***Tom Cru*se is definitely a person!***

30 min readJul 14, 2023

A journey through the history of the M*ssion Impossible franchise

The M*ssion Impossible movies are a $3.5B action-spy franchise that feature increasingly dangerous stunts perfomed by A+++ movie star Tom Cru*se. The movies are fun! He is definitely good at doing dangerous things on camera and making us understand how dangerous they are. His 45-year movie career is the result of hard work, will power and a very dedicated support system! Everyone says he is a very nice person with a normal, non-creepy smile, and he is in no way involved in human trafficking, slave labour, or child abuse! Yay!!

M:I (1996)

Brian De Palma’s 1996 film may seem quaint now, given how epic the franchise gets, but many of the sequences remain very impressive. The movie evolved from Paramount Pictures’ long running effort to make a big motion picture out of their 1960’s show about CIA spies. Tom Cru*se, already a major Hollywood star by then, had started his own production studio and was looking for a flagship film to launch his company. He recruited De Palma to direct the film, and together they designed iconic stunts like the aquarium restaurant explosion and a high-speed train fight. The success of M:I solidified Cru*se’s reputation as both a profitable Hollywood producer and as an action star who will perform extreme stunts.

Some would argue that the 90’s was the most interesting decade of Cru*se’s career. He married Nicole Kidman in 1990, with *******ogy’s leader as his best man, and he won his only Academy Award for Jerry Maguire in 1996, alongside acting nominations for Born on the Fourth of July in 1990 and for Magnolia in 2000. Cru*se was a dedicated **********ist in 1996, but back then the organization was very busy managing controversies like the death of Lisa McPhearson, the escape of high ranking member Don Jason, and their harassment campaign against the IRS. By 1996, *******ogy was already hoarding billions of tax free dollars off the sales of course books and donations. Once M:I was released, the couple stepped away from the high-demande organization and moved to England to shoot Eyes Wide Shut with Stanely Kubrick over the next 3 years.

“Everything that went on in Tom’s life was reported to either [the leader’s wife] or [the leader]” ex-**********ist Mike Rinder told the Daily Beast in 2019. He explained that Cru*se’s household staff, all of whom were **********ists, would report back to the leader about the couple. In England, the leader’s access to the couple was limited, so he assigned Marty Rathburn (who has since left and rejoined the church), to spy on Kidman. Rinder explained that “as soon as Nicole became in any way disaffected with *******ogy or unwilling to continue, she became a liability in [the leader]’s mind.” Rathburn said that Cru*se was paranoid that Kidman was having an affair, so he asked Rathburn to tap her phones, something that is illegal and that the organization denies. “I arranged through *******ogy’s consigliere to get a private investigator who physically installed a wiretap on her phone,” Rathburn told the Daily Beast. “And those tapes would come in and I’d forward them to [the leader].”

M:I-II (2000)

If the first M:I film is a sleek, action spy thriller, the second is an over-the-top melodramatic blockbuster. Director John Woo decided not to speak English to his actors, and supporting actress Thandiwe Newton struggled to meet Cru*se’s expectations, struggles she described in a nuanced interview with Vulture in 2020. It’s a messy movie that does not make much sense, but the opening sequence is very impressive! Cru*se insisted on free solo climbing Dead Horse Point in Utah, using only a few support cables with no safety net, and everyone was afraid he’d die! He didn’t! It looks cool! Limp Bizkit wrote the theme song!

In 2001, Cru*se filed for divorce. Rumours heavily suggested that Kidman was excommunicated, which would have severely limited her contact with her own children since they stayed in the organization. Though both kids remain devout **********ists to this day, Kidman has never confirmed or denied this, saying only that she supports her children’s beliefs and that “as a mother, it’s my job to love them… That’s our job as a parent, to always offer unconditional love.” Kidman continues to this day to have an incredible career. She’s earned five Academy Award nominations for her acting since Moulin Rouge! in 2002, and won for her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2003).

