Roger L. Simon - Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown (Large Print 16pt)

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Table of Contents

Praise for Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine, previously published as Blacklisting Myself

Years ago, I read Roger L. Simons first mystery novel, The Big Fix, and I was delighted. Roger was a left liberal then and so was I. Now Rogers politics and mine have changed, but his gifts as a writer have only grown richer. Blacklisting Myself is a story of Hollywood and America, funny and perceptive at the same time.

Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report,
American Enterprise Institute

Rueful, thoughtful, refreshingly direct, and full of juicy inside stories, Roger L. Simons memoir is the best and most intimate account of Hollywoods politics yet published.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary

When I read Roger L. Simons witty and riveting Blacklisting Myself, I felt as if I were reading the memoir of my own lost brother. This indispensable and entertaining book is the first to tell the true story of Hollywood and politics from the perspective of someone who actually lived it.

Ron Silver, actor and activist

Anyone who knows Roger Simon knows that he tells great stories about his life in Hollywood before and after 9/11. After becoming what he calls a 9/11 Democrat, Roger discovered that the Hollywood power structure became hostile to its apostates. The former financier of the Black Panther Breakfast Program tells all in his new memoir, with plenty of interesting names included....

HotAir.com

The philosopher Diogenes is said to have wandered the streets of Athens with a lamp, looking for an honest man. Had he lived in Hollywood, hed have needed two searchlights, a pack of bloodhounds, and a net. Or he could have just read Roger L. Simons new autobiography.

City Journal

... alternately funny and sad but [an] always fascinating secondthoughts memoir....

Ronald Radosh, National Review

Hollywood memoirs abound, but not many describe The Motorcycle Diaries, a hymn to Che Guevara, as a puerile fantasy, compare Stanley Sheinbaum, a key Hollywood politico, to one of Lenins useful idiots, and question the intelligence of Barbra Streisand. This long overdue memoir is different and deserved.

FrontPageMagazine.com

Mr. Simons mantraone shared on Andrew Breitbarts new rightleaning entertainment industry blog, Big Hollywoodis that conservatives cant be content to whine about liberal bias in the entertainment industry. Instead, they need to show they can compete in the business by making good movies.

The Washington Times

BY ROGER L. SIMON

Books

HEIR
THE MAMA TASS MANIFESTO
THE BIG FIX
WILD TURKEY
PEKING DUCK
CALIFORNIA ROLL
THE STRAIGHT MAN
RAISING THE DEAD
THE LOST COAST
DIRECTORS CUT
BLACKLISTING MYSELF

Screenplays

THE BIG FIX
BUSTIN LOOSE (story by Richard Pryor)
MY MAN ADAM
ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY (with Paul Mazursky)
SCENES FROM A MALL (with Paul Mazursky)
PRAGUE DUET (with Sheryl Longin)

for Madeleine

Introduction:

MY OLD LIFE CALLS MY NEW LIFE

I was sitting at my desk, staring at my cell phone, for a moment uncharacteristically unable to speak.

Hello... this is Roger Simon, isnt it?

Yes, yes, I blurted out, my throat tightening as it hadnt in years. I felt a similar pressure in my chest, and my palms were sweaty.

Like a ghost from the past, my old life was calling my new life.

This was all happening on a typical chaotic June day at Pajamas Mediathe burgeoning conservative new media company where I am the largely accidental CEO.

When the phone rang, I was watching a group of Tea Party activists being videoed in our studio while answering an email from an editor about a terrorist financing story and working with a writer on an investigation into Justice Department bias under Obama.

A woman identified herself as being from the Credits Department of the Writers Guild of America, the union of motion picture and television writers of which I am a member. I immediately assumed she was going to ask me, as they sometimes do, to participate in an arbitrationa service professional screenwriters perform anonymously, reading reams of their peers work to determine who receives the writing credit on a movie when more than one writer worked on the film. In the old days of Hollywood, those credits were often awarded arbitrarily to the producers brother-in-law or, more likely, his mistress. But the Guild objected and, after years of collective bargaining, won the right for writers to make the determinations themselves. It was a good thing, but I was having no part of it this day. I was way too busy to read a pile of scripts.

But before I could demur, my old life, as I said, called my new life. Are you the Roger Simon who wrote The Gardener? she asked.

Yes, I acknowledged, feeling immediately suspicious. This was 2010. The Gardener was a screenplay I wrote in 1989twenty-one years ago! Were they trying to bill me for something? This was a union, after all. Whats this about?

We want to inform you that it is in production, she replied. In production? A twenty-one-year-old screenplay? That was unheard of. Most screenplays dont make it past the studio shredders for three or four years, let alone twenty-one. Was someone playing a joke on me?

Are you sure? I asked.

Yes. They began principal photography two weeks ago. Two weeks ago? They were already shooting. Why hadnt anyone told me? This was my original screenplay, my idea. It would have been a common courtesy for the producer or someone (the studio? director?) to call, other than the Guild.

But then I almost instantly rememberedthis was Hollywood. Common courtesy is the last thing on their minds.

Especially common courtesy toward me. Because I wasnt one of them anymore. I was an apostate. After decades as a liberal, super liberal really, I had gone over to the dark side, the conservative sideor conservative to them anyway, in a world where anyone to the right of Jerry Brown was second cousin to Attila.

As I hung up, though, I started to become excited. I was having a movie made again. I was being reborn, in a sense. Hollywood does that to you. Its a like a fever or, more precisely, a virus, the kind of virus that you never lose entirely once contracted, a form of mono that doesnt go away but lingers in the body to strike again when you least expect it.

I started to fantasize. Would this be my second Academy Award nomination? (My first, for Enemies, A Love Story, ironically came in that same distant year I wrote The Gardener: 1989.) I was already getting a swelled head. The Gardenerthe story of a Mexican illegal alien gardener whose truck is stolen and who is forced, since he is not a citizen, to get it back by himselfwas a serious art film with a disadvantaged minority protagonist. Just the kind of movie the Academy loved. Moreover, in this case, the exact disadvantaged minority was even more timely than it was in 1989. Immigration problems were all over the news in 2010. The film would be right up the Academys alley. Nomination? Maybe I would even win the Oscar.

Of course, I would need screenplay credit first. Undoubtedly, there would be an arbitration, only for this one I would be the subject, not an arbitrator. I had been in that position once before for the Richard Pryor movie

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