This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing, My chance to talk with artists, policymakers, and performers, to hear their stories. What inspires their creations, what decisions change their careers, what relationships influenced their work. My guest today, author Lawrence Wright thinks a lot about religion. He wants to know why people choose one faith over another, especially when what they choose seems quote absurd or dangerous to
an outsider. This question has led Right to investigate some of the world's most complicated and secretive organizations, from the People's Temple in Jonestown to the Church of Scientology. His book on Al Qaeda won the Pulitzer Prize in two thousand and seven. Lawrence Wright has a unique firsthand experience as to the power of belief.
I grew up in Dallas in the Methodist Church, and it was despite the fact that Methodism doesn't have a reputation as being kind of a you know, hell fire and Brimstone, the first of the churches that we went to in Dallas really was that, and then we graduated to the Methodist Church downtown. My dad taught Sunday school for many, many years. You know, Dallas back at that
time was the most pious city in America. We had the largest Methodist, Baptist I think, the largest Episcopal church, and one of the largest Catholic churches in the entire country. And at the same time we had the highest murder rate and the highest divorce rate, you know, all the things that go along with excess piety. Yeah, so it was, and I was very pious as a teenager. I was in a group called Young Life.
And genuinely or you were responding to pressure.
No, I was, well, there was part of those things. It was you know, I had moved around a lot, as my dad was a banker and we moved quite a lot, and it was hard for me to establish roots. So when I got to Dallas and this, you know, Young Life came up. It was a social club for me. But also it was the first time I understood the you can binge yourself into the shape of the organization the way it wants you to be. And also the more pious you are, sort of the higher you climb,
the more important. So I got to be a part of it. Yeah, well you say those things, and it's and you want to believe them. I was not consciously trying to deceive anyone. At the same time, you know what to say, your.
Heart felt and you're genuine, but at the same time you realize that there's a there's an approval system here. Yeah.
And I think that that experience was formative in some ways for me to be so interested in religious matters and why you know, I people are always, you know, reporters, especially fascinated by politics. But you can have strong political views and it doesn't affect your life at all, But if you have strong religious views, they probably dictate much
of your behavior. It's puzzling to me why with most journalists it's just embarrassing to ask about what people believe because it's not supposed to matter.
Did you leave the area to go to college, did you? Yeah?
I went to Tulane in New Orleans, which was a city least like Dallas that I could find, and you could buy beer and woolworst and you could drink at eighteen, and you know, a lot of things.
Not very pious. The well in arts school.
By that time, I kind of shed that, but I was actively looking for a way to live a more bohemian life. I felt very constricted in Dallas.
Was writing something that was on your mind even at an early age?
Yeah? Yeah. In college I took a creative writing class. You know, I was not a.
Distant school paper. No.
I used to like doing that stuff though. And then after I graduated, you know, the Vietnam War was going on, and I became a conscientious objector and spent two years of alternative service teaching in Cairo, and that's where I became involved for the first time with the Arab world.
And when the boy from Dallas becomes a conscientious objector, how did that go off back home?
You know, I my dad was a war hero, and I wanted to be like him. I was in rotc. I expected, you know, to follow in his footsteps. But you know, there was this parallel problem going on, which was the Vietnam War, which was despicable, different war, and
it was a bad war. And you know, for a person, a young man like me who wanted to serve his country but did not want to kill people for the wrong reason or risk my life for something I didn't believe in, it just was a terrible My father and I I had horrible, horrible fights about Vietnam.
Do you have any brothers.
No, I had two younger sisters.
So you were it. You were the yeah scion. Yeah. Did you ever make peace with them about that? Yeah? You know.
I wrote a memoir about growing up in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination in America during the Vietnam Era. In the process of doing that, I talked to my parents a lot, and I let them read the manuscript and it was a very healing experience for all of us.
I think, when does writing become a career decision for you?
When I came back from Egypt in nineteen seventy one, I decided that I was going to write an article for it. I decided I was going to write an article for the New Yorker. I hadn't contacted them, and they, no, they had no idea. My folks had a little lake cabin up in Equipment, Texas, in East Texas, and so my wife and I moved out there for six months while I wrote letter from Cairo, and there.