While his divorce was being settled, Cru*se sued an erotic male wrestler for claiming to have proof that the two men had had an affair (which won him $10M), and an LA publisher for similar claims (the lawsuit was dropped after the claim was retracted). In a 2002 Barbara Walters segment promoting Vanilla Sky, Cru*se called the claims baseless. “Someone said they had a videotape showing you with another man”, says Walters. “I mean, common, that’s disgusting. I’ve got two kids’’ he snorts, waving her off. Then he adds, with a smile, “I’ve never lost a lawsuit.” Walters calls him “the quintessential American male” and Cru*se explains that the organization is “a workable religious philosophy.” We love that for him!

By 2004, Cru*se was 42 and an outspoken advocate for the organization. He cut ties with his long time publicist Pat Kingsley, a Hollywood titan, and reportedly donated $1.25M to the organization (he would donate millions more the next year). Sadly, he could not find a girlfriend, and so the leader’s wife was charged with auditioning women for the role. Maureen Orth wrote a detailed article for Vanity Fair in 2012 about Nazanin Boniadi, a 25 year old **********ist who was recruited to be Cru*se’s new girfriend. The grueling process involved months of intimate interviews about everything she’d ever done or wanted to do, a process she thought was for “a very hush-hush mission that would entail meeting dignitaries around the world”. When members finally orchestrated a ‘random’ meeting between her and Cru*se, her handler said “this is Mr. Cru*se. We can’t let him down,” which is when she understood the purpose of her mission.

According to Vanity Fair, he “overwhelmed her with the intensity of his affection, and he apparently liked it to be on public display. Once, says the knowledgeable source, he even complained that she was not sufficiently demonstrative: ‘I get more love from an extra than I get from you.’” Boniadi was surrounded by **********ists working for the leader and Cru*se, who isolated her from her family. The affair only lasted a few months, and after she made a perceived slight against the leader, Cru*se stopped pursuing her. The sudden abandonment left her shocked and devastated, which are unacceptable feelings within the organization. “For more than two months, Boniadi’s punishment was to scrub toilets with a toothbrush on her hands and knees, clean bathroom tiles with acid, and dig ditches in the middle of the night,” Orth writes.

By 2005, Cru*se was promoting War of the Worlds and he started dating Katie Holmes! In May he infamously jumped around Oprah’s TV set in excitement about his new love, and then ran backstage to push Holmes onto the set, holding down both her arms and presenting her to the audience like a prize. It’s definitely very normal behaviour! The clip went viral across a brand new internet video platform called YouTube. Around the same time, Cru*se got very snippy in an interview with 60 minutes Australia when the journalist asked about the organization and Kidman. Cru*se also told Matt Lauer that “psychiatry is a pseudoscience”, in reference to Brooke Shields using antidepressants to fight her post-partum depression. “All it does is mask the problem,” he said, “there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance”. Though Lauer tried to push back, Cru*se insisted that he did his own research on psychiatry, an industry that has frustrated *******ogy for a long time.

Cru*se proposed to Holmes less than two months after they started dating, and by that summer she was pregnant. In an article for Salon, several sources speculated that Cru*se had completed the highest level of education posible within *******ogy, which was why he was speaking more forcefully in public about his beliefs. Also, that summer was the last time anyone saw the leader’s wife publicly! Allegedly!

M:I:III (2006)

M:I 3 changed hands several times before J.J. Abrams came on board to direct. The recent Cru*se controversies made him a risky investment, so Cru*se agreed to an estimated 20% pay cut to lower the film’s budget. A self proclaimed fan of Abrams’s show Alias, Cru*se wanted Abrams to bring the series back to what made the first M:I installment so good: stylized espionage and emotional stakes. The legendary Philip Seymour Hoffman signed on to play the villain, while actors Michelle Monaghan and Simon Pegg added a lot of charm to the ensemble. Plus Kerri Russell is in it and she’s great!

The movie was a box office success, but several mishaps surrounded its release. Paramount tried to promote the movie in collaboration with the LA Times by hiding thousands of digital audio players in newspaper boxes around Los Angeles so that the M:I theme song would play whenever someone opened the door. Instead, people saw a strange box with wires attached to it and thought it was a bomb. Authorities couldn’t tell whether or not it was actually an explosive, so they blew up several newsstands to ‘deactivate’ the devices. They evacuated a VA hospital for hours while trying to figure out whether or not the newspaper stand in the lobby was rigged to explode. Multiple surgeries and procedures were cancelled because doctors could not get to their patients. In response to the scandal, a representative for the LA Times said “this was the least intended outcome”.

