure her boyfriend feels like a god, because the better he feels at the bar, the bigger tip you’re going to get. You’re the extractor – not the bartender – the extractor. It’s all about tips and it’s all about money – flat out.”
It was a personal story from the pen of Heywood Gould whose screenwriting credits included ‘The Boys from Brazil’ and ‘Fort Apache: The Bronx’ and whose books included a biography of Sir Christopher Wren.
The novel itself was somewhat dark and disenchanted as Gould admits: “Working behind a bar I learned quickly that you become cynical and ja
ded. I also realised that I had to get out of that lifestyle before it killed me.”
The producing partners Robert Cort and Ted Field optioned the book while it was still in manuscript and asked Gould to write a screenplay. Not everybody shared their enthusiasm and the script remained in limbo with Frank Price, the head of Universal, and the Oscar-winning James L. Brooks almost committing to it, but not quite. This was Cort and Field’s good fortune. Jeffrey Katzenberg at Touchstone Pictures could see how the story could be lightened up so as to be more like ‘The Graduate’ – everybody in Hollywood wanted to find another Graduate – and he knew just the man to play the lead, the young star of Touchstone’s ‘The Color of Money’.
Even if it was a short shoot they could only hire Cruise if they paid him his full fee of $3m. So economies had to be made in the rest of the casting with Bryan Brown, best known for marrying Meggie (Rachel Ward) who fell in love with Father Ralph de Bricassant (Richard Chamberlain) in ‘The Thorn Birds’, and Elizabeth Shue, who had just emerged as Ralph Macchio’s girlfriend in ‘The Karate Kid’, were hired.
Tom Cruise plays a discharged serviceman who intends to hit New York and make his millions. It is the late Eighties and elsewhere in the city Michael Douglas is shouting: “Greed is good.” Despite a diet of self-help books and mind-numbing evening business classes, he cannot cut the mustard. Bryan Brown hires him as a fellow bar man and, before you can say prestidigitation, they are twirling vodka bottles like drum majorettes. Sadly they fight over a girl and so Tom leaves for Jamaica where he both serves and has Sex-on-the-Beach. The recipient of his favours is Elizabeth Shue but when Bryan arrives with a rich wife Tom wants one, too, and shooes out Elizabeth in favour of his own rich woman. It doesn’t work out, the nadir of the relationship taking place at the opening of a Manhattan sculpture exhibition where Tom brings crashing down both the sculptor and his central exhibit. He realises the wealthy way is not for him, a view reinforced when Bryan commits suicide because he has lost all his money in commodities, and returns to Elizabeth who is carrying his twins (inside her).
This is pretty lame tale with lashings of music ranging from Elvis to Robert Palmer layered over montages to fill up the gaps. Tom shows his expertise at basketball, six or seven hoops in a row one thrown backwards, horse riding (along the beach) and having meat loaf mozerella and chicken a la king thrown over his head and groin respectively by the enraged Miss Shue. Brown, for some reason, begins to speak in tongues after he is married, beckoning his wife with the words “sweetheart, come hither” and suggesting they dance with the phrase “let’s decimate the dance floor.” Cruise, himself, gave a convincing performance in an unconvincing film.
The critics, in the words of Tom’s agent, Paula Wagner, “eviscerated” the movie. But every Hollywood cloud has a dollar lining and on the Saturday morning after the Friday opening Jeffery Katzenberg of Disney called to congratulate him: ‘Cocktail’ had had one of the biggest openings in Disney history. On a personal note the studio president informed Cruise that he was now able to “open” a movie.
“And in some weird way,” Tom recalls, “that really changed everything. That became, as far as the business side, a defining moment in terms of me getting certain pictures made, like ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. I didn’t even really grasp what it meant at that time.”
His fans turned up to the tune of $78m and ‘Cocktail was the seventh most popular film of 1988 sandwiched between ‘Die Hard’ and ‘The Naked Gun’.
Less harmoniously, war broke out off the set between barmen each of whom claimed to have taught Tom to spin the spirits. This was hardly surprising as he said he had visited thirty-four separate bars in Manhattan to do his research. When ‘barstar’ Myke Gorecki of Baywatch Café claimed in Cheers Magazine that he had trained Tom, John ‘JB’ Bandy wrote an angry letter saying that he had no part whatsoever in the movie. Bandy had trained and choreographed Cruise and Brown and got a credit. Bruce Rampick of Lucy’s Retired Surfers Restaurant and Bar in New Orleans said Cruise had trained in the bar he used to own in Manhattan.
Phil ‘Dog’ Lockhart of the Beer Hunter Sports Pub and Grill in Rancho Cucamonga wondered why any bartender would brag about training the bartenders for Cocktail as “most of the tips and pours they did wasted a lot of liquor.”