Was a report from Yeah.
So there it was an RFD, you know mail, and there was we had a little you know box out on the road where you raise the red flag and the mailman stops and I sent my manuscript into the New Yorker. I'm sure this isn't true, but it seemed that it came back the next day from equipment Texas to mister Shawn's desk to back the equipment with a you know, a little rejection card in there. And that was,
you know, my first attempt at becoming a writer. It would it would be many, many years later that I actually got a chance to write for The New Yorker.
You're in Cairo, you're married.
You know, this is an odd story because you know, I went in to I had to get a job that was fifty miles from my home, and that wasn't a problem I wanted. I was so sick of America at that time, and the argument over the war was so devastating, and I just wanted to get as far
away as I could. And it had to pay very little, and it had to be nominally in the service of the United States, so I uh, and the bedpen jobs were all taken, which normally is what a conscientious objector does, but this was during the Nixon recession, and those were all taken. So I thought I would go to the un and you know, get a job and they send me far far away. And I went to the UNN and they said, no, we don't do that. But here's a list of American institutions abroad. Okay, I mean one
of them. American University in Cairo had an office across the street at eight sixty six un Plaza. And do you remember Huntington Hartford and Show magazine here? I thought you might. Well, you know, he had a famous office, and I realized they was in the same building. And I thought, I'll go over and peek into Huntington Hartford's office and then I'll go upstairs and ask for a job.
So I did that, and you know, I walked in and I didn't I knew that there had been a war in the Middle East, but I wasn't, you know, it wasn't the war that I was focused on, you know, And and I didn't know that we didn't have any diplomatic relations with Egypt at the time. I'm not even sure what language they spoke, but I walked in and thirty minutes later they said can you leave tonight? And I said, well, no, my girlfriend's back in Boston and I haven't told my parents what I'm doing, and can
you leave tomorrow. Well, yeah, I can go tomorrow, so let.
Me make a couple of phone calls. There.
I went back and I told my girlfriend, now my wife, I'm going to Egypt tomorrow and I don't know where that leaves us, and I'll be gone for two years. And then and I called my parents from JFK the next morning and told him I was going to Cairo. And I flew to Cairo and landed, you know, late at night, and the next morning, at nine o'clock, I taught my first class. After a couple of weeks, I
was really missing Roberta. Back then, you didn't make telephone calls or you know, international calls and stuff like that. Letters were passing, and at some point I said, you know the terms under which we left were. You know, you can't go. You just couldn't live together in Egypt. You know, it was a very conservative society. And if I invite you to come, that means we'll get married. So and you know, our letters crossed in the mail. I asked her to come, and she said she was
coming anyway. And then did you name your first child Huntington? No, but that would have been some Then the question became where to get married, because there was this idea that was swhere in the back of my mind that if I got married in Egypt under Islamic law, I could have the additional three wives, which was an option. I wasn't sure that I wanted to exercise, but you know, it could be. You know, it's a contingency. I don't think I have the management skills. Yeah, over there, they
insist you be married. You can be married as many times as you want, you know, or they dis insisted that you'll be married. So you're there for two usually come back, yeah, and then what happens? Then I talked the start the long road of trying to start a career as a writer, and you moved to where. The first job I got was in Nashville for the race relations reporter. I was the only writer for a long time.
But we would go into situations where, you know, there was racial conflict and oftentimes the local press was biased or not paying attention to it, and so it might be about you know, the civil rights movement in the South, or Indians. You know, the Indian movement was underway at the time. School desegregation was very active, all those things. I got a chance to write about it taught me quite a lot about how you know, to actually write an article is a matter of being plunged into it.
Was there a mentor you had then.
A very crazy editor named Jim Leeson in Nashville.
Yeah.