There were also rumours that Cru*se had threatened to not promote the film unless Viacom, the parent company of both Paramount and Comedy Central, pulled the notorious Trapped in the Closet episode of South Park from their re-air schedule. Comedy Central did pull the episode, but whether the pressure came from Cru*se himself or other **********ists was never confirmed. The episode was one of the first times the general public learned specific details about what **********ists believe, and the entire organization was outraged. Cru*se did deny any involvement in the controversy, telling Diane Sawyer “I don’t know about it. I work. I’m busy. I don’t spend my days going through what people are saying about me, OK?”

Just a few weeks before the film’s release, Cru*se and Holmes celebrated the birth of their daughter Suri. The tabloid frenzy around the couple peaked towards the end of the year when the two married in a lavish multi-day ceremony in Italy. The organization’s leader was once again his best man. In her book Troublemaker, ex-**********ist and activist Leah Remini talked extensively about the wedding, an event that set in motion her eventual departure from the organization. Cru*se and Holmes asked her to invite Remini’s friends Jennifer Lopez and Mark Anthony (who had never met the couple and were not part of the organization) to the wedding. Over the course of the trip, different officials kept trying to separate Remini from Lopez in increasingly aggressive ways. She was disturbed by how a 7mth old Suri was left crying on a bathroom floor while several adult women stood around her, forcefully saying her name. She was also upset by how many high ranking officials were breaking *******ogy rules by openly cheating on their spouses and drinking heavily. She asked several of these officials why the leader’s wife was not present, including chief spokesperson at the time Tommy Davis, who said “you dont have the rank to be asking about [her].” (p.142)

Though *******ogy had become unimaginably wealthy under the leader’s control, they had difficulty controlling information in the age of the internet. In January of 2008, Gawker published leaked propaganda videos from 2004 that feature Tom Cru*se praising *******ogy with the M:I theme song in the background. “Tom Cru*se has introduced LRH technology to over 1 billion people of earth!” it brags. The video feels like a parody, and back then people thought it was very weird! The number of ex **********ists willing to share knowledge about the organization was growing. Multiple reports of slave labour, physical beatings and human trafficking (of both adults and children) within the organization’s workforce made their way to the FBI. In 2009–10, the FBI documented stories of abuse and trafficking from 15 different witnesses, and was planning to raid one of the organization’s compounds in California. These witnesses described things like:

- having their passports withheld

- being “sent to underground labor camps that resemble ‘concentration camps’ where they are treated like slaves”

- forcing minors to do physical labour instead of going to school

- forced abortions

- physical beatings

- recruiting mass groups of non-english speakers to work in US buildings without being paid

- disposing hazordous materials with no protective equipment

- denying life-saving cancer treatment

- and more!

Tony Ortega reported for the Daily Beast that they had “taken the step of recording the tail numbers of Cru*se’s planes that were at his private hangar in Burbank, California, just in case [the leader] tried to make an escape using them.” According to the Tampa Bay Times, there was a discussion about holding a grand jury investigation, but no action was taken over concerns that “the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion prevented the court from delving into whether the church’s discipline methods were reasonable.”

Ghost Protocol (2011)

JJ Abrams stayed on as a producer, but handed the directing reins for M:I 4 to Brad Bird. There is a great prison fight that opens the movie, and Tom Cru*se shows off some very big arm muscles! This movie is the first in the franchise to really lean into something that will make the subsequent films so unique within the action genre. In the M:I world, the high-tech spy gadgets fail and break, and the characters show fear as they leap into incredibly dangerous situations! There’s a unique sort of confidence to spy thrillers, where audiences assume that the plan will ultimately work out, but the M:I franchise does a really good job of subverting that assumption. Jeremy Renner joins the cast, instead of having Ving Rhames retrun (not an improvement), as does Paula Patton (she is not present in the subsequent films). Ghost Protocol did very well at the box office.

