Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine: The Perils of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown

An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and a mystery novelist, Roger L. Simon is the only American writer to pull off the amazing trick of being profiled positively in both Mother Jones and National Review in one lifetime. The stunning story of his political odyssey is told in this memoir, where Simon recounts his migration from financier of the Black Panther Breakfast Program to pioneer blogosphere mogul beloved by the right as a 9/11 Democrat.

But Simon is beholden to neither right nor left in this tale of Hollywood chic run amuck, as he talks out of school about his adventures with, among many others, Richard Pryor, Warren Beatty, Timothy Leary, Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Allen, and Julian Semyonov, the Soviet Union's version of Robert Ludlum and also a KGB colonel who tempted Simon to join the KGB himself. Among the topics covered along the way:

Is there a new blacklist in Hollywood, this one targeting conservatives?
Simon's red-carpet tours of the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union with Hollywood screenwriters and famous mystery novelists.
Why Al Gore's documentary on global warming didn't deserve the Oscar on artistic grounds alone; and why the Academy's voting system is so corrupt.

And, as they say, there is much, much more besides.

Roger L. Simon is the author of ten novels, including the eight prize-winning Moses Wine detective novels, which have been published in many editions and translated in over a dozen languages. He is also a screenwriter and has written for all the major Hollywood studios, including Bustin’ Loose with Richard Pryor, Scenes from a Mall with Woody Allen and the adaptation of his own The Big Fix with Richard Dreyfuss. Simon received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of Isaac Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story in 1989. He taught screenwriting at the American Film Institute and the Sundance Institute and served on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America. He is a former president of the West Coast branch of PEN and a former vice-president of the International Association of Crime Writers. His first non-fiction book - Blacklisting Myself: A Hollywood Apostate in an Age of Terror - was published by Encounter Books in January 2009. Simon has been blogging since 2003 and is the co-founder and CEO of Pajamas Media.