Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

Vast and unsustainable, and teetering always on the edge of environmental disaster – mudslides, wildfires, earthquakes – Los Angeles is a strange city, though I sometimes wonder if other people take against the place for the same reasons I like it. It is in some ways idiotic and certainly self-obsessed– but also vigorous and unpretentious: the equivalent in conurbation form of the kind of deluded monomaniac that for a long time I made the subject of my interviews.

We had moved there because we wanted an adventure. It was late 2012. Nancy and I were not long married and had decided to consecrate our renewed commitment to each other with a major life change. Nancy, raised abroad in less rain-lashed countries, craved a break from another British winter. The children were open to the idea of a big move – or too young to understand what they were signing on for; while I, a professional observer of American culture, reasoned it could only be a good thing for my work if I lived in the midst of the people I was studying, in classical anthropological style.

The invisibility of being in LA, the fact that I wasn’t often recognized, was also part of its appeal.

Any ambivalence I had about being famous – the fact that you sometimes got asked for selfies when your child was having a five-alarm meltdown on the Tube, or found yourself outside a pub where a large party went into a FOMO panic and every person had to have a photo – was reversed. In LA I could wander around lost and not worry that someone had spotted me and thought, ‘There’s Louis Theroux. Why is he walking up and down and looking at his phone?’ And those moments of recognition, someone asking for a picture or offering a compliment, being rare, were more welcome. In LA, I was in my twenties again, noticing that actors at parties didn’t seem that interested in what I had to say. ‘What do you do? Documentaries? Uh-huh. Cool.’ Scans room for escape. It was like being back on Krypton – a planet where I no longer had my superpowers.

At home in LA, busy coming up with ideas.

The 2008 crash was then still recent enough that property prices were depressed and we could just about afford to buy a house on the east side of the city, in a pleasant tree-lined area on the southern edge of Griffith Park called Los Feliz. Our children enrolled in a local school. The BBC arranged for a series producer to be based with me. A couple of APs were brought on and we rented a small office on a Hollywood lot, called The Lot, built aeons ago (in LA years) for Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford.

The first subject we looked into was California’s network of mental hospitals. Based on a previous film we’d made about a maximum-security facility for paedophiles and sex offenders, the California Department of Mental Health had been receptive, and access had already been signed off at the top level.

My new series producer and an AP went on a recce, and the reports that came back made it sound fascinating: a unit full of stalkers of stars; another that housed patients with psychogenic polydipsia, a pathological compulsion to drink water. It was like hearing travellers’ tales from explorers on a far frontier, describing lands where diamonds were strewn on the ground and men whose heads grew below their shoulders. Then the reports became less frequent and more laconic – the access was in doubt, for mysterious reasons – possibly one of our team had asked ‘Where do you keep the psychopaths?’ and the question had ruffled some feathers or more probably it was just a general sense of apprehension on the part of rank-and-file clinicians at the hospitals at the idea of featuring a vulnerable population of the mentally ill on a television programme. The project ebbed away.

Scrambling to make something, we front-burnered another idea we had been developing about end-of-life care and patients embracing long-shot medical treatments for life-threatening conditions. I’d seen the same subject done on the PBS documentary strand NOVA, but I felt we could do it with more focus on the human stories. I went into it knowing it was a further step along the road of grimness and I had moments of panic, wondering if this time we really were overworking the depresso machine.

We filmed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. For those accustomed to London’s patched-up and retrofitted Victorian monsters, Cedars-Sinai looked a little like a futuristic rendering of a hospital complex, all clean lines and curves and shiny windows. There was a Spielberg building and thousands of museum-worthy artworks on the walls, Rauschenbergs and Warhols and de Koonings. It had a reputation as the hospital to the stars. While we were there, the rapper Lil Wayne was brought in. There were reports – denied by Lil Wayne himself – that he’d overdosed on recreationally consumed cough medicine, also known as sizzurp or purple drank. But Cedars-Sinai also served a local community of regular people, many there on state aid for the poor and elderly, and it was mainly among these that we spent our time.