The big stunt in the movie involves Cru*se free climbing (he had many, many support cables this time) the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which they shot on gorgeous IMAX film. It’s an absolutely breathtaking stunt, and became the focus of much of the film’s promotion. “It’s very important to (Tom) that people know that he did it,” Simon Pegg told the BBC. “There’s another level of enjoyment when you watch it, cuz you can see that it’s him! CGI these days… you can do anything and it removes a certain tension when you know that it was done in the computer. But he was up that building, doing that thing. And we were watching it live, that’s scarier!”

Cru*se did very few interviews to promote Ghost Protocol, and almost exclusively talked about the stunt performances (which are very good!), while Bird and the rest of the cast took on more of the promotional duties. The New York Times interviewed Brad Bird about his career, and sprinkled in a few quotes from Cru*se about the director’s incredible talents. There were minimal, if any, mentions of Cru*se’s personal life. After the video leaks, Cru*se stopped talking about his beliefs publically, and journalists stopped asking. He continued to earn almost unanimous praise for his roles in films like Tropic Thunder, Valkyrie, and Rock of Ages.

Less than a year after the film’s release, Katie Holmes ended her marriage to Cru*se. The LA times reported that she used a throwaway phone to hire law firms in 3 different states before filing for divorce and moving out in the same weekend. The two reached a settlement in less then two weeks, and Holmes took primary custorody of Suri to ensure that the organization would do nothing to alienate her from her daughter. Cru*se would go on to sue Bauer Publishing for libel after Life & Style Weekley published a headline that said his daughter had been “abandoned by her dad”. In leaked deposition transcripts, Cru*se tried to justify why he’d only seen his daughter a handful of times between the divorce in June and Thanksgiving in November. When asked why he was able to leave a movie set for a 24h trip to attend a *******ogy event in London, but could not do the same to visit his daughter, he said “it was an important event… I felt it was important.” The case was settled months before trial, and neither parties sought compensation.

In November 2013, the organization opened a massive building in Clearwater, Florida, a project for which they spent a decade fundraising. The dedication ceremony was closed to the public. “[They] erected 6-foot-tall privacy fences and placed potted trees around the event site. Streets and sidewalks also were closed. Anyone who attempted to get close was stopped by [their] security staffers.” The organization had submitted city permits for a crowd of ten thousand people, but police estimated that the crowd was under 6000, though Tom Cru*se, John Travolta and Kelly Preston were present.

That same year, Lawrence Wright released his book Going Clear about the history of *******ogy, after writing a detailed cover story about screenwriter Paul Haggis’s decision to leave the organization. His book supported many of the claims that South Park originally aired back in 2007, and detailed the organization’s founder’s troubled past as an abusive husband and father. Prominent members of the church continued to leave, including the leader’s own father. Leah Remini, who had been under constant interrogation by the organization since the Cru*se-Holmes wedding in 2006, also left in 2013. She immediately filed a missing persons report regarding the disappearance of the leader’s wife. Two days later, the LAPD announced publicly, without speaking with Remini, that they had met “with the alleged missing person… We consider this case closed.”

Rogue Nation (2015)

Rogue Nation is the first M:I movie since 1996 to really nail the on-screen team dynamic. First time director Christopher McQuarrie, who had worked with Cru*se as a writer on Valkaryie, Jack Reacher and Ghost Protocol, really shines at balancing action, character development and mystery. There’s a great car chase that showcases Cru*se and Simon Pegg’s comedic talents, and there are several very impressive stunts! Cru*se learned to hold his breath underwater for 3 or 6 minutes! He hung off the side of a plane as it took off (which they shot 8 times)! Also Ving Rhames is back, he’s great, and Rebecca Ferguson joins the cast, she’s great too! Critics absolutely loved this installment, and praised the chemistry between Ferguson and Cru*se.

