OT: James Gunn Mega thread

Chris Pratt responded to the controversy with a passage from the Bible, lol

Also Dave apparently went on a rant about Cybernazis?

I also found out that Ben Shapiro is against Gunn's firing? Didn't see that coming.

So for the sake of consistency do you agree that Mike Cernovich should be fired for his past tweets?

The point is that if Disney going to fire someone for tweets that date back almost a decade, why didn't they fire others for things like domestic abuse and even actual pedophilia (see the director of Powder)

It's about pointing out Disney hypocrisy.

Apparently Michael Rooker just quit Twitter and I honestly don't blame him.

At this point people who work in Hollywood should avoid social media all together. Especially in this current climate.

So this was taken from Reddit by someone who claimed to have worked with Gunn on a film backed when they were with Troama.


"This might be a couple of days late to be writing about director James Gunn’s firing by Disney, but I wanted to make sure I got my thoughts in order. (Also, I’m an incredibly slow writer.)

I feel compelled to write in depth about Gunn’s firing, in a way I’ve never before felt compelled to write about anyone else who’s recently faced (for want of a better term) “Hollywood justice.” This is probably because a.) I knew James Gunn, and b.) I liked James Gunn. (I was somewhat acquainted with another high-profile media person who was forced out of his job for alleged improprieties. But as I didn’t care much for him personally I, rightly or wrongly, didn’t give him or the allegations much thought after he had to face the music.)

These might be selfish reasons to speak now when I’ve remained silent about so many others. But there it is.

I worked at Troma Entertainment in the mid-1990s, the same time that James was working there. I was the editor of the film TROMEO & JULIET, which James is credited on as co-screenwriter with the director Lloyd Kaufman. But James did a lot more on that film than that simple credit shows. With all due credit and respect to Lloyd, James was a driving creative force on that film. I worked with James in the editing room the way I normally collaborate with a director; he was in the room constantly with me. Lloyd felt more like a producer who had final cut, though I figured that this was because he had a company to run and didn’t have time to be in the editing room as much. James was young and hungry and saw this film as his big break, so he was more invested.

(In full disclosure, I haven’t seen or spoken with James in years, well before his work on the GUARDIANS films. The last time I saw him was at a midnight screening of his film SLITHER at the South by Southwest festival in 2006. We had some intermittent email contact after that. I tried to get the editor job on his film SUPER, but was unsuccessful. I think the last time we emailed was in 2012, about a TROMEO reunion at the New Beverly Cinema that I was unable to attend.)

Now even back in the 90s James had a twisted sense of humor. But we were working at Troma, the maker of underground cult/horror films like THE TOXIC AVENGER and CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH. A twisted sense of humor was an asset at a place like Troma. It wasn’t always my sense of humor, but I knew Troma films appealed to a certain kind of audience and I figured that James knew that audience. For myself, as a film editor just starting out, I was simply glad I had a job.

I also always felt that James knew how to focus and hone that twisted sense of humor. The ending of Tromeo & Juliet is a perfect example (spoiler alert!) Tromeo and Juliet find out, after they’ve already been married and had sex, that they’re full-blood siblings. But after finding out, they say to hell with it, run off, and continue to live happily ever after. Even though they’re living in incest, they lead a content suburban life. The children are a little deformed, but otherwise they’re a happy, loving family. It’s an ending both twisted and sweet at the same time, an ending that, for me, is pure James Gunn.

Though James did admit to me once that he loved scatological humor for its own sake. And at some point after TROMEO was edited but before the final sound mix was done, a decision was made to have the character of Tromeo’s father, Monty, fart constantly throughout the movie. No one ever told me that Monty was supposed to always be farting, and I later heard that no one ever told the actor playing Monty either. The sound editors just added a bunch of fart sounds whenever Monty was onscreen. I always assumed this was James’ idea, though I guess it could have been Lloyd’s.

So. James. Twisted sense of humor. Noted.

When I first heard that Disney was firing James over old tweets, something didn’t feel right to me. Now as I said, I both knew and liked James, so it was very possible my “something didn’t feel right” was simply personal bias. So I looked at James’ old tweets as well as the reactions to the tweets, the reactions that caused James to be fired. And I figured out what didn’t feel right to me.

No one has claimed that James had harassed or abused them. Unlike so many of the other “Hollywood justice” cases (Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, etc. etc.) no one said, “James Gunn did something terrible to me, and he should be punished for it.” There’s no victim.

And in the absence of an actual victim, all of this brouhaha, boiled down to its essence, is simply about something that James said.

