About Roger L. Simon

Roger L. Simon — the only writer alive to be profiled positively by both Mother Jones and The National Review — is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, prize-winning mystery novelist and the CEO of the influential new media company Pajamas Media. He is also a weekly columnist, distributed by Creators Syndicate.

Born in New York City, Simon graduated from Dartmouth and the Yale School of Drama. While at Yale, he wrote his first novel Heir, which was bought by United Artists and made into the film Jennifer on My Mind. This brought Simon to Hollywood to write screenplays.

Simultaneously, he embarked on his career as a crime novelist, writing The Big Fix, the first of eight mysteries about radical detective Moses Wine — dubbed the hippie Sam Spade by the Los Angeles Times. The Big Fix won the John Creasey Award of the Crime Writers of Great Britain, and was nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America and then made into a successful film starring Richard Dreyfuss. Simon wrote the screenplay.

Other Wine novels are Peking Duck — set in the People's Republic of China — and The Straight Man — based on the life of comic Richard Pryor, for whom Simon wrote a screenplay. The Straight Man was also nominated for the best novel Edgar.

In film, among Simon's credits are the box office smash Bustin' Loose with Richard Pryor and Scenes From A Mall with Woody Allen and Bette Midler. In 1989 he co-wrote Enemies, A Love Story with director Paul Mazursky. The film garnered Simon an Oscar nomination in screenwriting and won many prizes, including best picture from the New York Film Critics. More recently, Simon directed and co-wrote with his wife the independent feature Prague Duet. Coming out in 2011 from Summit Pictures is The Gardener, directed by Chris Weitz, for which Simon wrote the story.

Simon has also written journalism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Commentary and The National Review, among other publications. He served on the board of directors of the Writers Guild of America, was the West Coast President of PEN and the North American Vice President of the International Association of Crime Writers. He is a member of the writers branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

After September 11, 2011, Simon had a political transformation. A lifetime left-liberal, he moved to the right on foreign affairs and later financial issues (not social issues). He began a blog to describe his transformation, and it became something of an Internet sensation. This led to his co-founding Pajamas Media and later PJTV, the first online political television network. Currently he does the Poliwood Show on PJTV with filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd, on which the two discuss the intersection of politics and the entertainment industry.

In 2009, Simon recounted his adventures in Hollywood and his political transformation in a memoir called Blacklisting Myself. It has just been reissued in paperback by Encounter Books with additional chapters as “Turning Right At Hollywood And Vine: The Perils Of Coming Out Conservative in Tinseltown.”