Paramount spent $42M just to market the movie, more than almost any other studio spent on promo that year (Warner spent $43.7M to market Fury Road). Cru*se promoted the film, alongside McQuarrie and castmates Pegg and Ferguson, by focusing on Tom Cru*se nostalgia. Jimmy Fallon fawned over Cru*se while describing his latest stunt, then the two lip synched “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” from his 1986’s film Top Gun (which he also sung to Katie Holmes at their wedding), and Pegg told Fallon about the cute pranks they played on each other while filming their car chase scene. He reiterated to Fallon what he’d told the BBC when promoting Ghost Protocol about Cru*se’s unique and impressive stunt work. “Tom taped himself to the side of a plane, that’s how much he cares about you!” he said, pointing at the audience.

During this press tour, a few outlets noted the strange dissonance between the ongoing revelations about *******ogy and Cru*se’s chipper “nice guy” demeanor. Editors at GQ wondered whether Tom Cru*se was cool again, saying “whatever his PR team’s been up to, it’s working”. The Atlantic noted that “during the media tour for Rogue Nation, not a single interviewer has asked him a question that in any way deviates from the approved topics regarding the film,” even calling out Jon Stewart for making one of his last ever interviews as host of The Daily Show a softball giggle fest with the actor.

The organization had a lot of bad PR in 2015. Alex Gibney released the Going Clear documentary, based on Wright’s book, and Louis Theroulx released his special called “My *******ogy Movie”. In it, Theroulx tries unsuccessfully to engage with members at the controversial compound in Hemet, California, and reinacts some of the leader’s reported brutality towards other members. When Theroux asks ex-**********ist Marc Headley, who lived at the compound for 15 years, if he felt like he was kept against his will, Headley says: “I was keeping myself here, based on what they told me. I knew that there would be consequences of me leaving that would make it… very hard for me to live outside of this world. Those consequences became so minuscule compared to the terror that I was living through here, that… I would rather be dead than to live here.”

2015 was also the year that Leah Remini published Troublemaker, a non-nonsense book about her life spent as a high-profile **********ist, and the abuse she both witnessed and suffered. The book focuses on all the abnormal ways that the organisation treats Cru*se, and she lays out how members facilitate his lavish lifestyle. Following the Cru*se-Holmes wedding, Remini was repeatedly punished by the organization for continuing to question Cru*se’s legitimacy as a ‘good’ **********ist, and for pushing for answers about the disappearance of the leader’s wife. She told 60 minutes Australia that she was interrogated “all day, all night … until I said ‘Tom Cru*se is an amazing humanitarian, as well [the leader], and they are the only hope that man has’ was I able to leave. And that cost me $300K.” Once Holmes filed for divorce, the organization tried to make amends with Remini, but still refused to give her any answers. In her book, she recounts a converstation she had in 2012 with the leader himself where he assured her that “[his wife] was okay and that he had to keep her away because SPs are constantly trying to have her subpoenaed.” (p.179).

Her book motivated multiple ex-**********ists to share their stories with her, which include accounts of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, forced family seperation, child labour, and human trafficking. She approached producers Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman to make a docu-series with her and Mike Rinder about the organization, its abuses and its survivors. “I said, ‘Don’t be pussies.” Remini told The Hollywood Reporter about her pitch to the young producers. “ ‘If you’re going to be pussies, you’re not the right producers for this.’” A&E aired what was supposed to be the only season, but the deluge of survivor stories that both Remini and Rinder received compelled them to continue producing the show, which aired until 2019. The episodes go into great detail about all the psychological tactics used to keep members imprisoned. Many of the stories corroborate the testimonials detailed in the declassified FBI documents from 2010.

Fallout (2018)

Pre-production of the sixth M:I movie began while Cru*se was promoting Rogue Nation, with McQuarrie almost immediately returning to write and direct. Jeremy Renner exited the cast, but Henry Cavil and Vanessa Kirby joined! Fun! Fallout is full of incredible stunt work, which once again featured heavily in the promotion of the film. An epic HALO jump (high altitude low opening) at sunset opens the movie, which took over 100 jumps to rehearse — just to get 3 jumps worth of footage. There’s also a great fistfight in a bathroom and an awesome motorbike chase through the streets of Paris. McQuarrie adds a lot of nice storytelling details and does a great job of weaving the drama and characters into the action. The score is really epic too! The film concludes with a nail biting helicopter chase sequence that ends in a battle to the death on the edge of a cliff. The sequence is a seamless combination of multiple stunts and post production visual effects, shot in NewZealand, Norway, LA studios and London studios.

