'South Park' Episode Lives: Scientology Story Line Thrives Online

Since Comedy Central pulled the repeat of the episode "Trapped in the Closet" from its schedule last month, the episode has nevertheless been available to viewers online, where fans posted it in droves on file-sharing sites.

On YouTube.com alone, versions of "Closet" posted during the past two months have generated more than 700,000 views, according to data on the site last Thursday.

An online petition on ChefGate.info garnered more than 5,000 signatures to protest the

network's pulling the episode and linked to the episode on Xenutv.com, an anti-Scientology site.

Though big media companies such as NBC Universal and CBS Corp. have thrown their weight against YouTube in recent weeks

over its illegal use of copyrighted video, MTV Networks' Comedy Central, which like CBS is owned by Viacom, has so far looked the other way at the online proliferation of the controversial "South Park" episode, just as it has with bootlegging of the hot-button show in the past. An MTV Networks spokesman confirmed the company has not asked YouTube to pull the show, but declined further comment for this report.

By staying mum, in effect allowing unauthorized play of a copyrighted Comedy Central television show, Comedy Central executives appear to be coming out winners.

From Excerpt from Wings Interview: The Real Harlan Ellison

Harlan Ellison is the author of over nine hundred stories. A third of them are science fiction, a third are fantasy. The rest are mainstream.
. . .
On Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard:
Ellison: Scientology is bullshit! Man, I was there the night L. Ron Hubbard invented it, for Christ Sakes!
I was sitting in a room with L. Ron Hubbard and a bunch of other science fiction writers. L. Ron Hubbard was famous among science fiction writers because he was the first one to have an electric typewriter.
Wings: He claimed to have written Dianetics in a weekend, and nobody can deny it.
Ellison: That's true. He wrote Dianetics in one weekend, and you know how he used to write? He used to take a roll of white paper, like paper you wrap fish in. He had it on the wall, and he would roll it into the typewriter and he would begin typing. When he was done, he would tear it off and leave it as one whole long novel.
We were sitting around one night... who else was there? Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth, and Lester Del Rey, and Ron Hubbard, who was making a penny a word, and had been for years. And he said "This bullshit's got to stop!" He says, "I gotta get money." He says, "I want to get rich".
Wings: He is also supposed to have said on that same night: "The question is not how to make a million dollars, but how to keep it."
Ellison: Right. And somebody said, "why don't you invent a new religion? They're always big." We were clowning! You know, "Become Elmer Gantry! You'll make a fortune!"
He says, "I'm going to do it." Sat down, stole a little bit from Freud, stole a little bit from Jung, a little bit from Alder, a little bit of encounter therapy, pre-Janov Primal Screaming, took all that bullshit, threw it all together, invented a few new words, because he was a science fiction writer, you know, "engrams" and "regression", all that bullshit. And then he conned John Campbell, who was crazy as a thousand battlefields. I mean, he believed any goddamned thing. He really believed blacks were inferior. I mean he really believed that. He was also very nervous when I was in his office because I was a Jew. You know, he was afraid maybe I would spring horns or something.
Anyhow, the way he conned John was that he had J. A. Winter, who was a doctor, who was a close friend of John's, and he got him to run this article on Dianetics, the new science of mental health.
Wings: Dianometry was the first article, I believe.
Ellison: Right. And science fiction fans will go for any goddamm thing.
They'll believe anything, man, they will believe in the abominable snowman and the Bermuda Triangle, in Pyramid Power, in EST, in Scientology, in the Second Coming, they'll believe in any goddamm thing, they don't give a shit. They go to see Star Wars; they think it is for real!
So science fiction fans picked it up, they began proselytizing, he started making money, when he had made enough money he was able to spread out a little more, then he got more cuckoos, you know, pre-Charlie Manson assholes that had no place else to go, and he began talking to these loons as if Dianetics really meant something. Then he wanted to get tax-exempt status, so he called it "The Church of Scientology".
Now, they've gotten so big that they own property all over the country, and it is impossible to stop it. They infiltrated the FBI, they infiltrated the tax department... , the funny thing is, Ron Hubbard and I still occasionally communicate with each other. Every once in a while, a couple or three times a year, we exchange letters. And I write to him, you know, and I say, "Hey Ron, when is this bullshit going to cease?
These cuckoos are really driving me crazy! They come around the house with pamphlets!" And he writes me back, and he says, "It's the good work, it's the good work."
It's all very funny stuff. He was going to write a new story for me for the last Dangerous Visions, but I guess he got too busy counting his money. I don't know.

I've been reading Ellison's work since high school, and loved most of it. I've read only one of Hubbard's books and hated it. I can't understand how anyone can believe anything that came from the mind of the man who wrote Battlefield Earth.

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