Christopher Smith, Writer

TRANSCRIPT:

My name is Christopher Smith. I’ve been a Scientologist since 1983 and I am a writer for Golden Era Productions and Scientology Media Productions. And I’ve done that for the last twenty or so years I’ve been involved with Gold.

You know, I, as a Scientologist have the opportunity to work as an artist to forward my religion. That is the best gig I ever could have dreamed of. Similar to Ron Miscavige, were he a real Scientologist, having the opportunity to create music and work at the audiovisual and film center that LRH founded, that would be a great gig. So I look at Ron as… as somebody who actually turned his back on the gift that he was given. And I consider myself very fortunate and I never take that gift for granted. And I’m not sour grapes about Ron. I’m sour grapes about anybody who… who doesn’t actually take that responsibility for what it actually is and… and have the—take the honor of… of that.

Golden Era Productions is a film studio. We work… I’ve been, I’ve worked with every department here. I’ve worked with the editors, I work with the Musicians, I’ve worked with the scoring people, I’ve worked with everybody. And when you’re working on a project, because it’s a collaborative process, you know, audiovisual and film is a… is an… a collaborative process you do rub elbows with the rest of your team. And so I worked with Ron many times.

He scored or presented scores, I won’t say he actually scored, but he presented melodies to me for videos that I was working on. And in one particular instance—although I could tell you this story ten times over because it happened that many times—he brought me a melody, I listened to it against the video that I had just created and I said, “Ron, it doesn’t work.” They… the… the melody had nothing to do with the video that was there. And… and one of the basic rules about music is that it has to enhance the message of the video.

So it didn’t enhance it… it distracted from it. And more than that, it was just a meandering sort of—it wasn’t even a melody. If you want to call a melody a bunch of notes thrown together, then that’s a melody. If you want to call a melody an arrangement of notes that actually have some communication to them, that’s a real melody. And that isn’t what Ron presented. So I would tell… I told him in this one instance, I said, “This is… the melody is terrible, it just doesn’t… doesn’t do anything.”

The only thing that Ron Miscavige has is a chance to try to cash in on his familial connection. I look at that as just the accident of birth. Mr. [David] Miscavige is so diametrically different than his father.

His father is crude, just sort of a happy go lucky guy, somebody you’d expect to meet in a bar and tell you the joke, the uncle that you cringe about when it comes to the family reunion, because you know he’s going to be a little too loud, and a little off color and probably say the wrong thing to your family. That’s Ron Miscavige.

Mr Miscavige, who has an amazing presence, incredible sense of humor, just an impeccable sense of aesthetics, all of it, is an absolute opposite. He commands respect because of who he is and how he conducts himself. Ron gets away, you know, he’s the cheap beer, and he’s kind of the six-pack that you can get for a buck and a quarter. And what he could actually do, he had a great gig here. He was the Third Trumpet, he never really excelled to be the First Trumpet, and Ron was a guy who was kind of like a garage band trumpet player.

The extraordinary thing about working with Gold is the fact that everyone is actually aligned to the same purpose. So, if we’re making a video, that video is either introducing a new facility, it’s introducing a new service, it’s introducing something to the public or presenting it to the public. And everybody has that common purpose. So you get every person, from the scriptwriter, where the creation sort of begins, to those people who shoot it, the people who direct it, the people who do the post production, editing, music––all of that is really a team effort and you’re all a part of it.

And the beautiful part about working with Gold is we’re at it from the beginning. And we have this additional remarkable advantage, in that many times we have the Chairman of the Board, Mr. David Miscavige, also as a part of that collaborative team.

And, because he is actually driving the movement of Scientology forward, that piece that we’re creating, that presentation, is a part of that strategic drive. So his input and his collaboration with us actually gives us the guidance to be able to present that to whether it’s Scientologists at an event or it’s to the general public. And so his input is incredibly valuable. At the same time, he gives everyone the ability to wear their hat, so to speak, to do their jobs. So, as a scriptwriter, he looks to me to create that script. He looks at the editors to do that edit.

I mean, it’s… it’s remarkable because he’s… he’s trusting the professionals to actually come through and realize the vision that he’s put there, which is ultimately just forwarding the vision of our founder, L. Ron. Hubbard.

And his direction is so specific and so correct, it is… it’s uncanny, because it… it always makes it better. And his ability and I really think that his… his vision of the… the bigger picture, as well as the vision of, like, just one individual video, is so remarkably aligned to the overall purpose of forwarding Scientology that it… it just never falters.

Mr. Miscavige’s dedication to learning every aspect of filmmaking and every aspect of just about anything that… that is needed in order to forward the movement of Scientology. And so, his vision is the vision. Because it so closely mirrors the vision of L. Ron Hubbard and… and it is so closely aligned to the purposes of L. Ron Hubbard and I think that… that is a remarkable thing ’cause, that’s what never falters. And when you, you know, many times, when we’re working on a project we get mired in the… the tactical part of it, you know, the shooting, the… the writing of it, the language, the research, the whatever. And sometimes you can lose sight of the purpose of the overall. Mr. Miscavige never loses the sight of the purpose.

I don’t think there’s anybody who is more delighted by being able to deliver praise to the people he works with than Chairman of the Board. He is as excited by the completion of a project, a long project that we’ve been working on for a year, a video that we’ve been working on for a few days. He’s as… as excited about that as the creative people involved in it and he is never stingy with his praise on that. And you always, you… you get the sense that when he says something is approved to be able to be played, it is now a part of such a bigger picture than you… you almost, you… you almost can’t quite imagine that it’s a part of something so much larger and yet he brings it back to that.

CHAPTERS:

#1 Chris Smith introduces himself. #2 Ron Miscavige, turning his back on a gift he was given. #3 Working at Golden Era and working with Ron Miscavige. #4 Ron Miscavige cashed in on his familial connections. He is crude. #5 Working with Mr. David Miscavige. #6 Working at Golden Era with everyone aligned to same purpose. #7 Mr. David Miscavige's dedication and purpose. #8 Mr. David Miscavige praising staff for job well done.