Academy Award-Nominated Screenwriter’s Unexpected Right Turn

by Roger L. Simon

The following is an excerpt from Roger L. Simon’s Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror, which will be published by Encounter Books in late January. Simon is the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter of Enemies, A Love Story, Bustin’ Loose and Scenes from a Mall, among other films. He is also the author of the multiple award winning Moses Wine detective novels, the first of which, The Big Fix, was made into the Richard Dreyfuss film with a screenplay by Simon.

This excerpt from the chapter “The New Blacklist” about political conditions in contemporary Hollywood is from late in the book. Earlier parts are more autobiographical, detailing Simon’s migration from a “card-carrying” member of the Hollywood Left to his current job as the CEO of the right-leaning Pajamas Media. Along the way are encounters with Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Timothy Leary and Abbie Hoffman, among many others.

Pre-publication copies of the book may be purchased at Amazon, and you can join the book’s Facebook Group here.

The New Blacklist by Roger L. Simon

People often ask me whether my political change hurt my Hollywood career—whether I was and am the object of a new reverse blacklisting that discriminates against those who, as I did, publicly supported and continue to support the Iraq War or, worse yet, voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

In all honesty, I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have had much of a career, anyway. The insider joke about the old Hollywood Ten from the original blacklist was that none of them were any good at that point and that the glamour of being blacklisted kept them alive and in the public eye. Of course, that was an unfair accusation, not only to Dalton Trumbo, but also to Ring Lardner Jr., who came back from the blacklist to write The Cincinnati Kid and the original MASH. Albert Maltz, who wrote the WGA-Award-winning Broken Arrow under a pseudonym and later Two Mules for Sister Sara under his own name, was no slouch either.

In my case, it’s likely I lost some work, but I would have to have a clone to be sure what would have happened to me in the last half-decade or so had I continued my life as it was. I’d like to think that my public stand against Islamofascism cost me a half-dozen Academy Awards, but that would be blowing my own horn in the extreme. Hollywood careers are fragile at best, especially for writers. And mine wasn’t at its height at the beginning of the millennium. I was a decade past my Academy Award nomination and I was getting on in years for the business in general. Writers deep in their fifties are not the most sought-after commodities in the film industry for a number of reasons, including a notorious inability to tolerate story meetings with twenty-five-year-old studio executives fresh out of Wharton who haven’t seen any movies predating Spider-Man 2 and think Chinatown is a downtown neighborhood with overpriced lofts. It’s also true that older writers, as experienced and skilled as they may be, may not be the perfect people to write films for the Industry’s most coveted demographic—the sixteen-year-old male—even though that audience is now much more heavily engaged playing computer games, which, I am told, are considerably more interesting than today’s movies. That wouldn’t be difficult.

So I haven’t lost sleep worrying about whether or not I was blacklisted. Still, I am sure this new form of the blacklist exists, but not nearly to the formalized extent of the original list of the Forties and Fifties with its Red Channels and dramatic hearings in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, featuring “friendly” and “unfriendly” witnesses. Times are different and the system functions in a very different manner. Now it operates through an almost invisible thought control caused by a post-Orwellian “liberal” conformity so pervasive that a formal blacklist is unnecessary, and, indeed, would work against itself.

In some ways, this new, less overt list is worse, because there is nothing concrete to rebel against, no hearings, no committees, no protest groups pro or con, no secret databases. There don’t need to be. There is no there there, in Gertrude Stein’s immortal words—only the grey haze of this mindless received liberalism, the world as last week’s New York Times editorials, half-digested and regurgitated, never questioned, going forth forever with little perceived chance of reform, as if it were the permanent religious text of some strange new orthodoxy.

You see this new faith in practice at the average Hollywood story meeting. These are ritualized events and have been for the decades that I have participated in them. You wait an inordinately long time for your appointment, often longer than at a doctor’s office, but with nowhere near the legitimate excuse on the part of the executive keeping you waiting. They are definitely not in surgery. The intention is merely to confirm your lower place in the pecking order. (I have personal knowledge of an instance when John Huston and Jack Nicholson were kept cooling their heels in a tiny room by the now-forgotten head of ABC Motion Pictures for nearly two hours—I assume he didn’t realize they’d come to pitch him Prizzi’s Honor. Or maybe he did and this was a form of envy or vengeance.)