Progress was slow. We were not allowed to wander the corridors, as we had done in other hospitals and prisons we had filmed in. At Cedars-Sinai, our AP had to set up filming with each contributor individually days in advance; only three of us could go in at any one time and there was no hanging about, which ruled out the possibility of finding new interviewees as we went, a type of serendipity we had always relied on. Not to mention that we were also – naturally enough, in a story about life-threatening conditions – at the mercy of the progress of the illnesses, the comas and the cancers, and they didn’t always cooperate with our schedule.

Not for the first time, I wondered if I might have finally alighted on an idea that was too gloomy for even the most dedicated fan, but we soldiered on, and eventually accumulated a series of scenes I still look back on as some of the most awful and dramatic I’ve ever been present for: an aspiring x-ray technician called Javier who married his fiancée, knowing he was about to die, with the assembled family and officiator all in surgical masks and rubber gloves; a young comedian and actor called Donta being informed by his team of white-coated specialists, who entered the room like a firing squad, that they no longer held out any hope of recovery. Much of our filming centred on a college student and football player called Langston who was in an unresponsive state following a heroin overdose. Doctors felt it was only a matter of time before they would have to switch off the machines that were keeping him alive, though the family disagreed, praying over him, and several months after his accident, he came round and spoke to his family – later we filmed him walking into the hospital to thank all the staff who had cared for him. It was the only time I’ve been lucky enough to capture a miracle on tape.

As filming in the hospital dragged on, we thought about making more shows in LA and putting together a series that would be an oblique portrait of the city, its episodes infused with the quintessential themes of scattered souls, self-invention, disparities of income, and a culture of utopian aspiration jostling against a reality that was far more grim.

We were conscious we should probably – in a series about Los Angeles – also try to feature an idea touching on the world of celebrity and show business. We circled around the world of stand-up comedians, and filmed a couple of interviews: one with the alternative-comedy guru and podcast host Marc Maron, and another with a faded comic of yesteryear, Gallagher, whose act used to involve him smashing watermelons with huge mallets. These encounters had their moments, but I worried that there wasn’t enough at stake in the story – just the possibility of professional failure and embarrassment. The world of the comedians didn’t seem terribly different to my own world and I lost confidence in the idea.

As the months went by, filming on these and other programmes – about the Sheriffs’ Department, the Department of Children and Family Services, the secret underground world of monitored sex offenders – proceeded with the rhythm of LA traffic: brief stretches of open road soon gave way to unending miles of stationary vehicles. Too late, I realized something I should have predicted: that LA, being an entertainment capital, could not be more ill-suited to an outfit like ours. Every state and local institution in the city has endured multiple approaches from reality-TV teams. Like a remote tribe that has had too much contact with the outside world, they are all savvy about show business, and now want payment before anyone will put on a grass skirt or do a rain dance. The one card we could play – the idea of a reputable documentary production providing some exposure, memorializing what you do – was at best quaint and more often hopelessly naive. We don’t have any shiny beads but will you put on the grass skirt anyway? I remember coming to this realization not long after the LAPD turned down our access request. They had a standard filming contract that required productions to licence their logo. The licence expired every three years, meaning whatever you filmed would, in effect, be worthless not long after you made it.

Our lowest ebb came mid-summer. We had retreated to the world of stray dogs in animal shelters. Here at least we won’t be dealing with aspiring celebrities, I thought. Within a few weeks we discovered that our favourite character, a dog trainer who lived in an industrial space in South Central LA, the leader of a small pack of dogs, had an agent and a lawyer and a deal for a high-profile reality TV show that was going into production any second. Even the dog trainers were too starry for us.

