Today on the Scroll: A reporter posing as closeted gay royalty turns to Tom Cruise’s church for help to become a movie star.

Tom Cruise has another big hit film as his Church of Scientology indoctrination video swirls around the web, impeccably timed with Andrew Morton’s unauthorized biography. But what if someone who infiltrated L. Ron Hubbard’s headquarters on Hollywood Boulevard didn’t find the place nearly as distasteful as they imagined it to be?

Ian Halperin, a 43-year-old guerrilla investigative reporter from Montreal, claims to be the first person to record a Scientology employee affirming that they might be able to cure the homosexuality that was hampering his confidence to pursue an acting career, through the process of “auditing.” The encounter is just one part of Hollywood Undercover, set for release next week, and billed as “the world’s first YouTube-compatible book”.

The pulpy pages follow the exploits of the author’s id, His Highness Halperin, an alleged member of a non-existent Israeli Royal Family, who saunters around Tinseltown claiming he’s got money to give anyone who can help him be a star.  

Scientology seemed like a logical place to start, so Halperin put on a lime-green sequined polyester shirt and gold bowtie, cameraman in tow. A church official ordered the recording devices turned off, but Halperin’s explanation of how his uncle invented the credit-card key resulted in a bending of the rules, just for him.  

“The initial idea is to get struggling actors to divulge all of their innermost secrets,” says Halperin of the “pre-clearing” process. “And then if they become successful, there’s no chance of them ever defecting from Scientology, because the church has all this information about them.”

His Highness Halperin must’ve projected the right amount of wattage, as he was being monitored from the moment he was hooked up to the E-meter for a personality test, because the Scientologists were stealthily recording him as well.

All that complicated doctrine about Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy and Thetans notwithstanding, Halperin didn’t leave the Church’s Celebrity Centre with such a terrible taste  (similar to the recent portrayal in The New Yorker). What he can’t comprehend is Scientology’s alleged fixation with fixing gay people, while deploring other types of psychological treatment. Oh, and they also want money.

“It reminds me of a trip I once took to Soviet Russia where Lenin was omnipresent,” writes Halperin. “The only difference is that his social experiment eventually ended up in the crapper, while Hubbard’s seems to be thriving.”

Cynical reporting about the Hollywood system isn’t hard to come by, but Halperin has the audacity to get involved with his subjects, attracting empathy even while claiming that he’s a royal scion craving fame that his homeland cannot facilitate.

Halperin made the biggest splash on the media radar in 1996, when he co-authored a book speculating on the circumstances surrounding Kurt Cobain’s death. The touring lecture reached a surreal peak when, during their local appearance at The Opera House, Halperin was simultaneously ambushed by a private investigator hired by Courtney Love, and her estranged father, Hank Harrison, who just happened to be in the audience for the Who Killed Kurt Cobain? road show.

A subsequent round of undercover reporting, for the book Bad and Beautiful, found Halperin posing as a male model under the name Alfred E. Newman.

Hollywood Undercover ratchets it up, given how he insists on being addressed as “Your Highness” throughout. Halperin makes no claim of the literary value of the book, tied in with a forthcoming documentary, but emphasizes that he got through the doors of the Church of Scientology and didn’t find their tactics as sinister as Tom Cruise’s newest tormenter Andrew Morton makes them out to be.

In fact, reading Dianetics and volunteering at the Celebrity Centre ends up providing aspiring actors with a worthwhile distraction when they fail to become famous after their first few auditions. “They’re broke after a few weeks and have nothing better to do,” explains His Highness.

For his next trick, Halperin is documenting the experience of mounting an off-Broadway show, which portrayed a conversation between Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, the result of getting high and drunk and setting out to write the worst possible rock musical. The show got good reviews, and toured America, even as Halperin ended up playing the Hendrix part for some of the run.

“There are tens of thousands of actors out there who have no idea how this machine really works,” says Halperin, explaining his pursuit of journalism verite. “I’m no different. I’ve maxed out my credit cards to do this stuff. You’ll know it’s not working out if you see me busking with my saxophone along Yonge Street.”

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