Him. It was a strange man, and he the whole culture was a little strange, to be honest. I Jim when I went to apply for the job, I was a pretty good tennis player, and he asked about that, and so he asked if we could play tennis the next day. So I show up in my tennis duds and he goes out and plays me in his street shoes,
and of course I beat him pretty soundly. But still the notion that he would play tennis and street shoes was and he wound up firing me when I wrote a memo suggesting that we reorganized the I was probably I deserve to be fired, imagine. So, but it was a it was another test to be plunged into the freelance market.
I first became familiar with you and you're writing in the Olympia Washington story. The piece was entitled Remembering Satan, which you wrote as a book as well. These were excerpts in the book. There was a two part lengthy excerpt in the edition of The New Yorker, and I first became familiar with you, And I mean I was just supposed, you know, like knocked out by this piece. I thought, how on earth is this possible? Was this the first such piece you wrote, the Olympia piece.
No, I think I had written about you know, a lot of different even wrote about Satanists, and you know, people of all sorts of I mean, if you're a reporter and you have a passport to write about anybody, and I took full advantage of that. But that remembering satan is kind of a stereotypical type of article that I like to write about, which is, for one thing,
it's a discreet world, you know. In this case, it was, you know, this world inside Olympia, Washington that had been infected by these hysterical memories of Satanic ritual abuse which never occurred. But a man was convicted of these crimes. He confessed to them because he remembered them, and there was other than his memory. There was no evidence of it.
If I remember correctly. No one else was sentenced to prison.
Only Paul went to prison.
What's his relationship with his family now or do you even know it's very broken as far as I haven't talked to Paul in a couple of years.
But you know he's married again. You know, he started another life. But you know, it's an example of how the mind can be so persuaded of, you know, a false reality that.
Everybody is capable of.
That I don't know if I would say that.
To whatever degree, not capable of that, but creating a false reality.
One of the things that has been an education to me as a reporter when I'm out interviewing people that have been for instance, in out Kaida or you know, people that have come out of you know, I interviewed the children of Jim Jones, and you know, I talked
to people who went into scientology. They're not crazy people, then they're not stupid, and you know they're they're often you know, if there's a commonality, there's idealism of you know, there a longing to make, you know, change history, make something of yourself, and that's you know, maybe that's one of the most dangerous elements of our human nature, is that we it's the better parts of our nature that sometimes lead us into real dangerous areas.
We were the better parts of the natures of Jones's children.
Well you know they were. They were essentially captive to him. So but and they survived, thank god. They were all playing basketball in a tournament in Georgetown, Guyana, So they weren't killings when when the killings went down. But the it's always to me, it is always underscored the danger of these kinds of fanatical belief systems. There were these
three boys, two adopted. Stephen was a natural son and he looked very much like his father, Jim Jones, with the kind of Cherokee cheek bones, and he's very tall and striking, handsome man. And then there was Jim Jones Junior, who was black and adopted adopted. And then the third adopted son was Tim, who is this big red headed guy. Tim. These boys when I talked to him, Waco was going on at that time, the Branch Davidian episode, and Tina Brown was the editor of the New Yorker, and she
wanted me to go to Waco. And I said, they're more reporters in Waco than there are Branch Davidians. I just but I was. I was convinced that this must. You know, I'd seen the children, some of the children that were sent out. I thought that this must have happened before. And I found these three boys who had never then grown men, never told their story before. And I don't know why they were willing to talk to me.
But Tim, when I got to him, he demanded that we stood in a restaurant, in a public place, because he didn't want to cry, and he had never told his wife, his current wife, what had happened. Man, He wanted to say this story one time. Now, bear in mind, Tim Jones is a massive fellow. He can press one hundred pounds with either arm. You know, he has an immense physical presence. And we went to the restaurant and within a few minutes he was pounding the table and sobbing.
Because Tim is the one who had to go into the jungle and identify nine hundred people, his real parents, his adoptive parents, his wife at the time, and his children, everybody lying on the ground. And it makes an impression.
Did he ever confide to you or even just discussed to you what he thought was going on there? What he thought.
They all knew that their dad was crazy and that this was what was he doing there. You know, he was giving these suicide drills regularly. You know, they break out.
The what was the purpose of Jonestown.
