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sails of Hubbard’s yacht, forcing him and Betty back to port (see JP’s letter to Crowley
of July 5, 1946), but Parsons succeeded in recovering only a small amount of his money.
Before all this happened, Parsons trusted Hubbard implicitly and described him in a
letter to Crowley thus:
Although he [Hubbard] has no formal training in Magick, he has an extraordinary amount
of experience and understanding in the field. From some of his experiences I deduce that
he is in direct contact with some higher intelligence, possibly his Guardian Angel … He
is the most Thelemic person I have ever met, and is in complete accord with our own
principles.
When journalists from the Sunday Times dug into the Yorke collection at the Warburg
in 1969 and published a story about Hubbard’s connection to Aleister Crowley via
Parsons the Scientologists issued an official statement claiming that Hubbard had been
sent in by Naval intelligence to break up a black magick sect at a house in Pasadena
occupied by nuclear physicists, Hubbard even managed to rescue a girl (Betty) that the
cult were using.
At the time of writing, The Profit is not on general release, amid claims of interference
by Scientologists, who are extremely litigious and fearful of the ridicule this film exposes
them to. For the present the director seems satisfied with showing the film exclusively
at an independent cinema in Clearwater, Florida, the Mecca for Scientologists. The
writer and director, Peter Alexander, was a Scientologist for 20 years before leaving in
1997 and claims to have personally poured over $1-million into the Church over the
years before realising it was a sophisticated fraud.
Although the film is targeted at Scientology, an interesting side-issue is whether the
film will incline people to wonder about the truth behind Zack’s black magick sect.
A more serious film about Jack Parsons is planned. The film rights to Sex and Rockets
have been optioned by Don Murphy of Angry Films/Sony, the producer of Permanent
Midnight and Natural Born Killers. Kenneth Anger, who lived with Marjorie Cameron
for a few years and is a member of the A∴A∴, said in an interview in November 2000
that he had been approached by Don Murphy to make a full-length film of Parsons’
life. Anger has his own theory on Parsons’ death that isn’t mentioned in Carter’s book,
in an interview in the second issue of The Fenris Wolf (1991) he said he was convinced
he was murdered by the billionaire Howard Hughes, whose agents had earlier kidnapped
him in a limousine.
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