You know how all 80’s teen romances featured a girl the hero wanted. And you know how that girl was always romanced by some guy with a sort of overdone Kennedy scion kind of haircut, a Porsche or similar ride, and generally some country clubbish or yacht-person sort of clothing? Well, apparently whoever made the introductory Scientology film didn’t get that viewers were supposed to want to be John Cusack’s Lane Mayer in Better Off Dead and not Aaron Dozier’s ski champion Roy Stalin. It’s like rooting for the nameless college guy in the red sports car over Ilan Mitchell-Smith’s Wyatt Donnelly in Weird Science. Weird Science is apt here. More on this in a moment.

So I went to the Scientology Celebrity Centre for brunch yesterday. The building is beautiful and blocks from my house. (I had a friend pick me up in his BMW SUV because, when it came down to it, walking didn’t feel Hollywood enough for such a Hollywood moment.) Food was varied and pretty tasty. Service was friendly and adequate, but unexceptional and could have been mildly more attentive. I particularly liked the crisp waffles and the smoked salmon and capers. The regular water was excellent for Los Angeles, so they must have a good filter, and the orange juice was good enough. Say you saw the brunch in the internet and it is a discounted $25 a person for all you can eat, rather than the walk-in price of $30 a plate.

I had a good time because I went with friends. I will refrain from naming said friends, due to their general nervousness about the establishment in question. Now I have lived blocks from the Celebrity Centre for years and, after my recent Scientology sign maker widget post got such a surprising amount of attention, I thought I might want to actually check it out. So I made a brunch reservation for three people and invited seven or eight of my friends. One person who declined pointed out that perhaps the week a dude with Samurai swords got shot by Scientology security guards in the Celebrity Centre parking lot was not the best timing to extend such an invitation. (I later looked this incident up online and noted that it apparently actually took place in November of last year and not this week at all.) Only one of my pals had the good excuse of being en route to attend the Barack Obama presidential inauguration. Everyone else plead hangover or terror or similar. At any rate, my friends came through for me and exceeded expectations and we ended up being a party of four. The grounds were lovely and we were seated facing indoors, beneath a hand-painted ceiling, by a window facing a garden fountain. There was a kind of terrible easy listening cover band outdoors, but we couldn’t really hear them where we were at. Because the company was terrific and the food was yummy, we had a great lunch.

The Hollywood Celebrity Centre was initially a sort of artists hotel, from the time most noir novels are set, when people would regularly rent hotel rooms by the week. Because of the building’s beauty and history, one of my friends found someone to ask if we could take the tour I’d heard they had. A room where Errol Flynn stayed was quickly pointed out and the gentleman we spoke with also mentioned that Cary Grant had stayed upstairs. Then he ushered us briskly through a hallway, which had at least a few somewhat interesting maxims framed on the walls, and into an office where we were given little questionnaires to fill out. I found it kind of hilarious that the questionnaire included a question about whether one had heard of Scientology. I asked the manager guy we’d been introduced to how many people sitting in that room wouldn’t have? Maybe it is a multipurpose form, but a little customization would seem a lot less silly. The form also asked how I had heard of Scientology and had a long list of boxes I could tick. I made my own box and checked my write-in answer of “Live in Los Angeles”.

One of my friends asked the manager guy where his accent was from and he said Sweden. As both one of my friends and I had been to Sweden, we chatted about that a little. We told him we were a bit pressed for time but had about twenty minutes available for a tour. The Scientologists assured us twenty minutes would be fine and ushered us into a nice little screening room to watch a movie which would answer many of the questions we might have about Scientology. I wouldn’t mind having their comfortable screening room, but they miscalculated wildly with their recruitment movie.

First off, the movie shows incredible footage of spectacular Scientology buildings, including a castle in the UK used as a school. It then immediately cuts to a diatribe against materialism. Uhm, poor segue. Most importantly, all four of us work in some aspect of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. We pretty immediately became impatient with the recruitment film’s uber-beginners approach for morons. Instead of saying much about Scientology philosophies, such as those framed on their hallway walls, the film was incredibly defensive, going on and on about how it is too a religion and quoting court decisions from multiple countries. The flick drones on interminably about how Scientology is attacked by psychology and government because it is a good replacement for government mind control. Or something like that. They really failed to communicate their value proposition. They would have done much better by actually giving us a tour where a properly trained tour guide could have gauged each of our levels of interest, knowledge, and intelligence.

Most comically, the Scientology recruitment flick had a Troy McClure who really came across like the 80’s movie preppy jerk in the Porsche who treats the female lead so shabbily. I mean, I think tie pins under the tie knot are kinda pretty and I wouldn’t mind if they came back in fashion. But they really haven’t.

Finally, we nominated one of our party to go ask when the actual tour was going to start. They apparently didn’t have enough tour guides to start immediately or something and the movie droned on, so we got up and left. On the way out, the Swedish manager came out to speak to me, perhaps guessing that I had asked for the tour hoping to find something more meaningful and intriguing than dated prep haircuts. I asked him when the movie was made. Without hesitation, he started to say “eighty-” and then cut himself off, paused, looked up and away, and said, “uh, ninety . . . ninety-five.” It is possible that they did some sort of re-edit in 1995 where they added a building acquisition to the beginning or added a postscript to the end, after the badly-acted repetitive part, and we just didn’t sit through enough of it to see the post-1986 part.