The promotional tour yet again focused on the team as a whole, with many interviewers lauding Cru*se’s commitment to seemingly super-human stunt work. On the Graham Norton show, they rewatched footage of Cru*se breaking his ankle while jumping between rooftops, footage which they kept in the final cut! Henry Cavill ended up inadvertently causing the biggest production headache thanks to his lucious mustache. While filming Fallout, Warners needed to do extensive reshoots for their superhero blockbuster Justice League, which included a clean shaven Cavill. McQuarrie offered to shut down production for 3 weeks if Warners compensated them for the $3M cost of doing so, but Paramount nixed the idea, forcing Warners to digitally remove the facial hair in their own footage.

Critics loved this movie. Paramount embarked on a massive marketing campaign that cost $135M, almost as much as the actual production ($178M), getting ad spots during the NBA Finals and the Superbowl, as well as brand deals with BMW, Airbus, UBER and ESPN. The 4 week theater run grossed $790M worldwide, netting producers $477M in profit. Fallout was one of Cru*se’s best movie openings in his entire career, and as a producer he got a cut of the gross revenu. Most of Cru*se’s productions have earned him a percentage of the revenu, which has grown his wealth considerably over the last 15 years.

Cru*se and his four siblings purchased multiple units in a luxury apartment building in Clearwater, Florida just blocks away from the organization’s big blue building. The Sun reported that several other wealthy **********ists live there, all of whom have apparently donated tens of millions dollars to the organization. Even Director Christopher McQuarrie and his wife have a unit in the building, according to voter records. The Tampa Bay Times have extensively reported on the organization’s real estate holdings, specifically in Clearwater, and in 2019 they published a map illustrating all the buildings purchased by members in recent years. They reported that building sellers “said most of the transactions unfolded the same way. A broker who was a **********ist approached a downtown property owner. Made an offer. Paid in cash. Many of the properties weren’t on the market. And half the sales were for more than double what the properties were valued by the county property appraiser.” Most of these commercial buildings have been sitting vacant since their purchase. Ex-member Tom De Vocht speculated that the goal was to “buy up as much property as they can… whether they use it or not, whether they let it sit there and rot, so no one else can be there.”

By 2019 the organization was facing multiple lawsuits accusing them of “human trafficking, forced labor, and child sexual assault and exploitation,” according to Insider. The Tampa Bay Times reported that, in a 3rd suit in as many months, a Jane Doe alleged that she was “repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child in *******ogy’s care” and that “officials allegedly knew it was occurring and did nothing to stop it or alert law enforcement, actions rooted in policy.” When she escaped in 2018, she was attacked under a policy “aimed to destroy those labeled as enemies.” According to her complaint: “operatives cut the brake lines on the woman’s car, vandalized her property, followed and surveilled her, and harassed her with hundreds of spam calls.” Many of the claims align with allegations in the 2010 FBI investigation.

Another lawsuit filed on behalf of a separate Jane Doe alledges “child abuse related to auditing, where children are interrogated for hours about sexual questions; human trafficking… and [harrasment] tactics she endured after escaping, including, the [publishing of] ‘a hate website’ falsely stating she was an alcoholic dismissed from the sect for promiscuity”. This Jane Doe appeared on The Aftermath show and described her time working as the personal assistant to the leader’s wife until her disappearance. “The last time I saw [her], she was walking to her car with a driver… I looked up at her and she was crying, and she looked at me, and it was almost as if she wasn’t allowed to have me see her cry. She wiped the tears, and she got in the car and left. That was the last time I ever saw her, and that was 2006. This was a girl that I was with every single day… We would talk about everything… I never knew where she went. I dont know where she is.” Because of her proximity to his wife, Doe was “put on deck work… heavy physical labour where I would be digging ditches.” Doe would eventually escape the organization by sneaking into the car trunk of an unsuspecting actor on the set of a propaganda video shoot.

