Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine. Roger L. Simon

       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, isn’t it?”

      “Yes, yes,” I blurted out, my throat tightening as it hadn’t 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 Media—the 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 arbitration—a 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 producer’s 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 1989—twenty-one years ago! Were they trying to bill me for something? This was a union, after all. “What’s 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 don’t 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 hadn’t 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 remembered—this was Hollywood. Common courtesy is the last thing on their minds.

      Especially common courtesy toward me. Because I wasn’t 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 side—or 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. It’s 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 doesn’t 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 Gardener—the 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 himself—was 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 Academy’s 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 Bustin’ Loose, so had some idea of the process.

      Several writers who wrote after me would be competing for credit. I immediately dismissed one of them—the redoubtable Cheech Marin of Up in Smoke fame, who in the early Nineties had been hired to rewrite my screenplay and to star and direct in it. To put it kindly, an art film in the Italian neorealist style, as The Gardener was, was a bit outside Cheech’s comfort zone.

      The next writer was Leon Ichaso, someone briefly employed to undo Cheech’s smoke-filled mishmash and return the script to my original conception. He would not be in the hunt either because he had made no particular contribution of his own. The fourth writer, a man named Eric Eason—who had written the shooting script that got the green light—would of course be competition.

      A couple of weeks later, I read Eason’s script. It was well done, I had to admit. He had taken my work and brought it forward into the atmosphere of the LA Chicano/Mexican gangs of our time. He had even, to some degree, improved upon my original, deepening the story’s key relationship between Carlos—the gardener—and his teenage son Luis, who is being romanced by the gangs.

      The film was being directed by Chris Weitz, who made About a Boy with Hugh Grant and later New Moon, one of the Twilight series. The latter, a vampire film, was clearly not Oscar material, but it made a fortune, more than any movie I had ever been involved with, and they were spending more than ten million dollars on The Gardener, a healthy budget for a tiny “specialty film” shot in East LA.

      The Gardener seemed a force to be reckoned with, and I wanted to be part of it. Moreover, I had been involved with the movie not once, but twice before. In 1998 I had polished my original script with the actor Andy Garcia, who wanted to play the lead. At that point, I was going to direct. It was close to being made then, but, as often happens with independent productions, the financing fell through. I felt I more than deserved screenplay credit when it was finally produced. And the Writers Guild credit rules, I knew, were biased in favor of the writer of an original, as this was.

      And yet something troubled me in all this. A reality nagged at me even as I lusted after renewed Hollywood fame and fortune.

      The truth was, another

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