Well, they stated purpose was to they were Jones was intensely paranoid. He had the feeling that the government was persecuting him, which was not really true at all. But one night the entire church disappeared. You know, they all went secretly to this little South American country with it, you know, in the in the middle of the jungle. They've been preparing it. The boys are religious Utopia, the yeah, and it was just a you know, it was like a you know, a little summer camp type of thing.
They've built quantcet huts and so on, and they were living near a river and they built an airstrip.
I remember reading on this thing online where they said that Jonestown was this training ground where they were breeding MK ultra operatives who were capable of committing murder on behalf of the government and then they'd have no memory of it. Well, you know, I'm not saying that that's true, but I remember reading that once.
I was fast when I was writing about remembering Satan, when I was doing the you know, multiple personalities were supposed to be the product of satanic ritual abuse, and there was a big rise in multiple personality disorder. And one of the theories was that the multiples had been created by the CIA in order that one personality could become a spy and you know, deliver messages that other personalities inside the same human being wouldn't know about.
Lawrence Wright's New Yorker article, The Orphans of Jonestown, came out for the fifteenth anniversary of the nineteen seventy eight massacre that killed over nine hundred people. Listen to more conversations with writers who take on complicated issues, like David Simon, who wrote the TV show The Wire but started out as the beat reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
I think I was very fair as a reporter. You know, some of poverty is about personal responsibility, and some of it is not.
Some of it is systemic and a result of societal forces that are profound. Take a listen in our archives at Here's the Thing dot org. This is Alec Baldwin. You're listening to Here's the Thing. My guest, Lawrence Wright prefers taking notes on index cards over using a computer. You can only imagine the number of cards, right you For his book Going Clear, Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison
of Belief. After it was published in twenty thirteen, documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney asked right if he'd consider an adaptation.
We'd worked together before. You know, I had done this book about al Qaeda called The Looming Tower, and I had my little acting venture. I didn't want to travel with it, you know, I just hate touring, you know, doing the book tour thing. I had seen Anna Deavere Smith do Fires in the Mirror at the Public Theater in nineteen ninety two and was the first time I could see that journalism and theater could be married. And
I fascinated by that. So I did a one man show called My Trip to al Qaeda, and I did it off Broadway for about six weeks and in a few other cities, and Alex saw me do it in Washington. We decided to make it into a documentary, which we did for hb OH. We hit it off. Alex is his nickname from childhood is Tiger, and his well chosen name, and he's this very skillful storyteller, and it takes those qualities to take something as complicated about an organizations vindictive
and litigious as the Church of Scientology. It takes somebody like Alex to put together a movie like he's just done.
One of the things I thought when I saw the film, and I mean, all my friends and people who know me personally, it wasn't lost on them that within about a week of returning from Park City for the festival, I went there to have a vacation with my family. We just tacked on an extra weekend to see some movies because I'm a big fan of the festival, and it wasn't lost to my friends with it. About a week after that, I was back on a plane to
London to go shoot a film with Tom Cruise. And Tom is a friend of mine, you know, and I mean I consider him a friend in the business sense, but we don't get to see each other that often. But he's always very kind and as people who know Tom know, he's a great person to be in the trenches of movie making with. He's very hard working and
very very passionate about the work. But when I saw the film, one thing I didn't get and maybe it's there, maybe it was in the book, and maybe it's in the film, but it was I mean I watched this film with intense scrutiny. There wasn't any sense to me of what are the people who are in scientology and remain in scientology and who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it? Because I have some opinions about that. What people have told me, Well,
what does it do for them? Why are they there?
Especially when people go into scientology, they don't you know, they don't go into it because it's a cult. They go into it oftentimes because they're looking for something such as well, you know, sometimes they're spiritual seekers or they you know, you might be one of those people that goes down on the subway and someone says, would you like to take our personality tests? You know, and sure,
Oxford capacity analysis. It sounds like, you know, might be and you know, well, if we see that you have a little trouble of communicating with people that's true, well we you know, we can help, we can help you with that. Or in the case of Paul Hagis, you know, he had a girlfriend that he was having trouble with and say, we have a course that can help you in your relationships and PA and the truth is, oftentimes they can help. It's like going into therapy. People do
benefit from it. So this initial exposure to scientology is often very positive to people.
