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Tom Cruise and John Travolta are no longer homo sapiens
FOXNews.com - Tom Cruise, John Travolta: Homo-Novis - Celebrity Gossip | Entertainment News | Arts And Entertainment
Cruise, Travolta: Homo-novis
Is it a conspiracy or just bad luck?
The anti-Scientology video we told you about on Monday afternoon featuring actor Jason Beghe has been removed from YouTube. Sort of.
The original video, put up by videographer Mark Bunker, is gone. YouTube pulled it late on Thursday. In the video, which Bunker made, Beghe describes his 13-year membership in the sect and why he left.
Bunker thinks YouTube took down the video under pressure from Scientology. It’s possible, of course, but unlikely. The video is still up on YouTube in other forms, including here (warning: contains offensive language). It’s also easily found just by typing Beghe’s name into most search engines.
Bunker says YouTube cancelled his account because of previous copyright issues with other videos he’s posted. He says those issues have been cleared up and he should have had time to prove that before they removed the Beghe interview.
YouTube, which is owned by Google, is not the easiest place to get an answer from. Ricardo Reyes, the head of public relations, told me Thursday night, "There’s no conspiracy here." He would not say if Scientology had pressured the video posting site into taking down the Bunker/Beghe video. Reyes e-mailed the official YouTube stance to me later on: "We do not comment on individual videos."
Despite this little flap, Beghe’s video has taken off like a rocket. The Village Voice newspaper here in New York as well as several video outlets have picked up the story about his brave escape from the sect. Some have even taken our original stories without credit. C’est la vie in this case. It was just important that Beghe get his story out to the widest audience possible.
Beghe has more to say, and a longer video, some of which we’ll see here next week. The more he describes the Scientology experience, the scarier it sounds. As he told me the other day: "A Scientologist who’s ‘clear’ believes he’s no longer a Homosapien. He’s Homo-novis, a new race. They believe they are the only hope for this section of the galaxy, starting with planet Earth."
Yes, Tom Cruise and John Travolta evidently believe this, Beghe says.
And, yes, Beghe did confirm with me what he’s talked about on the videos: All Scientology sessions are taped. Every one of them, including those of Cruise, Travolta and all celebrities. Does Beghe care if his tapes ever get out?
"Hell, no," he told me. "They won’t do that anyway because then the whole thing comes out and everyone knows there are tapes. They can’t do anything with them."
Beghe also told me that one possible theory for why the careers of Scientologists tend to go south is that the famous actors, such as Jenna Elfman or Juliette Lewis, "get so involved in thinking only they can save the world" that the sect overwhelms them.
This may be true: Elfman has had little luck since the cancellation of "Dharma and Greg," Lewis gets little acting work, Elfman’s husband, Bodhi, is only known because of Jenna and rocker Beck hasn’t had a real hit album since "Odelay" back in 1996.
As for Travolta, his career had a brief revival in 1994 with "Pulp Fiction." But he’s headlined a series of flops since then from "Be Cool" and "Ladder 49" to "Lucky Number," "Swordfish" and the Scientology-based sci-fi film "Battlefield: Earth." The rare exceptions were non-leads in "Hairspray" and "Wild Hogs."
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Originally Posted by Brookie
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