ARTIST

However we may associate L. Ron Hubbard’s name with Scientology, it was originally most associated with the arts — in fact, his fiction stories actually funded his long road of research to Dianetics and Scientology. “Capturing my own dreams in words, paint or music and then seeing them live,” he once confided, “is the highest kind of excitement.”

Having published hundreds of works and millions of words between 1929 and 1941, the name L. Ron Hubbard had become virtually synonymous with American popular fiction. However, it was by no means confined to the printed page. By the summer of 1937, for example, one finds it on such scripts for the big screen as The Mysterious Pilot, The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, the Spider series, and The Secret of Treasure Island, one of the most profitable serials of Hollywood’s golden age. Then some forty years later, one further finds the name L. Ron Hubbard on an internationally bestselling Battlefield Earth, and the ten-volume dekalogy of Mission Earth each volume also an international bestseller.

Yet L. Ron Hubbard’s photographic output was actually just as prodigious and just as professionally rendered as any LRH work of fiction. His photographs have appeared in salons and galleries throughout the United States and Europe, while annual photographic calendars and the traveling exhibition and companion text, L. Ron Hubbard: Images of a Lifetime, have thus far attracted tens of thousands of viewers.

Then there is his involvement in the field of cinematography. By the spring of 1979, one can name no aspect of the filmic process he had not mastered. In consequence, his instructional notes on cinematography, directing, costume design, lighting, scoring and makeup comprise a perfect distillation of filmmaking basics, while his instructional material and drills for actors are revolutionary.

Similarly, although he never counted himself as a professional musician in the strictest sense, he was a radio balladeer in the 1930s, while in 1970s, he organized, trained and orchestrated several performing groups, and into the 1980s, composed three musical albums. And it was specifically through his 1965 examination of musical structure that he derived his definitive statement on aesthetics as a whole: ART. Described as a codification of all artistic endeavor, ART has probably inspired more creativity than any single text of its kind.

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