SCIENTOLOGY HAD a giddy and playful air in the mid-seventies, when Haggis arrived in Los Angeles. It was seen as a cool, boutique religion, aimed especially toward the needs of artists and entertainers. The counterculture was still thriving in the seventies, and Scientology both was a part of it and stood apart from it. There was a saying, “After drugs, there’s Scientology,” and it was true that many who were drawn to the religion had taken hallucinogens and were open to alternative realities. Recruits had a sense of boundless possibility. Mystical powers were forecast; out-of-body experiences were to be expected; fundamental secrets of the universe were to be revealed.
Haggis became friends with other Scientologists who also hoped to make it in Hollywood. One of them was Skip Press, a writer and musician on the staff of the Celebrity Centre, which was the church’s main foothold in the entertainment industry. Like many young recruits, Press believed that Scientology had given him superhuman powers; for instance, he believed that when he got into the right mental state, he could change traffic lights to green. He and Haggis formed a casual self-help group with other aspiring writers. They met at a Scientology hangout across from the Celebrity Centre called Two Dollar Bill’s, where they would criticize each other’s work and scheme about how to get ahead.
Paul Haggis on vacation in Antigua in 1975, the year he joined the Church of Scientology
Eventually, this informal writers club came to the attention of Yvonne Gillham, the charismatic founder of the Celebrity Centre. Naturally warm and energetic, Gillham was an ideal candidate to woo the kinds of artists and opinion leaders that Hubbard sought to front his religion. The former kindergarten director staged parties, poetry readings, workshops, and dances. Chick Corea and other musicians associated with the church often played there. Gillham persuaded Haggis and his circle to hold their meetings at the Celebrity Centre, and they were folded into her web.
Haggis and a friend from the writers club eventually got a job scripting cartoons for Ruby-Spears Productions, beginning with a short-lived series called Dingbat and the Creeps, then Heathcliff. After that, Haggis went on to write Richie Rich and Scooby-Doo for Hanna-Barbera. He bought a used IBM Selectric typewriter. His career began to creep forward.
One day, a well-off strawberry farmer from Vancouver introduced himself to Haggis and Skip Press at the Celebrity Centre, saying he wanted to produce a life story of L. Ron Hubbard. He was offering fifteen thousand dollars for a script. Press declined, but Haggis accepted the money. His memory is that it was a horror script that he hoped to interest the strawberry farmer in. He never actually wrote a script about Hubbard, and eventually returned the entire sum, but in Press’s opinion, that was when Haggis’s career began to accelerate. “The money enabled Paul to cruise a bit and develop his career. Next thing I knew, Paul was getting an agent.” His Scientology connections were paying off.
HAGGIS SPENT much of his time and money taking advanced courses and being “audited,” a kind of Scientology psychotherapy that involves the use of an electropsychometer, or E-Meter. The device measures bodily changes in electrical resistance that occur when a person answers questions posed by an auditor. Hubbard compared it to a lie detector. The E-Meter bolstered the church’s claim to being a scientific path to spiritual discovery. “It gives Man his first keen look into the heads and hearts of his fellows,” Hubbard claimed, adding that Scientology boosted some people’s IQ one point for every hour of auditing. “Our most spectacular feat was raising a boy from 83 IQ to 212,” he once boasted to the Saturday Evening Post.