This is the story of how I got kicked out of Hollywood…and how I hope to kick myself back in again.
From the late 70’s to early 90s I made my living as a Hollywood screenwriter. I’m best known as co-writer of cult film Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which features the seminal punk band The Ramones.
My writing partner and I worked every day on the set of the film, and we spent a lot of time with the band, including a 22-hour marathon Ramones concert at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. As a souvenir of that day, I still carry around a 40% hearing loss and white-noise tinnitus in both ears.
Over the years, I’ve been approached by many Ramones fans wanting to know what it was like to work with band members Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Ringo. Of the four, the most interesting, approachable and, yes, intelligent glue-sniffer was Johnny Ramone, and my partner and I would often spend time talking with him about his film collection and our shared affection for Buster Keaton movies.
One thing Johnny and I didn’t talk about, however, was our shared dislike of liberal politics. I’m not sure exactly how conservative or how socially constrained Johnny felt at the time, but I never heard him say anything of political consequence on the set. And certainly, for most people in the rock music scene, conservatism was the political love that dare not lip-sync its name.
It was the same way in the movie business, of course. Social networking (of the pre-Facebook kind) was key to finding work, and at a Hollywood party you never deviated from the Hollywood party line or you would be frozen out. Whenever President Reagan was vilified or unilateral nuclear disarmament praised, often in the same breath, I said nothing and let others do the heavy breathing. In my silence, they simply assumed I shared the Hollywood groupthink. I discovered that, even if you don’t believe in modern liberalism, it’s still possible to make all of Hollywood your oyster…but first you need to clam up.
Johnny Ramone famously came out of his own political shell in 2002 during the Ramones’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. While on stage receiving the award, Johnny leaned into the microphone and proclaimed himself a conservative Republican shouting “God bless President Bush and God Bless America!” – a rebel yell in the heart of the (Musicians) Union.
It must have been a liberating moment for him.
I not-so-famously came out myself as a radical capitalist a decade earlier when I wrote a politically incorrect screenplay called Global Village Idiot. For me, too, it was a liberating moment, as it freed me from the possibility of making a living in the only business I ever loved.
The great liberal sin of Global Village Idiot was that it made fun of the environmental movement, and for that I was cast into the Hollywood wilderness, which is roughly east of Normandie Avenue. At the time, environmentalism had officially replaced the “peace” movement as the official religion of Hollywood. This was unsurprising, as the high priests of both religions – such as John McConnell and Hellen Caldicott – were exactly the same.
At that particular moment, however, Hollywood had just suffered its first defeat in their religious war against the State of California with the electoral failure of Proposition 128, the “Big Green” initiative.
Cobbled together by environmentalist groups and state legislators such as former SDS radical Tom Hayden, Big Green was a grab for power by leftists who yearned for control of California business and industry by passing the nation’s most stringent environmental regulations.
Big Green would have included the creation of an Environment Czar with the power to sue any polluter, even the government itself. It was thought by many that Hayden was angling to be the Czar. Unconfirmed sources reported that he appeared giddy at the prospect. Apparently Hayden special-ordered a top hat to wear on the job that said “Czar” on it, but became disillusioned and lost interest in the position when his hat was delivered and the letters mistakenly spelled out “Tsar” instead. But, again, this is unconfirmed and quite possibly invented a few moments ago for comic effect.
The usual Hollywood celebrities and movie moguls campaigned for the proposition. Chevy Chase, Ted Dansen, Meryl Streep, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Susan Sarandon, and dozens of others made the rounds of fundraising cocktail parties, or shot commercials for Prop 128, or crafted their TV show storylines to support the message of Big Green.
The Hollywood effort to pass the initiative was spearheaded by Jane Fonda, who was recently divorced from Hayden. It was rumored that, as part of the divorce settlement, Fonda was awarded custody of the hat.
My screenplay had its own version of Big Green called “Blue Skies,” and it mocked the politicians and Hollywood celebrities who rallied ’round its cause.
So yes, I knew the subject matter of Global Village Idiot was a little “touchy” for Hollywood. But I felt I had established myself as a writer; I was selling regularly and for the last 5 years I was represented by a William Morris agent. And it was, after all, just a low-budget comedy film, full of sight gags and dumb jokes. Moreover, the script itself was so good-natured that I was sure Hollywood would take the subject matter in stride and accept it as impish, amiable joshing and all in good fun.
Yeah…I’m just that stupid.
The screenplay I handed into my William Morris agent turned out to be a 110-page pink slip.
I knew I was in trouble when my agent didn’t take my phone calls. Well, actually, even in the best of times he never took my phone calls. He was, after all, a Hollywood agent. But when I finally did connect with him, his terse assessment was that the screenplay stunk and he refused to show it to anyone. A few days after that, I was officially notified that I would no longer be represented by the agency. In later months, I learned that William Morris happened to be of the biggest financial backers of Big Green.
The reaction of my Hollywood friends was no better. They uniformly hated it, thought I was crazy to have written it, and argued vehemently against its underlying philosophy.
