Friday, August 25, 2006

Never Mess With a Guy With Two Last Names, Because He's Probably Even Richer Than You

Our occasionally excitable visitor Pastorius raised a few eyebrows (including my own) by suggesting Viacom's bouncing of Tom Cruise was related not just to his general wackness of late, but something to do with Scientology as well.

I was of the "I'm Sumner Redstone, I'm sick of this [stuff], I'm 83 years old, and I don't give a flip" school. But it seems Brother Pastorius was on the right track, too:

The unknown trophy wife of a Hollywood film executive has been revealed as the unlikely driving force behind Tom Cruise's dramatic firing this week.

Paula Fortunato, 43, the wife of 83-year-old Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman who sacked Cruise, took a dislike to the actor after he publicly criticised the actress Brooke Shields for using post-natal anti-depressants.

Cruise's obsessive devotion to Scientology has seen him demand that his young fiancee Katie Holmes should go through the agonising process of childbirth in silence.

His allegiance to the cult has itself stirred controversy, it being based on the belief that humans are an exiled race from outer space called Thetans.

"Here is a woman - and I care about Brooke Shields because she is an incredibly talented woman - where has her career gone?" Cruise ranted on national television. "These drugs are dangerous. I have actually helped people come off them. When you talk about postnatal depression, you can take people today, women, and what you do is, you use vitamins."

Redstone estimated that Cruise's off-screen behaviour cost his latest movie, Mission: Impossible III, between £50 and £75 million in lost box office revenues even though the film was, he said, 'the best of the three movies' in the action series.

Sources say Fortunato told her powerful husband, "I never want to see another Tom Cruise movie again".

7 comments:

  1. Gotta love the British newspapers. No American paper would have the balls to call Scientology a cult.

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  2. And if you believe that Paramount cut their price on Cruise's production deal because the wife of the boss of the firm's parent company disliked something Cruise said on television, I have a bridge you'll be very interested in purchasing. . . .

    Occam's Razor is very useful in such cases.

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  3. And yes, how true it is that no American paper would call Scientology a cult. Sad and stupid.

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  4. I'd say Redstone was using the missus as in-house market research.

    Still, the unique character of Cruise's weirdness, and the intensity of her reaction to it, as opposed to the easily understandable sloth and hedonism of Lindsey Lohan, is directly attributable to Scientology's alienness (or should I say Thetanness?).

    And a me-too hat tip to Mr. Elliott's sagacity.

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  5. Of course, I make no distinction between Scientology's cult-ness and Christianity's. But then, there isn't any.

    Though the Scientologists are a mighty strange bunch. They make Foursquare Gospel look rational.

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  6. Of course, James. All elevator doors look about the same. ;-)

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  7. Even those with empty shafts.

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