Four women also filed a civil suit against the actor Danny Masterson, the organization, and its leader for “stalking, libel, slander, invasion of privacy and conspiracy” after they filed police reports accusing the actor of raping them (Masterson has since been convicted on 2 counts of rape). Accorting to The Tampa Bay Times: “The women repeatedly found strangers around their homes, sometimes peering inside with flashlights at night. Their email accounts were hacked and credit cards stolen. One woman’s dog mysteriously died and the autopsy showed trauma to its trachea. They were chased in cars; one was run off the road. They were followed into grocery stores and nail salons. All have woken up to find their car doors and trunks wide open.”

Dead Reckoning Part 1 (2023)

Dead Reckoning Part 1 was released on June 12th! The production was announced back in 2019, but the pandemic pushed back the release date several times, a nightmare for any production. Though Italy’s lockdown stopped the shoot in February 2020, the UK and Norway let them skip the mandatory 14 day quanrantine to continue production. Filming in Italy had to stop again in October when 12 people on set tested positive for Covid. In December, McQuarie posted photos from the set of a masked Tom Cru*se and fans noted that Cru*se’s mask was not CDC recommended because it had valves designed to “release hot, humid exhaled breath quickly”.

That same month audio leaked of Cru*se reprimanding two crew members for not standing 2 meters apart. As he threatens to fire them, he ephpasizes the importance of this film in the context of a struggling film industry. “They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us! … We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers.” He continues, yelling “you can tell it to the people who are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down… That’s what I sleep with every night, the future of this fucking industry!”

Cru*se was also pushing to release his long awaited Top Gun sequel, which ended up grossing $1.5B worldwide and earning Cru*se his 4th ever Oscar nomination, this time as a producer. Both of his projects — Top Gun Maverick and Dead Reckonning — had media outlets crediting Cru*se, who turned 60 that year, with saving the entire film industry. In an interview with Empire, he explained how he sprang into action to establish Covid safety protocols in order to get his Dead Reckonning shoot back up and running. “Other studios, I was informing them what we were doing, and how we were doing it, and the protocols in place,” he explained. “And other films followed as a result. They were like, ‘Well, Mission’s going, they’re not stopping.’ I kept calling friends, saying ‘Get your movie back, here’s what I’m doing.’” In a luncheon leading up to the 2023 Oscar awards, Steven Spielberg gave Cru*se a long embrace, telling him “you saved Hollywood’s ass, and you might have saved theatrical distribution. Seriously, Maverick might have saved the entire theatrical industry.” Though his movie was nominated for 6 Oscars, including for Best Picture, Cru*se did not attend the award ceremony (but Nicole Kidman was in attendance).

In spite of the strict regulations against big public gatherings in 2020, **********ists continued to gather at the blue building in Clearwater. A Tampa Bay Times reporter “observed a bus parked outside the [blue] building with [organization] members sitting shoulder to shoulder”. The Daily Beast reported that a leaked letter from the leader to his followers called the pandemic “hysteria” and “planetary bullbait”, and when the news outlet asked them to confirm their position on the pandemic, “things got strange. They proceeded to accuse The Daily Beast of possessing a ‘perverted agenda,’ adding, ‘If you actually look at what we have done, you will wish The Daily Beast had the protocols our Church leader put in our Churches. We are working to help others get through this — and that even includes you.’ (Italics theirs.)”

Leah Remini clarified the terminology used in the letter. “Bullbaiting in *******ogy is a drill where [members] are taught to hold perfectly still while being ‘baited’ into a reaction… [They] shouldn’t be reacting to a global pandemic but rather just going on with life as normal.” She added that any safety measures they do are “just a show. It’s for public relations reasons only.” She then weighed in on Cru*se’s meltdown and the media’s reaction to it. “Tom seems to think that Hollywood is incapable of making films without his help… He thinks this is normal behavior and, to be clear, this is ‘normal’ behavior coming from a **********ist. In fact, this is tame… No one needs to be ‘addressed’ by Tom about safety codes.”

In 2022, three Australians filed a suit in Florida courts accusing 6 officials, including the leader, of human trafficking, saying that “they endured years of emotional, physical and psychological abuse, in particular while spending more than a decade aboard *******ogy’s [ship] in the Caribbean”. The courts tried to serve the leader 14 times, and eventually ruled that “the allegations were credible enough for [the leader] to instead be served through the office of Florida’s secretary of state,” which allowed the civil suit to proceed.