Now I don’t believe that James is in any way a pedophile. When we worked together, he seemed to live a pretty normal life with his then-girlfriend. He was also a genuinely nice guy: well-spoken, well-educated, fun to be around. What James did in his humor and what I saw of how he lived his life were two different things to me. When his novel THE TOY COLLECTOR came out in 2000, he signed my copy, “Frank, thanks for all the long days of boofing in the T&J editing room.” Believe me, James and I did no “boofing” in the editing room. That’s just James’ twisted sense of humor at work. So I have no reason to think his tweets about pedophilia are also anything more than his twisted sense of humor, and I’m going to work on that assumption. If you disagree with me, well, nothing I say will convince you so I guess stop reading here.

While I was still in grad school I was having problems working with a certain director, and I asked a recent graduate who was several years older than me for advice. I’ve since forgotten how this related to my problem, but he said something that I never forgot, “Never write anything down that you wouldn’t want coming back to you. It’s one thing to say something out loud; people forget what you say, and even if they don’t their memories about it can be challenged. But once you write something down, there’s a record. If you write someone a letter, that letter can be filed away and be brought back out at any time to show people what you said. So make sure you don’t write anything down that you’d regret later.” And he was just talking about what you’d write down on a piece of paper and then put in the mail. A year or two later the Internet became big, and his advice became even more important, where anything you wrote could be pulled up in a Google search (well, Yahoo search back then).

I always took that advice to heart. And I guess a result of that is my public social-media presence was, and still is, pretty innocuous. Mostly nerdy, “safe” posts about STAR WARS, comic books, and filmmaking. There was nothing too extreme, nothing that might come back to haunt me later (though who would come back and how they would “haunt” me is always very vague in my fears).

After James’ movie SLITHER came out in 2006, I started following him on social media. So I saw a lot of the so-called-offensive tweets firsthand. Now I’m not offended easily, so I didn’t necessarily find any of what he wrote online offensive. But some of it I did find in bad taste. Some of it was just shocking. And some of it was genuinely funny. (I admit I burst out laughing at the “weak hotel shower” one.) But I always read what James posted online, no matter what I thought of it, simply because I was impressed by James’ fearlessness. Even if I was as funny as James, I would never have the courage to post what he did. I would constantly be afraid it would come back to bite me. But James just put it all out there, not caring what anyone else thought. Plus, he was so much more successful than I was (even in 2006), so he must have been doing something right. He had a good career, he had fans, so apparently whatever he was doing worked for him. I didn’t necessarily attribute James’ success to what he wrote online, but I figured that if he’s this brave in his online life, that bravery much have carried over to other aspects of his life. It was a bravery I myself didn’t possess. So a lot of the reason I followed James was just to witness that bravery from a distance.

The unfortunate irony is that what I was always afraid of eventually happened to James. It came back to haunt him.

Now, there’s a lot of talk online about how the attacks on James were politically motivated. I’m not going to talk about that. Not that I don’t have opinions about that, just that what I think has pretty much been covered by others online (and this piece is long enough already) so I don’t feel the need to repeat it. What I do want to talk about is that I think it’s unfortunate that in our society now we’re not allowed to ever make a mistake.

If James has assaulted or harassed someone 8-10 years ago, or had committed some other kind of crime, this would be a different story. But all James did was say some off-color jokes.

Yes, James posted some stupid stuff. And the fact that he said it 8-10 years ago doesn’t automatically excuse what he said. But enough time has passed since then that we can assess whether James is a different person or not. The fact that he doesn’t tweet like that anymore, added with the fact that he had deleted those old tweets, shows me that he has. (I see absolutely no problem with deleting old tweets of yours if you think they don’t reflect the person you are today.)

Those old tweets have come back to haunt him, though, and now he has to account for them. But even so, it’s unfortunate that in our current society there’s no way to simply say to a person, “What you said was wrong! This is why it was wrong! Don’t do it again!” And if the person understands that, and is sufficiently contrite, then the whole matter should be dropped. But our society doesn’t work like that. If we ever made a mistake at any time in our past ever, we’re now made to pay for it. And the Internet just makes dredging up our past that much easier.

If our society had a way to simply point out our mistakes, give us the opportunity to sincerely apologize and atone for those mistakes and move on, our past mistakes could never be weaponized against us the way they were for James.

Now, Disney is a private company and it can do what it pleases. But in firing Gunn, it reflects that aspect of our society where we could be punished for any mistake we’ve ever made at any point in our lives.

It’s a sad thing, because none of us are perfect. We often do and say dumb things. Should we be made to pay for them years after the fact? If so, then none of us are safe. Any of us can be called onto the carpet for something we did or said decades ago.

(I also realize that there’s an argument for what I said in the past several paragraphs to be applied to Roseanne Barr. Personally, I do think there are differences between the two cases. Barr made her tweet recently, and attacked a specific person in a racially charged way. But I also concede that I don’t care for Barr’s online personality, so I’d have to think further about it to make sure I’m not being totally biased.)

As for James:

James, what you said was wrong. Don’t do it again.

Okay, I’m good.

Frank Reynolds July 22, 2018"