For more than a year, I attempted to find new representation. My resume opened doors to other agencies, but after I insisted that Global Village Idiot be the script they showed around, the same door was swiftly slammed shut, and they didn’t bother to express the traditional concern about not letting it hit my ass on the way out.
A good friend of mine, who was also an agent, hated the script as well and refused to handle it, advising that I forget all about my 3-brad bundle of Hollywood Kryptonite and write something else.
But the damage was done. As a writer, whether you get the next job or not depends in large part on whether you got the previous job.
It works like this. If you’re a producer, you want a reason to believe that the money you spend on a screenplay will result in financial success. But success relies on talent, and talent is intangible, mysterious and hard to judge. As a result, fear runs rampant through the industry because, as screenwriter William Goldman accurately wrote, “Nobody knows anything.” As a result, few people in Hollywood trust their own judgment.
Success in the movie business is not only uncertain, but it often seems random and maddeningly ephemeral. So if nobody knows anything, how can you judge whether to take a risk with a particular writer, or actor or director when there are thousands of similar, equally talented people vying for the same job?
Easy: you depend on the judgment of somebody else.
If you’ve got talent and someone else has recently spent money on your services, you’re golden. Money changes everything. Executive “A” doesn’t have to justify the reason he hired you because Executive “B” has already given him the best reason there is: somebody believes they can make money with you. So one job leads to the next and that’s how careers get hot.
Over the next few years, my agent friend kindly represented me on new projects, but the magic mojo power of steady work was gone and I never worked in Hollywood again.
That was the end of the story for fifteen years, until October of 2005, when I got word of a screenplay contest sponsored by American Film Renaissance. AFR is a film institute that was created by founders Jim and Ellen Hubbard to “promote inspiring and enduring American principles in cinema.”
Every other year, AFR runs a film festival showcasing films that celebrate the American Spirit, and in 2006 the fest was held in Hollywood. As part of the festival, AFR sponsored the screenplay contest.
As it happened, Global Village Idiot reflected exactly those enduring American principles. It was pro-capitalist, pro-individualist, pro-freedom – in short, it was pro-American, which is precisely why Hollywood hated it. So I submitted the script.
On January 1st, 2006 AFR announced ten finalists…and I was one of the Hollywood Ten.
Two weeks later, I attended the festival for the announcement of the winner. Among the judges were Academy Award nominees Lionel Chetwynd, John Milius and Roger L Simon. Am I allowed to say “man-crush” on this blog? As a bonus, Milius pledged to personally slaughter an ox for the winner.
That evening, at a theater inside the Hollywood and Highland Center, Ellen Hubbard announced to the crowd that Global Village Idiot won first prize. I received applause and a check for $2,000 which, when pro-rated over my time on the new Hollywood blacklist, worked out to about 35 cents per day in exile.
Dalton Trumbo did considerably better, and he was a communist.
For three years after winning the prize, I didn’t do much to promote the script or try to get it produced. What was the point? When it comes to the environmental alarmism, Hollywood is still Hollywood, only more so and with an extra helping of hypocrisy. In a time when they give Academy Awards to Al Gore films and talent agencies boast of their commitment to the environment, what agent would represent it? What studio would make it?
But the worries and passions that aroused me enough to risk my career all those years ago have only enlarged with time.
Not letting the current economic crisis go to waste, the Obama administration has plans to regulate business that go beyond Big Green’s wildest dreams. As expected, the EPA has found global warming to be a threat to the public, setting the stage for the regulation of all greenhouse gases, which means a “devastating effect on the economy.” And what Tom Hayden couldn’t get for California, Obama got for the entire nation – an Environment Czar. Surprisingly, she’s a socialist, one of the leaders of a group that called for shrinking the economy to control climate change. When it comes to shrinking the economy, she’s doing a great job!
No word yet on the hat.
It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Big Hollywood that it began to dawn on me that other avenues to getting the screenplay seen and produced were opening up. There were like-minded people inside the business raising their voices who might be receptive to the script. And the established Hollywood gatekeepers of agents and script readers, who had been so effective in keeping me out of their offices and off the back lots of Hollywood, might be eluded by going online.
So the same day I discovered Big Hollywood, I grabbed a domain and started my own site called globalvillageidiot.org. I threw my screenplay online for anyone to see and started blogging about it.
Things have changed since I was banished from Hollywood. Newspapers such as The Seattle P.I. and the Rocky Mountain News no longer get to decide the news. And talent agencies such as The William Morris Agency, which claims to be green while servicing the egregious carbon-burning, corporate-jet-and-limousine besotted clients of Hollywood, no longer gets to decide who can read Global Village Idiot.
We’re at a tipping point now. By growing margins, the public is beginning to see through the global warming alarmism promoted by government and the media. And yet the present administration is on the cusp of pushing through radical changes to our way of life based on that global warming alarmism.
I’d like to think that a world premiere of Global Village Idiot in the heart of Hollywood might help tip things in the right direction.
Yeah…I’m just that stupid.
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