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Louis Theroux

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Revision as of 23:58, 14 October 2019 by CogitoNotStirred (talk | contribs) (add section on Scientology film)
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Louis Theroux in 2009.

Louis Theroux is a British film-maker who has produced a series of documentaries for the BBC, often featuring people who would benefit greatly from stupid-reducing pills. The subjects of Theroux's documentaries include a wide variety of people who are either quite eccentric or FSTDT-level wingnuts. He is the son of the prolific travel writer Paul Theroux.

Weird Weekends

Theroux produced three series of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends where he visited the "genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting", primarily in the United States. Of specific interest to the mission of RationalWiki are the episodes on born again Christians, UFO nuts, right-wing survivalists in Idaho, and the "Self-Fulfillment" episode which discusses hypnotism and other pseudo-psychological woo.

BBC Two Specials

From 2003 onwards, Theroux has produced a number of specials for BBC Two. As with Weird Weekends, there is plenty of facepalm-inducing material for the rationalist, starting with Louis and the Nazis where Theroux meets a variety of white nationalist neo-Nazis in the US including Tom Metzger, the Prussian Blue girls and a group of not particularly friendly anti-Semitic skinheads.

Theroux has also done two documentaries on the Westboro Baptist Church and the Phelps clan. The first, in 2007, was entitled The Most Hated Family in America, and profiled their protests at military funerals. The follow-up documentary, America's Most Hated Family in Crisis, discusses how a number of church members have defected or been "defellowshiped" and tries to investigate how members of the church feel about losing contact with their children when they decide to leave.

His Scientology movie

His 2015 documentary My Scientology Movie is a thought-provoking dig into the shenanigans of the Church of Scientology, which probably got him disinvited from Tom Cruise's annual croquet party.