Thursday, November 01, 2007

Roger Simon's New Book

There was some speculation over the summer about the whereabouts of Roger L. Simon's memoir. Well, hey, color me pleasantly surprised: it exists!

It's got the subtle title, The New Blacklist, and, boy, does it suck! In this excerpt, Simon rationalizes why he doesn't get screenwriting work:

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 pre-dating Spiderman II and think Chinatown is just some downtown neighborhood with over-priced lofts.


Yeah, tell that to Richard Price and David Mamet (both 59), both of whom get so much fucking work they don't have time to masturbate.

He also takes another swipe at De Palma -- evidently, Redacted was made to "rescue a failing career" -- but we've dealt with that crap here.

Simon does make one important concession: "For the most part, Republicans are lousy filmmakers." Some of them even suck at filmmaking and blogging!

...Simon put me in mind of the Baldwin adage, "Those who say it can't be done are usually interrupted by others doing it."

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