It’s an odd footnote in the lives of two notorious 20th century figures. In 1960, Leni Riefenstahl and L. Ron Hubbard briefly collaborated on a screenplay that was to be a remake of her popular 1932 film directing debut, Das blaue Licht (‘The Blue Light’). Since then there has been very little written about this unusual meeting of the minds. There’s a brief mention of it in Riefenstahl’s 1987 memoir, and somewhat less in the English-language translation of it. In 2007, The New Yorker devoted a single sentence to it as an example of how Americans, after memories of World War II had begun to recede, increasingly wanted to work with Riefenstahl. And in the otherwise excellent 2007 biography Leni, author Steven Bach describes the collaboration briefly but gets Hubbard wrong, saying that his days as a science-fiction writer and Scientology leader had not yet happened when he met Riefenstahl in 1960. In fact, Hubbard’s days as a sci-fi author were mostly behind him by then, and Scientology was already a worldwide phenomenon. Hubbard was introduced to Riefenstahl as Scientology’s leader when they met in London that March. Other than those brief mentions, not much has been said about the actual work that these two colorful characters got up to in Hubbard’s London apartment, where Riefenstahl ended up living for a while. (…) Now, however, an actual copy of the script they wrote together has turned up in the U.K. archives. And after we obtained a copy of it, we contacted the family of the person who made this meeting happen, and learned more about the collaboration. And it turns out that Scientology was very much central to this unlikely and short-lived partnership. (…) Riefenstahl herself wrote that Hubbard invited her to use his London apartment where the three of them could work on the screenplay, but then Hubbard was “unexpectedly summoned to South Africa.” Leni stayed in Hubbard’s flat, which came with the use of a housekeeper, and Hudsmith visited her each day to work on the film. Despite Hubbard’s absence, Leni called the script that they had completed “outstanding.” Only the obstacle of obtaining a British work permit was keeping her from filming it, she said, but more attempts to “smear” her kept surfacing. She wrote that she had to sue a publisher to keep a book from coming out in Germany that would claim she had shot film in concentration camps for Adolf Eichmann and then had suppressed the footage. It wasn’t true, but she said she had stopped the book from coming out just two days before it was scheduled to be published.
via daily beast: The Untold Story of Scientology Founder’s Secret Pact With a Nazi Propagandist