It was 1994, and I had read an article in Premiere magazine saying that the Celebrity Center, the Scientology epicenter in Los Angeles, was a great place to meet women.
Willy convinced me to go check it out.
Thank you, JD Shapiro. The disaster that was Battlefield Earth actually makes a lot more sense now. For years, most Americans have blamed John Travolta for Battlefield Earth—after all, he was the be-wigged, be-nasal-tubed Scientologist standing at the messy, dank, gray center of a movie based on an L. Ron Hubbard book. To think, all this time we should have been blaming the screenwriter, a desperate man who wears his desperation on his sleeve in the form of a giant rubber chicken; a man who thinks calling his penis "my Willy Wonker" is the height of hilarity.
But wait. There's more:
During my Scientology research, I met an employee who I instantly had a crush on. She was kind of a priestess, and had dedicated her life to working for the church by becoming a Sea Org member. She said that she signed a billion-year contract. I said, "What! Really?" She said she got paid a small stipend of $50 a week, to which I said, "Can you get an advance on the billion years, like say, a mere $500,000?" And then she said as a Sea Org member, you can't have sex unless you're married. I asked her if she was married. She said yes. So I said, "Great! That means we can have sex!"
It all makes sense! Isn't the involuntary, guttural "Ugh!" inspired by reading that passage very similar to the involuntary, guttural "Ugh!" inspired by looking at this picture of John Travolta and Forrest Whitaker in Battlefield Earth?
If you crack open JD Shapiro's skull, you'll find a whoopie cushion—and it is this worn-out whoopie cushion that wrote the terrible Battlefield Earth as well as the terrible apology for Battlefield Earth.