Dead Reckoning Part 2 (2024?)

Part 2 is in post-production and will be released in 2024! Yay!

Though membership in the organization has rapidly shrunk over the last 15 years, its wealth has ballooned. Thanks to Australia’s charity regulator, which requires non-profits to report their revenue annually, journalists learned that the organization’s wealth in Australia alone nearly tripled between 2013 and 2019. No such regulator exists in the US, where the organization is headquartered. A 2021 investigation by The Age outlined the two main ways the church makes money: “It uses aggressive sales techniques and can charge followers tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to progress through its courses and move through religious levels. It is also heavily reliant on large donations from extremely wealthy backers.”

Law enforcement has often supported the organization, thanks in part to the organization’s generous donations towards police unions and charities. In 2022, a settlement between the New York Attourney General and disgraced CBS executive Leslie Moonves revealed that now-retired LAPD Hollywood captain Cory Palka had notified Moonves when one of his victims filed a criminal complaint against him, something apparently common at the LAPD “when the allegations involve a ‘V.I.P.’”. In a detailed Twitter thread, Leah Remini confirmed that Palka was “in charge of the division where I filed my missing person’s report into the disappearance” of the leader’s wife. When she originally met with Palka, “he had a letter on his desk thanking him for all his help with [organization] matters and inviting him to come and have lunch, as a guest.” Her thread includes several leaked emails between Palka and the organization, as well as examples of LAPD officers, including the detective in charge of her missing persons report, accepting awards and donations from the organization.

In July 2023, leaked internal documents revealed that when the LAPD closed the missing persons investigation back in 2013, they had been unable to verify the identity of the woman with whom they had met. Journalist Yashar Ali reported that after Remini filed her report, detectives met with a woman at a coffee shop near the organization and came back with a set of fingerprints. The next day, “two LAPD lab technicians determined that the fingerprints taken at the coffee shop could not definitively be matched to the fingerprints the California DMV had on record” for the leader’s wife. Instead of obtaining a second set of prints, they closed the file. Detectives later asked the coffee shop for footage of the encounter, but when “the coffee shop sent the footage over a week later, the videos for all the cameras were inexplicably scrambled.” None of these events are in line with LAPD procedures.

The end

In 2022, Vox described Cru*se as “happy to have beautiful things handed to him without looking at their cost. *******ogy is attractive to Cru*se, in this account, because it makes his life easier while simultaneously flattering his ego with the belief that he is a hero.” Cru*se’s brand is now fully enmeshed in the stunts his character performs, and it has become essential to his image that we perceive him as someone with a lot of charm and superhuman abilities. But his stunts are only possible thanks to a crew of hundreds of stunt coordinators (a very dangerous job), engineers and post-production VFX artists. It’s easy to be charming when one’s life is facilitated by the unpaid labour of an entire organization.

Tom Cru*se will keep making a lot of people a lot of money, and that money will continue to be funneled into an organization that does a lot of things that seem like crimes. But he does not need to live in our hearts and minds as a good person who is saving the world. He is just an actor, with a fat bank account and a wide smile, and one day he’ll die, probably while doing something very dangerous.

He needs our love, but we do not need to love him.

He is just a mimic… who makes really fucking good movies.

July 2023

BIBLIOGRAPHY

@LeahRemini: Meet Cory Palka, a 34-year vet of LAPD and a longtime captain of the Hollywood Division.

@marisatomay: Steven spielberg telling tom Cru*se to his face, “you saved hollywood’s ass”

60 Minutes Australia: Peter Overton’s infamous interview with Tom Cru*se

60 Minutes Australia: Where is the missing wife of Sc*entology’s ruthless leader?

ABC 20/20: Leah Remini interview

ABC News: Cru*se Sues Porn Star Over Gay Allegations

ABC News: LAPD Dismisses Leah Remini’s Missing Person Report on Wife of Sc*entology Leader

BBC Breakfast: Simon Pegg Interview M*ssion Impossible 4