What about the people like Travolta, people who seem to have the world on a silver platter and everything is going their way.
Well, that wasn't true. When he got in. He was a you know, troubled young man who was in his first movie in Mexico. He confided to an actress who was on the set. You know, he's having these difficulties, and she was a scientologist, and she gave him some auditing, which is what scientology calls his therapy, and gave him a copy of Diynetics and so on. He had an experience which happens to a lot of scientologists when they're being audited. He went exterior. In other words, he had
an out of body experience. He had the sense that he had left his corporal being and could look around the room and you know, see things behind him and so on. At the time he was taking a course, when he'd tried out for this Welcome Back Cotter, the teacher had everybody in the class turned their direction. I think it was CBS Studios, you know, but telepathically send the message to the executives that John Travolta is right
for the role, and he got the part. And so he always credited Scientology was putting him in the big time, as he said, So you know, in that sense, he really did feel that it had changed his life. But it's one thing to get into it, and it's another thing to get out of it. If you are a star, like Travolta was at one time the biggest star in the world, the biggest and you have put your name down again and again and again. As a Scientologist, you're identified with it.
And they have tapes of you, yes, discussing your darkest moments.
Right like if you and I were sitting in a Scientology auditing session right now, and you're my auditor, and you know, and I'm holding the cans which are attached to the E meter, and you're probing and asking me very impersonal questions about my life and things that I would not want to disclose to anyone else except in this very confidential confessional atmosphereiatingly yeah, material that is actually secretly recorded, sometimes videoed, and then it becomes apparent to
you that if you decide to leave, the church may use some of that against you. And I talked that. I talked to a guy whose assignment was to go through all those old auditing sessions on John Travolta and find stuff they could use against him because they were worried that he was.
Going he was going to go over the wall. In the piece in the film, the one thing I found that was disturbing was that there are celebrities and wealthy public figures who tie a certain amount of their money millions of dollars to this organization, a second tier, if you will, and this is my description the second tier, if you will, are you know, middle Americans, middle income who often go into debt, often go into dangerous amounts of debt and unwise amounts of debt in order to
pay for these orditing courses so for them to give money to the church. And then there's people who are poor, who have nothing, who wind up trading in kind services. They become, you know, they become like a labor force for them, and then they get forty cents an hour according to the film, and they're doing a lot of work that benefits other people. In the film, they're saying that these people are maintaining in the hangar of cruises airplanes.
Well, not only maintained it, what they did was refurbish it. They built all the furniture, they painted it, They you know, they essentially took an empty hangar and made it into an office and a place for his planes and all these elaborate If you ever been in his hangar Burbank, well he's got you know these you know, big decals and stuff like that, you know, banners hanging down. It's
a pretty swank environment. And they handcrafted a limousine for him, and oversaw the reconstruction of his tour bus, and they, you know, refurbished his house. And these are people who are paid fifty dollars a week. Many of them joined as children, so you know, they're impoverished and.
They have no place to go.
They have, you know, and if we if they do, they don't know it. They Yeah, then of course may be the case that their families and all are in the church and if they left, none of those people would ever speak to them again.
Do you think the people who were the beneficiaries of this kind of stuff, do they know what's happening.
Yeah, there's no question that Tom Cruise knows what's going on inside the Sea Org. And I hold Tom to account. I single him out in particular. And because there are only two ways that the abuses that we chronicle in the movie and in my book, they are only two ways that they can be addressed, and one is that the IRS decides, well, maybe we should re examine that tax exemption that we were bludgeoned and to given them in nineteen nine.
Expect I'm explained for people who don't look this is a fascinating part of the film. It was during the time that Hubbard was alive, or was the settlement reached after Hubbard dies After he died, and apparently he had a brigade and raising a lot of money, and he had a lot of cash at his disposal and was just shelling the Irs and litigation to maintain their status. And finally the IRS just caved and said.
