Roger L. Simon on *The GOAT*
Roger L. Simon is a co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ Media — the powerhouse alternative media company that has launched conservative comedian Steven Crowder and others to fame.
He joined the show to discuss his latest work, his writing ethos, and why the storytelling medium inherently cuts against Hollywood’s empty virtue signalling.
TRANSCRIPT
Charlie Deist: Good morning and welcome to the show of ideas, not attitude. I am Charlie Deist, your host this morning, filling in for Bob. Glad you dropped in to spend an hour of your time with us.
First, I want to tell you about the AMAZING potential of a powerful combination of ALL-NATURAL herbs that can restore your vitality.
This ancient ayurvedic formula actually reverses aging at the cellular level and can make you feel 12, 25, 35, or even 55 years younger. It’s harvested from the high ridges of the Himalayas where only the bravest Sherpas dare to tread.
And if it sounds too good to be true, well… maybe it is.
This miracle mixture can be yours for just one easy payment of… your soul.
No, this is not a Sunday morning radio infomercial.
It is the premise of a new book, The GOAT, from Academy award winning screenwriter Roger L. Simon.
Some call him the Godfather of conservative media.
He was nominated for an Oscar in 1990 for the screenplay of the movie The Enemies: A Love Story.
He is also a deep political thinker, but his true art is writing stories. He found success in Hollywood screenwriting before blacklisting himself by coming out as a conservative.
He also wrote the popular Moses Wine detective series as well as The Big Fix (both the book and the screenplay). He’s worked with Woody Allen and Bette Midler, Richard Pryor, many others that you’ve heard of. Roger is also a co-founder and CEO emeritus of PJ media, the powerhouse alternative media company that has launched conservative comedian Steven Crowder and others to fame.
He’s here with us this morning to discuss his unique worldview and the theme of his new book, The GOAT.
Roger, welcome to the show this morning.
Roger Simon: Great to be here. That was the greatest intro for my book. It was really funny. You had me going for a second. I thought, are they advertising herbs on here? My book is about this fictional herb, of course. You had me for a second and I thought, well that was really smart. So great work Charlie.
Charlie Deist: Well, I’m still trying to figure out the key ingredient. I’m experimenting here in my kitchen with all kinds of things. I’ve got the turmeric out and people say, you know, add black pepper, but I haven’t managed to take many years off of my age yet. But it’s a great book — I’m about halfway through your book and I can’t put it down. Give us a brief overview of the book. It starts off with an aging tennis player who suffers from a back injury and then has a botched surgery, so he finds himself turning to some strange solutions.
What’s going on at the outset of the book?
Roger Simon: The guy, who is my age, has finally made it into the finals of his local club tournament in the senior division. His back goes out something fierce. He’s taken over to the Cedar Sinai Medical Center and the doctor says, “We’ve got to operate, this is real bad,” but there’s a woman from India or Nepal or something in the corner who says “do not do operation — always makes it worse. Go see my cousin, Gambo and valley, he fix up. But of course the guy is a Western guy. He takes the operation, but the woman is right and it’s a disaster. So ultimately he meets Gambo, who does have those herbs that Charlie was advertising on this show a few minutes ago, and he starts to get younger and live a second life, and the rest of the book which I won’t talk too much from here involves the world of tennis.
Part of his second life is battling Nadal at the French Open and Federer at Wimbledon and becoming a world renowned person, but it has overtones of Goethe’s Faust. It’s a funny story but a cautionary tale too. It is covertly a libertarian /conservative book, but not in the open way because I don’t believe that art should be propaganda. I think it’s boring and ineffective. So this is more like one of those classic novels, which really were conservative tales. If you take apart the Greek theater you can see it is very conservative. Don’t tell that to Colbert or somebody like that, they wouldn’t get it.
Charlie Deist: That is an understated point. I think that when we talk about Hollywood, it is always characterized as the extreme left. Certainly people you have worked with, Bette Midler, for example, are out there on Twitter very loudly proclaiming their liberal bona fides. But when we look at these ancient stories, you talk about Goethe — and he was ripping off Christopher Marlowe, who was also probably ripping off an earlier source — I have heard there are only so many stories out there, and most of the new ones that come out of Hollywood are just borrowing from these ancient themes.
So you’re saying this is a conservative perspective in a way. Is there a conservative basis in storytelling?
Roger Simon: Yes. The great stories that are classics to us, from Don Quixote to Hamlet, to the Godfather, or Mr. Smith goes to Washington. All of these have messages that are more or less conservative. You know, Hollywood used to produce movies that were largely pro-American and conservative, because the old Hollywood moguls were of course that way. They came from eastern Europe and they loved America for obvious reasons. They escaped hell.
We have lots of actors and directors and people who pretend that they are liberal, but that’s only in their public lives. In their private lives they are are the most greedy people you could imagine.
