The Church of Scientology and the movie business have qualities in common – they are both purveyors of dreams and they both provoke emotional reactions in their customers.
In a move that makes the connection more overt, the church has now acquired a property that has the distinction of being the longest continuously-producing Hollywood studio. The Scientologists have bought the five-acre site on Sunset Boulevard from a struggling public TV station, KCET-TV, for an undisclosed sum likely to have run to several million dollars.
Over the years the studio has been in the hands of Monogram Pictures and Allied Artists and has produced such blockbusters as El Cid [see footnote] with Charlton Heston, Hurricane directed by John Ford, and several Charlie Chan movies.
It adds some 28,000 square metres (300,000 square feet) to the church's already huge capacity to create films and television. The new space includes two sound stages, post-production facilities and offices, and the ability to broadcast by satellite, which will be important to the church's growing ambitions internationally.
The church said its new Hollywood base would become the central media hub for its more than 9,000 churches and missions around the world, making it a key component of its global outreach to – or as its detractors claim, indoctrination of – its followers.
"This new studio enables the church to establish one of the most advanced centres used by religious broadcasters with the ability to harness 21st-century broadcast technology and production power to deliver its message to the largest international audience possible," the church said in a statement.
The link between Scientology and Hollywood is popularly recognised through a few high-profile celebrities, notably John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Other Hollywood figures such as director Paul Haggis have become high-profile defectors from the church.
The connections go back as far as 1954 when the Los Angeles branch of the church was opened.
Last August it opened its refurbished headquarters on L Ron Hubbard Way, the Los Angeles street renamed after the church's founder. The global printworks for Scientology, Bridge Publications, is also based in LA, where it pumps out Hubbard's lectures and books including Dianetics, which has sold more than 21 million copies.
Occasionally, the link has spilled over into attempts to put the Scientology story on to the big screen, with disastrous consequences. In the 1990s Travolta struggled to raise finance for his plan to make a film of Battlefield Earth, Hubbard's novel of the same name. On release in 2000 it died in the cinemas and was panned by critics; the legendary Roger Ebert likened it to the train crash in The Fugitive.
Travolta's film was clearly an attempt to spread the word about his church through film. Rarely have film-makers who are not members of the church dared to take on the subject of the notoriously litigious movement that some people condemn as a cult.
Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of There Will Be Blood, Magnolia and Boogie Nights, will be hoping to do a little better at the box office than Travolta if and when his film now in pre-production hits theatres. The Master, as it is nominally being called, is set in the early days of a church called "the Cause" and revolves around the relationship between the founder and one of his disciples.
Though it does not openly refer to Scientology, it has long been widely assumed to be based on Hubbard's sect.
Even before this week's deal, the Scientologists already had state-of-the-art film-making facilities. Their existing media headquarters, Golden Era Productions, located at the church's international headquarters in California, includes one of the largest free-standing film studios in America.