Well, here's the situation that described what had David Misscavage found himself in. After Hubbard died, he wrestled control of this organization and Hubbard had decided not to pay the taxes, and so by nineteen ninety three, the Church of Scientology was a billion dollars in arrears and it didn't have a billion dollars, and so this was an existential moment for the church. They had to get a tax exemption.
And moreover, the IRS hated them because, you know, in the eighties, Hubbard had infiltrated all these you know, the Justice Department, the IRS, Food and Drug Administration had all these Scientology spies inside the government until the FBI broke it open and what was called Operation snow White, and twelve people went to prey and including Hubbard's wife. So the IRS, among other government agencies did not look kindly
on the Church of Scientology. So how do you just imagine how you would go about getting a tax exempsion from the IRS. Well, the Scientology way was to launch twenty four hundred lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents, to hire private investigators to follow agents around to go to conventions where they might be drinking too much or fooling around.
I don't have a billion dollars to pay the taxes, but I've got fifty million, two lobs some grenades at ye.
Yes, yeah, and so and they they they won, and they wanted such a they one my personal feeling is twofold. One is I think that the IRS just did cave because the deal that the deal on the table was, will give you the exemption and all those lawsuits will go away. And they did.
And so do they say, well, we'll give you the exemption and take away those losses. Would you have to pay us some amount of this money in twelve million dollars and that's all see the IRS that's acquired.
And moreover, it was such an overwhelming exemption. The church has manifold different entities, you know, but even Hubbard's novels are considered to be scripture and taxes and in the church now has the authority to determine which parts of itself should be tax exempt.
Who was it in the film? If I remember correctly, there's someone, I think there's an individual use site who says to Hubbard early in his career, the only way you're going to get riches if you started religions.
Oh, there were about ten people he said that too. And you know, I think that Hubbard really, I think he really did believe that. But let me get back to that question of you know, just to touch back on Tom Cruise before we finish that if the if the I R S re examined after the licking it took from from Scientology, if it decided to go back and re examined, that that might force change inside the church. But I haven't seen any evidence that the IRS has the appetite to do this, although.
The Senator on the West Coast, Senator.
Ron Wyden, is looking into this, and so you know, that's a possible. But the other way that change and reform could come in Scientology is that some of the celebrity megaphones turn around in the other direction and demand change. And nobody has benefited more from Scientology than Tom Cruise. Nobody is more identified in the public with the Church of Scientology than Tom Cruise. Nobody has brought lured more
people into the church than Tom Cruise. If you ask people name one member of the Church of Scientology, that's the one ever. And moreover, it's a powerful I mean, if you look at you know, he was the number one box office star, so he had Travolta than Tom Cruise. And you know, and also Will Smith, who started a Scientology school. Although he says he's not a scientologist, he was one of the time he was number one. So you have one, two, three, the most powerful actors in
the most power. And if you're a young actor standing out in central casting waiting to get maybe.
He's not a bad idea. If I stopped by this center.
Well, when you're standing in line, they'll be passing out brochures saying how to get an agent, how to get ahead and the business. Come to the celebrity.
Center where they make that direct link.
Yes, and he also back in the old days, the acting schools like the Beverly Hills Playhouse was run by Yes, who was my teacher. He was apparently a wonderful.
Teacher, and he was a scientologist.
And did he ever try to recruit you? Uh?
I think I wasn't there long enough. I was there for under a year. I went briefly and could sell Us was quite a character.
He would tell me about it, and I'm fascinated by him.