Charlie Deist: Right. Now, as someone who was at least at one time very much a Hollywood insider, do you know of people in Hollywood that today are suffering under this illusion of being liberal, when in fact they would like to do what you did and actually have the courage to come out as having a more conservative sensibility?
Roger Simon: Yeah, there are a few of those, but then most of them have made an accommodation. And that accommodation is sort of like a split personality accommodation. They invent a mini-me. They act as if they are the most progressive person you ever heard — ”everybody should be equal.” Then they hang up and they call their agent and say, “15 million!? Are you kidding me? That should be at least 30 million. Now go get it or I will never talk to you again.” There are like two different people. I saw it all the time even when I was more liberal. It would disturb me but now I think it is just ugly.
Charlie Deist: There is this term, “virtue signaling,” and it seems like there is a new currency where the more you posture and present yourself in a certain light, the more fame you can gain. You have also said, in a book titled I Know Best, that moral narcissism has become a major problem in America. Is this something that you’re driving into at all in the new book with this kind of desire and lust to be youthful again? How does this fit into the broader cultural and moral landscape in America?
Roger Simon: It does. I want to entertain people. I Know Best was a nonfiction book. So people can read my opinions very clearly, but when you write a novel I have the duty to be entertaining. I’ve had a lot of great reviews on it. Most people laugh out loud. One reviewer said he was laughing out loud on an airplane causing embarrassment. The novel as a form, just as a film or a play, must entertain your reader.
Your second duty is to instruct. But you must instruct very quietly. The themes are expressed more subtly in the novel but you can pick your choice on how you want to read it.
Charlie Deist: Fair enough. Certainly the book does entertain. I was up late last night and couldn’t put it down.
There was this one section that really grabbed me. You’re writing about Los Angeles, where you spent many years. You no longer live in Los Angeles, and part of this passage might illuminate why. I want to just read briefly from this. I think it will act as a kind of a hook for people who might be interested in checking it out. You are writing about your protagonist Dan Gelber before he undergoes this transformation. He’s still skeptical about the potential of the amazing potential of this herbal package.
You write:
He was already in the valley speeding north on Reseda past half empty strip malls, smog check garages, convenience stores and Armenian bakeries. Cities of homeless growing beneath the freeway underpasses, their tents sprouting like toadstools between the weeds, taco stands and falafel joints, Argentinian butchers and hallel butchers, tire shops and pawn shops. It was the heart of multicultural Los Angeles. The city most of its inhabitants, loved and hated or more accurately loved to hate.
Everywhere and nowhere at once, the melting pot that kept on melting until its contents spilled over into the Pacific on one side and sank into the Mojave on the other, only to discover none of it had ever really come together as one, never fused or united, and only existed as isolated dots. One after the other, after the other, after the other.”
So, there you have it people. This is the premise of The GOAT — an acronym for the greatest of all time, referring to this protagonist who undergoes a transformation at the hands of a Nepalese Sherpa with a special herbal mixture that gives him his youth back and launches him to fame as potentially the greatest of all time. What did you intend with that title? It’s kind of a double entendre. You’ve got this old man and sometimes old men are referred to as goats.
Roger Simon: I was thinking exactly what you said. There’s a double entendre of course. The term “GOAT” in tennis and many sports means the greatest of all time. So I deliberately used it to describe the feeling of an old man being an old man. When people read the book they will probably be able to put this together, I hope so. It is a positive ending. I don’t like to bring people down. It may be that Alduous Huxley was the greatest writer of all time when he wrote Brave New World, because we may already be living in it. But I don’t need to remind people of that. I like to think of finding another way out.
The book has like 35 Amazon reviews right now, and it is interesting to read them as an author, because they are different from the reviews you would get from the literary press. We’re getting great reviews from this but not all amazon reviews are great for every book. Most people loved the ending but some people absolutely hated it. It’s 4.4 out of 5 so it’s doing well, but for some reason some people couldn’t stand the ending. It’s really how interesting people respond. I think it has a lot to do with their own psychology and something to do with the writing. I think we authors have a lot to learn from Amazon, actually.
Never before have you been able to get such direct feedback from readers. Feedback from book reviewers is a slightly different thing, because book reviewers are trying to show off that they are smart guys or girls and know what they are doing. They want to look good. It has to do with themselves and not the book. But people writing their reactions on Amazon are just telling you what they thought. They can be anybody from anywhere in America or anywhere in the world.
I’m like Trump–I have a thin skin, so I want everybody to give it five stars, but that can’t be possible for any book ever written.
But if you put on your leather skin and read these things you can learn something.
Charlie Deist: I imagine it’s a skin thickening endeavor! The Bob Zadek Show has put out a few self-published books, compilations of interviews, and it is the same sort of thing where people will give feedback. Some like it, but you can’t please everyone. The best feedback does seem to come closer to the source — the readers. It is not all just the literati giving their opinion from atop the mountain.