Nevertheless John ‘JB’ Bandy sued Michael ‘Magic Mike’ Warner when he claimed that he had conducted the training. His claim for damages being his earnings as a bartender/consultant had increased tenfold since he had been canonised as Cruise’s trainer. The dispute , in this world of the twirling dervishes, went unresolved.
CHAPTER TEN.
There are few more fascinating examples of how the Hollywood system works – meticulous, ego-driven, spending profligately on research and development, tenacious - than ‘Rain Man’. From an idea that was pure but a script that was weak, it was shepherded through the development process with various people adding their talents to the story until a movie was produced that attracted critical acclaim, eight Oscar nominations (four winners) and $172m in the US alone. It then became the number one movie in every country it played in throughout the world.
It would never have happened without Bill Sackter who, in 1920 at the age of seven, was put in the Minnesota State School for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptics. He remained there for more than forty-five years before becoming a ward of state. A young student, Barry Morrow, and his wife, Bev, petitioned for his guardianship. Barry was due to take up a job at the University of Iowa School of Social Work and insisted Bill come with them. The School gave the boy a coffee shop to run and, true to Morrow’s faith in him, became popular with students and faculty alike. He died in 1983 at the age of seventy but Wild Bill’s Coffee Shop is still there and Bill found fame in a 1981 television movie about his life in which he was played by Mickey Rooney and written by Morrow. They both won Emmies.
Morrow also created a mall of small shops next to the coffee shop, all of them operated by people with disabilities. He was invited to Texas for the Association for Retarded Citizens and there he met Kim Peek. To Morrow’s amazement, Peek was able to tell him the author of every book in the library, correct the ZIP codes on the membership list and give him detailed driving instructions to almost anywhere. Thus ‘Rain Man’ was born.
Morrow came up with the story of two brothers, Charlie Babbitt, a tough young Los Angeles businessman and Raymond Babbitt, a retarded savant in a sanatorium, who only discover each other when their father dies. The Emmy-winner was now versed in the way to get a TV programme made and pitched it to Stan Brooks, the head of television at the Guber-Peters Productions. But the president of the company, Roger Birnbaum, was at the meeting and pronounced the idea: “The best story I ever heard.” It was worth a feature film.
Peter Guber, later to head up Sony, was unenthusiastic but let Birnbaum have his head. He and Morrow took it to Warner Bros but they turned him down as they had something similar in development – ‘Forrest Gump’. (A film they dropped after the success of ‘Rain Man’ – Paramount made the hit film ten years later.) Undaunted, Birnbaum managed to get Robert Lawrence, President of United Artists, to hear Morrow’s pitch. He bought the idea within fifteen minutes.
After working on the script for eight months with input from Birnbaum, the CAA uberagent Michael Ovitz was brought in and Barry Morrow found himself at dinner with Dustin Hoffman and the director of Guber-Peters world-wide hit, ‘Beverly Hills Cop’, Martin Brest. At the end of the meal Hoffman pronounced: “We’re going to do this movie together and it’s going to be great.”
But when Hoffman said this movie, he actually meant a rewritten version of the script and, to Morrow’s chagrin, two new writers – Richard Price and Michael Bortman - were hired to script their versions.
Dr Darold Treffert, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at St. Agnes Hospital, Wisconsin, and an expert on Savant Syndrome, who was the consultant on the film, was pretty horrified by the turn the story had now taken. “Savant Syndrome is spectacul
ar in its own right,” he points out, “it does not need to be embellished. That script had in it more typical Hollywood scenes – Mafia mobsters, narrow escapes and a chase scene in which Charlie and Raymond roar out of a burning barn on a motorcycle fashioned by using some of Raymond’s savant mechanical skills.”
More worrying was the ending. “In the original script there was a happy ending. Raymond has changed so much that he does not return to the institution. He moves in with his brother, they go to ball games together and live happily ever after. While that makes a nice story, it is also an unrealistic one.”
Ovitz, meanwhile, proposed another of his clients – Tom Cruise – as the other brother, Charlie Babbitt. Tom accepted with alacrity and, in September 1987, joined Hoffman (Raymond Babbitt), and the screenwriter and the director in adjacent beach houses in Malibu to work on the script. Only, by now, the writer was Ron Bass and the director, Steven Spielberg. Hoffman had had ‘artistic differences’ with Martin Brest. One of them apparently was that Brest didn’t like the idea that Hoffman, the title character, did not appear for fifteen minutes. Dustin retorted that Cruise was the biggest star in the world, quite capable of holding the movie for forty minutes if need be.
Tom Cruise: All the World's a Stage Page 13