Well, could sell Us He said something that, although it was very arch and very kind of you might think this was ego maniacal. He was nonetheless right. There was a guy up on stage doing a scene. I was in this class. My then girlfriend got me into the class. This guy's up there doing a scene I'll never forget. And Cadsellis is giving his notes on the scene and the guy starts to debate him. He says, well, yeah, I don't think it's really and Kdsellis says, I beg
your pardon and he says, well I don't. He goes, well, I think it's this, and he goes what it is is? And Godselli is now insisting and being a little more because he was a very powerful guy rhetorically, and he goes and says it again, and the guy debates him again, and Kadzelis he said, we're not here for you to debate what I tell you. He said, you come here and you pay me for me to give you my opinion. He said, I'm not interested in your opinion. I give
you my opinion, and you listen. He turns to the classics. And that's it. We don't discuss what I'm saying. This isn't a debate. I say what I say, you listen, you write it down perhaps and we're done. And Scientology I have found and this is I mean, I I find it odd, but at the same time I find it kind of fascinating. And nonetheless, where Scientology says to you, this is what you were put on this earth to do,
and it gives you that license and that freedom. You tell your parents, your wives, your children, everyone in your life that nothing must get in the way of this thing. This is the goose that lays the golden egg. Movie stardom. Are you are different? There's an exceptionalistic nature to who you are as a person. And the only way you're going to first survive, I mean to stay in that orbit out there, in that spaceship living that way. That's a very difficult thing to do.
And I think when so many of these young people when they come, you know, it is a young person's game when they get into it. So many of the people that went in scientology, and this is true of anybody that tries to become an actor. Many people who try to become actors, they leave high school. They don't go to college. You have to go right away.
Nearly everyone we're talking about is uneducated.
Yes, and so you're in your vulnerable intellectually vulnerable. And also you are risking everything. Your friends are going off, they're going to get law degrees and stuff like that, and you are out in you know, Hollywood, eating dog food, hoping to be a movie star. There's a sense of inadequacy that you haven't filled in the great blanks that all your friends are doing. And so you along come scientologists, which says.
Why bother, none of that matters.
Yeah, we can, you can supersede all that, because well we will get all you will. You will learn the secrets of the universe, and you'll acquire superhuman powers. And that's and also just being noticed at all at that level is you know, very powerful, because you know, I'm
sure you've done this a million times. But I remember once when I was out in La and I was at Norman Lear's company, and I walked into a room in the lobby and there were about forty guys who were blonde and six foot two and extremely handsome, and I felt small and brown, and you know, but there
was a sign saying no actors passed this point. And I was able to walk past this point, and all those blue eyes turned in my direction, and I thought, one of those guys, one of those guys is going to have his life change, and everybody else is going to go home and some of them become lawnmowers or something like that. But that's the risk to have the Church of Scientology come along, maybe in that same room and passing out brochure is saying that we can help you.
And by the way, on the brochure that might have a picture of Tom Cruise or somebody like that is a very powerful lure.
And here's people who say to you, you are different, Just be different, Just accept it, don't fight. Where you're going to go right now is extremely unusual for the average person's going to be very rarefied atmosphere. Stay calm in the pocket, and you're going to throw the football one hundred yards down the field. You're going to score the winning touchdown. Don't get in the way of your own success. And I have seen many of the people I know who are really prominent in scientology, they just
that's what it did for them. What clarity was for them was this is who I am in a macho and anybody that tried to make you think what you were doing was less valid or less substantial, or less meaningful, or it was silly or whatever.
These guys look and what you're saying, what do they get out of it? There is you know, this is you know a sense of solidity of your identity, belonging. And what's so confounding about scientology in many ways is that, you know, it promises you that you will become more yourself and that you will achieve all this freedom of thought, and that you you know, you'll become saner and healthier and so.
On, but shed your past.
What happened so often is the very opposite. You know, you be kind of you become kind of enslaved to the mentality and you're not allowed to think freely. You know. One of the things that was so striking to me about Paul Haggis, who is a very skeptical, imaginative, curious person. But he was in the church for thirty five years and for thirty four of those years he never heard a disparaging word about scientology, never looked on the internet, he never read any of those stories because he was
told not to, and he didn't. He was just as obedient as all those other people because he was told.
It was for his intellectual curiosity. Go regarding that, Yeah, what is the thing you're working on now?
