Roger Simon, CEO of Pajamas Media

Blacklisting Myself: Memoir of a Hollywood Apostate in the Age of Terror is the title of Roger Simon’s new book, a record of his long career in Hollywood and association with the American film industry.  Simon is best known today as founder, with LGF blogger Charles Johnson, of the high-profile online news and commentary website, Pajamas Media.  As an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Simon co-wrote the screenplay with famed director Paul Mazursky for the outstanding adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story.  He wrote Bustin’ Loose for Richard Pryor, adapted his own novel The Big Fix for Richard Dreyfuss and shared credit with Woody Allen for the Scenes From a Mall screenplay.

In his first non-fiction work, Roger Simon contemplates his decision to remove himself from a world, a working environment from which he had become estranged in his personal evolution to a much more conservative view of life and the political realm.  The memoir recalls his many encounters with household names like Warren Beatty, Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary and according to some reviewers, a recounting of meeting a wildly self-absorbed Barbra Streisand and her spiritual guru, both dressed in white in an all white room, that alone is worth the price of the book.

The author was a left-leaning, reflexive liberal for most of his life and makes no apologies for it nor does Simon hesitate to point out the dull, gray conformity of thinking in the entertainment industry with all its petty orthodoxies.  His personal migration to the Right is unique, fascinating while punctuated with hilarious tales of the bizarre cast of characters in our film making capital.

Simon provided Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood blog with an excerpt and I quote here:

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.

Simon’s take on attending meetings with Hollywood film executives today:

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?) F***ing 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.

On the dismal public reception to the recent crop of anti-Iraq War movies:

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.

Blacklisting Myself is from Roger Kimball’s Encounter Books, which I have written about before, and is in pre-release sales at Amazon.  The price is less than $20 in hardcover and I am in line.

Michael Barone wrote about Simon’s memoir:

“Years ago, I read Roger Simon’s first mystery novel The Big Fix and I was delighted. Roger was a left liberal then and so was I. Now Roger’s 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.”