But for all its frustrations, working in LA also meant being able to film and go home at the end of the day – not to a hotel in a foreign country but to my family. I loved returning from work to find the kids in the swimming pool and jumping in with them less than an hour after I’d been at my desk and then barbecuing dinner with my towel round me like a sarong as the light went. The boys picked up situational American accents that they used at school and on playdates but not with us. Nancy got a part-time job at a campaigning production company and found a new circle of friends who had no idea that I was someone on television, and who as a result seemed to see her more clearly. In the winter we took trips out to Joshua Tree and 29 Palms on the edge of the Mojave and dreamed about moving to the desert, with sand and cactuses instead of a lawn, with clear night skies crowded with stars and the possibility of a different life.

And in between TV commitments I was also nudging along another project, a long-nurtured dream shot of my own.

It had started at a documentary festival in Sheffield more than a year earlier. Late one evening, at the bar of the Mercure Hotel, where the film-makers and dignitaries gather for drinks after the films and sessions are all finished, I’d run into a friend called Simon Chinn. We’d been at Westminster together. Back then he’d been a sporty and self-deprecating ladies’ man and an indifferent student – he had once copied a history essay of mine on Jean II and Philippe VI of France. But in the subsequent twenty-five years he’d emerged as a documentary-producer of international renown, the winner of two Oscars for his films Searching for Sugar Man and Man on Wire.

Simon asked if I’d ever thought of making a feature-length documentary for cinemas. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have an idea.’ A few weeks later Simon called to say he had an idea: ‘Scientology.’

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed in previous chapters I have expressed an interest in the mysterious and secret religion founded by the troubled sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard. From my visit to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit as a young whelp in the last century, through my tour around the Celebrity Center for an abortive TV documentary in 2002, and onward, I had seen Scientology as the ne plus ultra of cultdom, combining, as it did, show business, Americana, hucksterism, over-the-top religious commitment, and space aliens. (Have I mentioned that Scientology disputes these characterizations? If not, may I do so here?) And so, given my history with the subject, there was an irony or maybe just a coincidental quality to the idea of Simon suggesting Scientology to me. Simon’s interest stemmed from a story he’d read in the New Yorker by Lawrence Wright, profiling a disaffected ex-Scientologist, Paul Haggis, and the Church’s efforts to harass and silence him.

I met up with Simon at his offices in Fitzrovia and we discussed the idea.

‘It’s the holy grail,’ I said. ‘The ultimate story. It would be amazing. But how do you do it? They would never let us in.’

‘Do you know that?’ Simon asked.

‘Ah . . . yes,’ I said. ‘The best they would give you is tiny amounts of meaningless access. A tour of the Celebrity Center. A heavily chaperoned visit to some warehouse where they make e-meters. Almost everything I’ve ever done has been based on access,’ I went on. ‘It’s part of how it works. That sense of permission.’

But Simon’s interest and his track record was enough to prevent me pooh-poohing the idea entirely. And so over the following months we kept in touch, reading up on the subject, meeting for coffees and comparing notes.

Since I’d last gone spelunking in the potholes of Scientology research – those vast databases of allegations about ill treatment in the Sea Org and crazed self-actualization techniques – the contours of the story had changed a little. Starting around 2004 there had been a stream of departures from the upper echelons of Church management. In a series of memoirs and newspaper articles, these disaffected ex-members – most of whom had worked at a secretive base in the desert a couple of hours outside Los Angeles – depicted a culture of violence and degradation deep inside Scientology. They portrayed Scientology’s leader, the diminutive David Miscavige, as a brutal and unaccountable martinet who verbally abused his underlings and ran a regime that hinged on isolation of staff from loved ones, humiliation, control, and weird mind games. For several months at least, and possibly longer, they alleged Miscavige had forced senior staff to eat, sleep and work inside a double-wide trailer nicknamed the Hole.

This feels like another good place to mention that Scientology disputes all these allegations.

Miscavige had seized power soon after Hubbard’s death in 1986 and, in the accounts of the apostates, he came across as a Stalin-like figure, someone who had none of the religious vision or charismatic charlatanism of the founder but who more than made up for it with a kind of genius for control and domination.