I think that this book works on a few different levels and I encourage people, before it comes out in a movie theater in some number of years, to get ahead of the curve and check it out. I think it strikes the Zeitgeist particularly well. Not only do you have this theme of the tennis world and who is the “greatest of all time” people talk about — you know, Kobe Bryant and compare across sports…who knows if you can even do such a thing? — this sort of obsession with rankings and the best, and that intense competition that is probably nowhere greater than in Hollywood.
But you also have this question of where do we turn for healing? What do these alternative medicines actually have to offer?
You do hear on the Sunday morning infomercials–these outrageous promises it seems, but there’s always kind of a question of maybe there is a better path than the path of Western medicine.
I was wondering if this book is at all autobiographical? Have you experimented with any of these herbal remedies as compared to western medicine? Or was this something you were thinking as in line with the Zeitgeist that will particularly resonate with a film-going audience in 2020.
Roger Simon: I have done lots of acupuncture and things like that, but the real healing that this novel talks about is not Western or Eastern medicine. I’m not going to quite give it away, but it’s much more related to what you just said a few minutes ago about the pursuit of being the greatest, whether it’s in tennis or in Hollywood or in anything. It may be a misplaced pursuit.
The real pursuit is something very different and why this is — to me — a deeply spiritual and religious book, just like Faust stories often are. You don’t make a compact with the devil, even though he has a great sense of humor, which he does in this book. So it is more than western versus eastern medicine. One thing is quite clear to me about those: There is probably good things in both.
Charlie Deist: I think it’s funny that the character who comes in the Mephistopheles figure to keep the Faustian analogy, this Doctor or Shaman, he makes a pretty compelling pitch that the devil is just an ancient story that was made up to scare people. It is persuasive. For a second when I was reading that I found myself thinking, you know, maybe this is all just a crock, but, you’re making the point in the novel that there is maybe some wisdom embedded in these old stories, correct?
Roger Simon: Yeah, totally correct. I’m flattered that you believe it because it is only interesting to create a Mephistopheles or whatever kind of figure you’re going to call him, if it’s well-done and funny. If you don’t make Mephistopheles beguiling it’s not interesting. He does have something to say and you know, at different times in my life I thought he was right.
Charlie Deist: Well, all in all, these Sunday morning listeners didn’t expect to tune into a sermon, but they are getting quite a bit more value than I promised at the beginning.
Roger Simon: Well, I’m not a priest or a rabbi! Far from that. People can read all about all the crap I did in life. I mean, I’m a 60’s guy, so I make no claims as a spiritual leader. I’m just a storyteller. The story went the way it was. And you know, interestingly enough, I went through several drafts before I came to the ending I did. So, I had to teach myself.
Charlie Deist: I wanted to ask you one more question, but first of all, just to refer readers one more time to the Amazon page and note that Roger Simon, who I’m speaking with this morning, the founder of PJ media and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, is asking for reviews, even the harsh ones. He wants to learn from this process. So go check out the book, The GOAT.
My last question has to do with the intersection of entertainment and politics in the figure that is most talked about these days. Conservatives can’t quite decide what to make of him. Liberals have more or less made up their mind that he is perhaps Mephistopheles himself. I’m talking about Donald Trump, and I’m curious to get your perspective on how he has blended these two worlds of entertainment and politics and whether this is potentially a good thing or whether it represents some sort of degeneration of politics.
What’s your perspective?
Roger Simon: I am a solid supporter of Donald Trump. My wife put it best. He’s the bad medicine we need right now. I know this is show is going out in Northern California, and I know a lot of people have made these assumptions but I think they ought to examine them more carefully.
The thing most people dislike about Trump is his style. But to do what he has done, he has to be pretty good. So start thinking a little bit more.
Charlie Deist: Bob is a libertarian and has done many shows that address this question from a variety of different angles. One of the frequent themes that comes up is the accumulation of unelected authority within the bureaucracies and the alphabet soup agencies. If Trump does anything in his presidency to leave a positive legacy, it would be dismantling this whole administrative state. Maybe it is also tied to this moral narcissism that you speak and write about. There is this sense that the elites will manage things to everyone’s benefit. and it never quite seems to work out that way. But Roger, I want to thank you for spending some of your time with us this morning. It’s been a pleasure talking with you. Where can people follow your writing.
Roger Simon: Real Clear Politics, and The Epoch Times. And Amazon. By the way, speaking of Amazon, we are having a little trouble today with the Kindle version, but give us some time if you want to buy a kindle. Paperback and hardback is fine.
Charlie Deist: It should be worth every penny. Thanks Roger for joining us again and we’re going to break here, but when we come back, we’ll be talking about the potential formation of a new political party in California. Quentin Kopp has teamed up with some other high power political figures here in California. We’re going to get to the bottom of that.
