





Earlier this week a rumor popped up on Reddit Los Angeles: "Is the Arclight Cinemas chain owned by Scientology?" This rumor's been going around the internet for a few years now--it seems to have started with Arclight employees complaining (in blog comment sections or to friends) about the weird training they get and the strange language the higher-ups use, but it's slowly been seeping out into the general population (there was a tiny flurry on Twitter about it around the time The Master came out). The beloved and terrific Arclight chain is owned by the Decurion Corporation, which is based just south of West Hollywood, and which also owns Pacific Theatres, developer Robertson Properties Group, Pacific Swap Meets, the Vineland Drive-In, and Mini-Pac Storage. Decurion Corporation definitely sounds like the name of a business established as a front for a cult, and its website says stuff like this: "Decurion's purpose, the fundamental reason it exists, is to provide places for people to flourish. We believe that every human being has something unique to express. We seek to create the conditions in which that expression will emerge ... We expect to create conditions for this through our work." But it has nothing to do with Scientology. A rep for Decurion gave us this statement: "Arclight is not affiliated with Scientology in any way." And ditto for Decurion. There's also no apparent connection between any of the company's officers and the CoS. Decurion explicitly lists on its website the people who've influenced its "operating philosophy" and it's a pretty standard collection of corporate psychology types, none of whom have any obvious connection to Scientology (or to Landmark, a quasi-cult whose name has also been thrown around in all this Arclight chatter).

And if you pick apart the creepily anodyne language of the website, that's really all it is: standard, common corporate bullshit written to make workers think their bosses care about them so that they'll work harder ("Through our practices, we are pursuing what we call the dual bottom line: superior economic or financial return on the one hand and individual and collective development on the other."). It's just a semi-extreme version of the kind of "management philosophy" you'll find in a lot of companies today--walks like a cult, talks like a cult, almost definitely isn't the Church of Scientology. It might, however, in this case, be LesterCorp.

· Is the Arclight Cinemas chain owned by Scientology? [Reddit]