At the same time, what I was also struck by was the sense of world-changing zeal of the Scientologists and their sincere belief that they had all the answers to all the problems that had plagued humanity for decades – war, insanity, crime – and their complete conviction that it was down to them and them alone to save humanity. This explained their dead-eyed intimidation of journalists, their hounding of ex-members, and why so many of them were prepared to tolerate ill treatment: what was a few months of polishing door knobs in a punishment programme when weighed against the salvation of the universe? This notion of idealism being a close cousin of zealotry was central to what interested me about the Church – especially wrapped in the bizarre trappings of the sci-fi space opera – and it took me back, in a pleasurable way, to my Weird Weekends days of people passionate about nonsense in a way that was comical and troubling and sad, but with some of the seriousness and maturity of the later shows mixed in.

I wrote up a film treatment that developed these ideas. ‘I love stories in which the best human qualities are put at the service of questionable projects,’ I wrote. ‘I find that the most shocking behaviour is motivated by very relatable human impulses.’ As to how the film might work, I was a little more vague, and these parts of the treatment – for all the references I included about it being a ‘landmark documentary feature’ and ‘my dream subject’ – couldn’t help disguising a certain skimpiness and desperation. We’ll meet a defector . . . and I’ll do some Scientology with an Independent Scientologist . . . and I’ll try to get into the opening of a new Org . . . and stand by the fence of the secret base . . . and we may even get some access to the Celebrity Center . . . Did I mention it is a landmark documentary feature?

Maybe for this reason, there were troubling questions of who would direct the film. Simon had been keen to bring on a high-profile name – someone with ‘feature documentary experience’. But the rarefied world of A-list theatrical documentary directors was not yielding up many names. In a way, it wasn’t surprising that there should be few takers, in the premier league of doc makers, for a non-access-based Scientology film fronted by a presenter who specialized in access.

By the time I was living in LA, more than a year down the line from the first conversations with Simon, the project was still notionally moving forward – the BBC had committed money, the film was funded – but with still no director or coherent vision, we were arguably no further along.

One day at work a colleague, an AP who lived in LA and was connected in show-business circles, mentioned that the Hollywood comedy writer and director Larry Charles had seen and enjoyed some of my programmes. I was delighted, of course. My years of aspiring to write sitcoms were still near enough that the idea of praise from one of the original writers of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm – a man who had also directed Sacha Baron Cohen’s prank film Borat and Religulous, a satirical documentary about religion presented by the American comedian Bill Maher – felt like a kind of anointment.

A few weeks went by and then I had a thought. I suggested to Simon that Larry might be the director for our movie.

We met up at an organic coffee shop in Beverly Hills. Larry, then in his mid-sixties, arrived, long-haired, long-bearded, in a Homburg hat and baggy cotton trousers that could possibly have been pyjama bottoms. In Hollywood, scruffiness is an indicator either of homelessness or inestimable wealth. In Larry’s case, I was fairly sure it was the latter. He was effortlessly funny, complimentary about my old shows – he mentioned the dementia one for some reason (‘I loved that scene, the woman going “gullah-gullah-gullah”, it’s become a thing I do with my girlfriend’) – and his conversations were a torrent of ideas so free-flowing that they bordered on the hypomanic.

On the subject of a Scientology film, he was immediately enthusiastic. He’d tried to do a bit on Scientology in Religulous – it hadn’t made it into the film – but he felt the subject was ripe for a different approach. ‘Little bit of prosthetic disguise on your face, you would be unrecognizable,’ he said. ‘You could go undercover as a dishwasher at the Scientology headquarters for two weeks.’ Another idea involved producing a live musical celebrating Scientology and staging it in Hollywood. ‘There is a way to expand on what you have done. Bring new elements into it, broaden the canvas, deal with larger themes and use humour, outrageousness, danger, spontaneity, emotion and film techniques to produce a scary and iconoclastic and fun ride.’ Many of his ideas revolved around exploding the usual documentary storytelling tropes and using Hollywood techniques, especially re-enactments. ‘I see re-enactments as being very important to this . . . I just want you to do what you usually do. My job is to turbo-charge everything to take it to the next level of it being a movie that can play in malls not just in art houses and festivals.’

