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" The Master is not not about Scientology. Philip Seymour Hoffman&amp;#039;s slightly unnerving-looking performance as a confident writer/thinker/cult-leader in the 1950s naturally evokes L. Ron Hubbard, but the actor told Entertainment Weekly recently, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not the L. Ron Hubbard story. [Scientology] was one of the bigger movements at the time, but there were a lot of movements at that time.&amp;quot; He doesn&amp;#039;t mention any of those other movements by name but does say he was partly inspired by Orson Welles, which sounds appropriate: Welles and Hubbard were both hugely charismatic and terrifying as hell. No serious filmmaker really wants their movie to be &amp;quot;the L. Ron Hubbard story,&amp;quot; because that makes it sound like a Lifetime movie but with more political fallout. Another Paul Thomas Anderson movie, Boogie Nights, could be said to be based on any number of disenchanted porn stars, and probably is, but really, Anderson would like you to believe it&amp;#039;s about more: the &amp;#039;70s, drugs, the disappointments of fame. It just so happens that making a movie about the porn industry doesn&amp;#039;t have the same kind of reverberations as making one with more than a passing resemblance to the most clandestine and powerful &amp;quot;religious&amp;quot; group in Hollywood. All of which is to say, you can draw your own conclusions about what The Master is about (and these new stills from the movie), but yes, the similarity in shirt collar is &amp;amp;lt; target=&amp;quot;_blank&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;definitely there. PREVIOUSLY: The Master Instant Trailer Review &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;?p&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15357/the-master-scientology-denial-11711489/?click=news>