Well, I'm doing you know. I did another book about Camp David the Carter begins the Dot Thing, which had a play and I'm now going to do it as a movie for HBO, and I'm doing a pilot for HBO on Texas politics right and I'm working with Bob Balaban on a play about the making of the movie Cleopatra, which is the thing that I have been having the most fun with and I'm going to write about isis.
So those well, okay, that's what I wanted to tell when you say I'm going to write about isis?
Yeah, I can't talk about it too much, but I.
Is this more about religious fanaticism for you?
Well, in part it is. I'm fascinated by the fact that the entire fabric of civilization can simply be ripped away. And you know that barbarism is just under the sheets and in most grotesque fashion. You know, we look back in the twentieth century and you see Nazism and people, how did that happen? Well, you know now it's happening again. It's a mystery when these things occur, that human nature can encompass such savagery. But it's right there in front of you, and it's and it's also it's a fact
of human nature that people are drawn to it. And that's whatses my curiosity.
Do you think that when you look at isis do you think that people I just want to get your general comment about this. Do you think that people over there isis I should say? And whoever the next isis is? It seems to have another They seem to be opening up a new show over there every eighteen months or year. Do you think that they just hate our guts that the United States viewed as a hero of the United States viewed as an answer the United States viewed as
a good guy? Is this just more of people wanted to send us some kind of message about US foreign power.
I don't think it has as much to do with us, although I think Iraq our eventors in Iraq where it was, you know, that's what broke the egg, and I don't think we would be looking at what we're seeing now. But what the whole region what worries me about isis is that everything that holds the Middle East together is breaking apart. The states are failing. You know, I've been in Syria before and it was to me the least
religious Arab country that I'd ever been in. So it's quite surprising to see, you know, this Islamist uh savagery going on right there. And yeah, I just I was I was taken aback by it. But you know, I spent a lot of time in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and places like that, and I know that they're not strong, resilient governments and they are very fractured societies. And in that environment, we saw what happened in Iraq. You know, just almost overnight, uh, this band of marauders uh takes
over an area of the size of the United Kingdom. Well, Jesus, you know, how did that happen? And will it spread? Will these societies be able because we can't stop it. It's going to be up to uh Sunni societies in the Arab world to stop it themselves, and I don't have confidence that they can. That's what concerns me. The problem becomes when you identify yourself so much with your religion rather than your country or your family or so on.
That becomes the sole basis of your identity. And it's a real problem in Europe right now for marginalized young men who don't feel like they are a part of French society.
For instance.
You know, there may be eight to ten percent of the population of France is Muslim. Sixty percent of the prisoners are So can you imagine a better example of how marginalized a group of people is in a country. And clearly France has done a horrible job of trying to integrate these people into their societies. And it's not just the fault of the French government. I'm holding you know, those Muslims responsible as well for not participating more fully
in the countries that have adopted them. But this is a this is a profound problem, and it's going to last a long time, and I feel, you know, that we can't solve it ourselves, and if we try to solve it, it'll it'll rebound on us in a profound way. I'm not saying we should disengage entirely, but we should be honest about the limits of our ability to resolve a problem that is essentially a function of the societies that is.
In I know you're not a writer in the Halveston tradition where you're going to inhabit some institution. But if I can be so bold to recommend the next fanatical reality that Lawrence Wright should inhabit and write a book about, I'd love to see your book about the Pentagon.
Oh that's an interesting I see.
You write a book about the Pentagon from top to bottom. You'll give me the rights to do it with HBO. I can play portray us or someone. We'll have a great time.
Well, that'd be great.
We'll we'll have a lot of fun.
So you're attached.
I'm attached. I'm such a fan of your writing. That's an easy yes. The answer is yes, I'm attached.
Okay, that's good to know.
If you also appreciate Lawrence Wright's work, there's a lot more to consume. Nine books, five plays, countless articles. The documentary film based on his book Going Clear, Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief is currently available on HBO on Demand and HBO Go. And if you're ever in Austin, you might be able to catch him playing keyboard in
the Blues Collective Who Doo. Wright said of playing in a band quote, I decided a while ago that I would only do things that are really important or really fun. This is really fun. This is Alec Baldwin you're listening to. Here's the thing