After Larry left, Simon and I loitered behind, both dazed and excited by Larry’s manic creativity and raffish bohemian glamour. ‘I think we might have found our director,’ Simon said.

More meetings followed between Larry and me, and in hindsight, the six months or so of brainstorming were like a lost weekend of Hollywood romance, a whirlwind affair with a mistress who I suspected was too attractive and intelligent for me, making me wonder when it was going to end or what dark secret about her past I would uncover. We would email ideas back and forth and occasionally meet in a cafe in West Hollywood. For my part, the idea of ‘taking meetings’ with a comic master felt exciting but also trepidatious. He talked about working with a tiny crew. I worried that his idea of a tiny crew was my idea of a huge crew.

During one coffee session, I explained my sense that the important material would stem from the Scientologists’ reaction to whatever we came up with. They would undoubtedly view me as an ‘SP’. A ‘Suppressive Person’ – the term is used often by Scientologists and is synonymous, more or less, with ‘psychopath’. Scientologists teach that journalists are 1.1 on the ‘tone scale’, putting them on a par with ‘sexual perverts’ – which I think means gay people – and so they feel they are licensed to harass and confront them, especially those they view as disseminating negative information about them. The Internet is full of amusing videos of Scientologists ‘handling’ reporters in this way, and also tailing them in blacked-out vehicles. In fact one of the most revealing short documentaries on Scientology, John Sweeney’s 2007 Panorama, was mainly composed of sequences of him being tailed and harassed until he famously snapped under the pressure and went shouty-crackers during a tour of one of their facilities.

‘We need to think about how we document them coming after us,’ I said to Larry. ‘It’s a shame we can’t make a film and then release it and then film them harassing and suppressing our film.’ I mentioned Errol Morris’s film Tabloid, about a woman in the 1970s who became erotically obsessed with a Mormon missionary, kidnapping him and allegedly making him her sex slave, and I went on, ‘The most interesting part of that was that the woman later attended screenings at festivals to stand up and denounce Errol Morris – none of which you would know from watching the finished film. But can you imagine how much more interesting that would have been? The main character stepping up and taking control of the movie.’

‘I love that,’ Larry said. ‘A film within a film. We could have a casting call for actors to play David Miscavige.’

This wasn’t exactly what I’d meant and, intrigued as I was, I also worried that it seemed prankish, unmoored from any documentary reality. But Larry was off and running. What about instead of being one film within a film, there were several, each in a different mode? A religious epic. A sci-fi film. A Miscavige biopic. At this point, my head was starting to spin as I tried to keep up with Larry’s runaway vision. But I’d spent enough time in Hollywood by now that I knew I should mask my confusion. ‘Yes, I love it,’ I said. ‘Wow, interesting. Ha ha ha!’

One August day, I took a break from some filming I was doing in the South Central dog pound and Ubered up to some shiny offices in Century City, where Larry, Simon and I spent a morning interviewing editors. We talked about the re-enactments and the idea of doing things differently. It was becoming real and I was in equal measures excited and scared. A few weeks after that, I took off with the family to my dad’s house on Cape Cod for a short break, and it was there that I received a message from Simon. It said simply, ‘Larry’s out.’

I called back straight away. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He doesn’t think you’re on board with doing things in another way. I think he felt you were maybe a little unenthusiastic.’

‘Did it seem that way to you when we were interviewing editors?’

‘I’ve got to say it didn’t. So I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe there’s another reason. I don’t know.’

I sent a message to Larry, hoping to change his mind. ‘I am absolutely on board with another way of working . . . For me this is all about stretching myself and using different muscles.’ But it didn’t work. We were now nearly a year into our development phase and still without a director.