Once inside the executive’s office, the pecking order of talent and management thus confirmed, it’s instantly waved off in a burst of small talk and a call for the requisite mineral water—originally Perrier, now something more exotic like an obscure Welsh brand in a blue bottle whose unpronounceable name you can barely remember. But the small talk is what’s important. It usually revolves around the freeway traffic (a perpetual subject), the Lakers (depending on the year), and, over the last half-decade or more, a ritualized Bush bash. (What will they do without him?) Fucking Bush did this or that … Did you hear the stupid thing Chimpy the Idiot said? You didn’t even have to hear Bush referred to specifically— the word “idiot” sufficed. You knew. The subtext was that we were all together, part of the secret society, the world of those who know as opposed to those who don’t.

If you didn’t agree with this particular Weltanschauung, if you dissented from its orthodoxy just a tiny bit, you had but three choices: One, you could argue, in which case you would be almost certain to be dismissed as a fool, a warmonger, or a right-wing nut (all three, probably) and therefore have had little or no chance at the writing or directing job that brought you there. Two, you could shut up and ignore it (stay in the closet), in which case you felt like a coward and experienced (as I have) a dose of nausea straight out of Sartre. Three, you could stop going to the meetings altogether—you could, in effect, blacklist yourself.

I don’t know the size of that self-selected blacklist, but I suspect it’s substantial, though certainly not as large as the number of those in the closet. People have to make a living, after all, as in the days of the old blacklist. Only there are no “fronts,” as in the Woody Allen movie of the same name. No one has come forward to ask me to ghost write an anti-war movie, a remake of The Battle of Algiers, say, set in Sadr City, although, with my radical past, I suspect I could do a better job of writing left-wing movies than Hollywood has lately, judging by the box office receipts.

There are many reasons for the failure of those movies, but chief among them was not what the right-wing blogs said—that they were out of touch with the public. That may have been true to some degree (issue movies, taking at the very minimum nine or ten months to make, usually considerably longer, are almost always somewhat late to market as far as public opinion is concerned). It’s that they were fake. In other words, these films weren’t really believed in by their creators, in any deep sense. They are a cinema of “as if,” and those who see it sense it unconsciously.

This is the opposite of a movie like the classic of classics Casablanca, a film that triumphs with its audiences for being heartfelt. Hollywood’s new anti-war flicks are essentially posturing. They are cinema made by people who think they are supposed to be anti-war, but don’t really feel anything. No wonder the audiences didn’t respond. (This wasn’t true of a few of the Vietnam War-era films that had more genuine passion, just as the demonstrations against that war were vastly more impassioned and well-attended.) Sometimes, as in the case of Brian De Palma’s Redacted, these films seem to have been made to rescue a failing career by demonstrating the “correct” political views. This may have been unconscious, or barely conscious, on the part of the filmmaker, but true nevertheless—cynical as that accusation may sound.

For evidence you need go no further than the subject of De Palma’s movie—the rape and murder of an Iraqi woman by U.S. troops. This choice of theme is intended to convey a message against the Iraq War, but horrid events of this nature have happened in all wars on all sides, including World War II, when GIs are known to have raped and murdered German women. Thus De Palma’s point is irrelevant and propagandistic, unless he wants to say we should never fight a war, which, of course, he doesn’t. (Nazis, in Hollywood’s received wisdom, are still bad.) He wanted to say we shouldn’t fight Bush’s war, the Republicans’ war.

In this particular case, the Army punished the servicemen involved, casting further doubt on the director’s premise. It’s unlikely, however, that De Palma cares. He is, after all, a member of the club—or fighting to get back into it—and lives in the world of the pervasive haze I have described above. To him, thinking that way is natural, like breathing. It is a kind of “going with the flow.”

Meanwhile, those flailing against this flow have a tough time. Some of this is obviously political. The system has excommunicated them. But some of it is due to this uncomfortable truth: With some notable exceptions, at least to far, Republicans are lousy filmmakers.


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Posted Jan 7th 2009 at 11:15 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Media Criticism | 36 Comments