So here is my free consulting advice to Scientology: Make a new recruitment movie more often than once every twenty years. If the Church of Scientology would like further media consulting, my rates are available via the contact form on this site.

Fun fact to know and share: Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who played the cute dork who gets the girl, Wyatt Donnelly, in 1985’s Weird Science, pursued a course of medieval studies and is now a professor of English. That’s hot.

I’m not sure modern social science has an explanation for how John Hughes could have done a movie as fun and positive as Weird Science and then done all the wretched values-destroying propaganda he did afterward, so maybe Scientology can trump psychology there and come up with a plausible explanation.

Every now and then, I will use my TiVo to download a bunch of music videos. I download a bit of everything and then watch them briskly and efficiently. No reality programming in between. No commercials. If I don’t like the beginning of a music video, I fast forward to the mid-point to see if it gets better once it gets going. If not, I’m on to the next one.

I never heard of Justin Moore before, but I just got through playing his “Back That Thing Up” video about five gajillion times. “Back That Thing Up” has what Tapeheads fans would know to call serious production values. For those of you who must shamefacedly admit to never having seen Tapeheads, allow me to illustrate:

Mo Fuzz: All this video is missing is production values.
Ivan Alexeev, Josh Tager: Production values?
Mo Fuzz: Yeah. Tits and ass.

If muscles on video vixens and tight faded jeans on singer boys are coming back in style, I think I owe some deity a sacrificial goat now! Maybe two goats for the drummer still having tattoos and a mohawk. If “Back That Thing Up” is representative of Justin Moore’s body of work, he falls somewhere between Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks on one side and Motley Crue and AC/DC on the other. There are at least as many appalling sexual double entendres in “Back That Thing Up” as there are in “Big Balls”. I loathe puns. Unless they are sex puns. Then I love them.

Justin Moore has a mischievous smile, an easy charismatic stance and delivery style, and a smooth Southern voice both speaking and singing. Justin Moore has enormous star quality and looks really good in tight faded jeans and a cowboy hat. I usually don’t like cowboy hats (even though my foot was once photographed with one for Playboy.) He has an uncomplicated comfortable way of moving in his country duds which just works very very well. According to The Valory Music website, Justin Moore’s parents were deeded a fifteen-acre farm from his grandfather in a 272 person town called Poyen in Arkansas. His bio includes such American small town pastimes as high school baseball and gospel choir. I know country performers tend to talk about their mad farming skillz the same way rappers represent their drug-dealing resumes. Justin Moore is kind of being pitched as both flawlessly country and kind of indie, although it sort of looks like he is a Universal recording artist and he did get an awesome music video directed by Wes Edwards and produced by Brittany Hailes.

I have lived in both Georgia and North Carolina and, when I was thirteen, there were a lot of accent fetishist New Yorkers who wanted to date me for the five minutes I really had that Southern twang, until the moment passed. There is still the occasional word I say with a Southern accent, but I do not now identify as Southern nor have I ever identified as Southern. I have never thought of country as my community or culture. So I don’t care if Justin Moore’s comically country music-ready resume is over-spun or not. Apparently Country Music Television is a little wound up about the content in the video, so too racy for CMT is certainly a selling point in my book.

I know, I know, I get all excited about some media thing. I research it. Then I have to ponder whether it is real or not. In my defense, the YouTube comments on the cowboy singer’s videos tend to be mostly girls saying they are super “cuntry” and way better than those “Playboy whores” in the “Back That Thing Up” video. Except for the one gay guy who wanted Justin to back his nice thing up into some dick. This was apparently very offensive to some country fans. Some “cuntry” girls also complained that the video was degrading to women, but they were un-eloquently debated by other posters who apparently ran the lyrics through a rap filter and felt that it was good that “at least” it was not what they had come up with. Yeah, ’cause Justin Moore is more talented than they are.

This all brings me back to what was really my only point:

There is this kinda new singer Justin Moore and his catchy and nicely performed song “Back That Thing Up” has an incredibly cool video out directed by Wes Edwards. The end.

So right now FUSE is playing a block of Nelly videos. I find Nelly ridiculously hot. Hot like sexy, not hot like kindling. I’m not even sure if I like his music, but I certainly enjoy his videos. They’ve got productions values! (Bonus cool points to anyone who gets the movie reference there.)

So I was sitting there, letting the purple hair dye set in my hair, watching the Hot In Here video, and I suddenly realized that at least part of the video was shot inside a particular nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. Specifically, it was shot inside the Basque nightclub a couple blocks from me which burned down a day ago. Holy firemen of irony, Batman!

I was all trying to go to sleep at like six in the morning and I couldn’t figure out WTF was up with all the helicopters. I mean, my neighborhood has been a little weird lately, but this was just ridiculous. Turned out they were all the news copters shooting the fire and the literally two hundred and ten firemen and countless arson investigators and other officials dealing with the fire. Apparently, the building’s core was super old and had like poisonous resins or something on some of the burning wood. Not the best air quality where I live in Los Angeles for the past day.

But I really think the copters should have been blasting Nelly singing Hot In Here while they flew over my place. That would have totally made it all okay.