Simon Brett’s Hollywood journey began in the 1980s after an agent offered six years of financial freedom for his mystery novel adaptations, including A Shock to the System and collaborations with Michael Caine, Clint Eastwood, and Michael Douglas. By 2001, ghost story scripts like The Ring—a hit with younger audiences—cemented his career, but post-9/11 Hollywood demanded anti-war propaganda, forcing him to embed in Afghanistan to resist false narratives. Blacklisted for refusing to conform, he lost income, sold his home, and faced financial ruin—yet stood by his principles, framing defiance as "soul-making" against cancel culture’s creeping conformity. His story reveals how integrity, not compromise, shapes lasting cultural resistance. [Automatically generated summary]
I knew I was going to get this picture and I finished the pitch and wound up and the guy looked at me and he said, that's great, but could you make the villain the American military?
So the funny thing about my Hollywood career is that I never wanted it.
And you have to understand that there are people who not only would sell their soul for any kind of career in Hollywood, but have sold their souls for careers in Hollywood.
You can tell just by reading stories about them in the news.
But I didn't want it.
I just wanted to write novels all my life.
That's all I wanted to do.
I wanted to write books.
I wanted to write books that were specific to me.
I didn't want anybody collaborating with me or changing what I had written.
And I knew that those books would be quirky and different.
I wasn't aiming to get on the bestseller list, though occasionally I did, but I just thought this is what I wanted.
I want to put my vision down on paper.
So I wasn't thinking about Hollywood at all, but because I knew I was going to write these quirky books, I knew I'd need money.
I knew I'd need some form of income to make sure that I was always free to do whatever I wanted to do.
So I was working any kind of job I could find.
And one day, this is way back, back in the 1980s, I was literally sitting on the edge of my bed with a pad on my knee, calculating whether I had enough money to get through the month, pay the rent, feed my family.
I was thinking how much freelance work would I have to do to keep things together.
The phone rang in back of me and I kind of reached back over my shoulder, picked up the phone, and there was a guy I'd never heard of before who said he was my Hollywood agent and he had just sold one of my books for an amount that to me at that time was like a shower of gold.
It must have been at least five or six years income to me.
So I went from wondering if I was going to make it through the month to having six years of freedom to write whatever I wanted, just like that, because of Hollywood.
And because of that offer and because that book was sold, people started paying attention to me.
And I got a call from a producer in New York who said to me, I will pay you to write any screenplay you want to write.
And I said, I don't want to do that.
You know, I don't want to be in the movie business.
And she looked at me like I had just been hit by lightning and didn't know it, which was literally true.
I mean, who else does this happen to, right?
But I said, I don't want to do it.
And she said, well, is she shocked?
She says, is there anything you would write?
And I said, well, I read this wonderful mystery by this terrific mystery writer named Simon Brett.
It's called A Shock to the System.
If you optioned that, I would adapt it.
A couple weeks later, she called me up.
I optioned it.
An actor named Tony Randall had the option on it.
She bought the option from him.
And now I thought I have to do it.
So I wrote the screenplay to a shock to the system.
And I thought it was pretty good.
I worked very hard on it.
And as it was coming out of my, whatever those things were called, those jet printers where you had to tear the paper after it came out of the printer.
As it was coming out, they hired Michael Kaine to star in it.
And they made it.
And it was a good movie.
And the script caused excitement in Hollywood.
And I became, I'm not sure I was the flavor of the month, but I was one of the flavors of the month.
And into New York flies this Hollywood agent I've never seen before and didn't even know I had, takes me out to a lavish dinner at the Russian tea room and says to me, I can get you now any Hollywood career you want.
I said, I don't want a Hollywood career.
But still, he was able to get me work.
And over the years that went by, every year or so, I would get an assignment and I would think that's an interesting story.
That would be fun.
And I would write a screenplay and pick up some extra dough.
And it was good.
You know, it kept me, so I never had to do any, I never had to do anything.
I never had to kowtow anybody.
I didn't have to change my books.
I could write what I wanted to write.
And over time, you know, I moved to England and I still get offers from Hollywood.
I wrote movies in England as well, worked with big producers and met stars.
So now I came back to the States and they started to make my books into movies.
And Clint Eastwood made True Crime and Michael Douglas made Don't Say a Word.
And they were going into production.
And I thought, you know, I'm getting to be middle-aged.
If I want to work in Hollywood at all, I should probably go and work in Hollywood.
So I came out to California and I started working in Hollywood.
And at the same time this happened, 9-11 happened.
Just as I came back to the States, 9-11 happened.
In fact, Don't Say Word was the first hit film to come out after 9-11.
And it opens with my name over the Twin Towers.
And I remember sitting in a movie theater and hearing people gasp when they saw the Twin Towers still standing in this movie that came out just about a week after they'd been destroyed.
Around 2002, a ghost story movie came out called The Ring with Naomi Watts.
And I went to see it.
I love ghost stories.
And I could tell right away that this was going to be a big hit.
And I stood out, as I sometimes do, in the lobby to hear what people were saying as they came out.
The doors opened.
And out of the theater marched all these 13-year-old girls.
And they were all saying the same thing.
They were all saying that was the scariest movie I'd ever seen.
And what was innovative about The Ring is that it was a horror movie, but it was geared toward younger people and it was rated PG-13.
So all these girls could see it who had never actually been to a horror movie.
Now, here's the thing.
I know more about ghost stories than any living human being.
I have read almost every ghost story ever written.
I love them.
And I love the kind that can be geared to younger people because I don't like blood and gore.
I don't want to write horror.
I want to write ghost stories.
So now I just start churning out these ghost stories and I'm selling every one of them.
They come out of my printer.
I sell them.
I'm selling two, sometimes three scripts a year.
They have to understand.
That's big money.
That is a lot of money when you are selling more than a script a year and my fee had gone up.
And so I was making a decent hit for every screenplay.
But at the same time this is happening, we're going to war.
America is going to war and first in Iraq and then Afghanistan.
And at the same time that's happening, the culture mavens of America, the talk show hosts and the actors and the producers and writers are all starting to talk about what horrible people we are for being so prejudiced against Muslim people that we would go to war against them just because they had blown us up.
And I started to have these kind of weird situations in Hollywood that I'd never had before.
So for instance, I was asked to come in and pitch a rewrite of a famous scary movie.
And I went in and I did the pitch.
It was the best pitch I have ever done in my life.
I don't know if you've ever had the experience where you're talking and suddenly you realize you are just on a roll.
It was the best pitch.
I just thought, oh, I'm golden.
Nobody else is going to get this movie.
This is terrific.
I knew I was going to get the picture.
And I finished the pitch and wound up.
And the guy looked at me and he said, that's great, but could you make the villain the American military?
And I said, I actually just blurted out.
I said, we just went to war.
The American people don't want to see our military portrayed as villains while the boys are being shot up in Afghanistan.
Thanks for coming in.
I was gone.
I was out in the parking lot almost before I finished this, almost before the sentence was out.
I was ushered out the door.
Happened again when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, a famous director, found a script of mine, an old script that had been bouncing around for a couple of years, wanted me to update it.
He brought me in.
In the first 90 seconds, he said to me, the Republicans don't care about Mitt Romney.
They just want to get the N-word out of the White House.
And he didn't say N-word.
He said exactly what he meant.
And I said, that's ridiculous.
It's so much more complicated than that.
Thanks for coming in.
I was gone.
I started to write about the fact that Hollywood was making movies about anti-war movies while our boys, our men and women, were fighting in the field.
And, you know, during the Vietnam War or after the Vietnam War, they wrote famous anti-war films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, but everybody had come home already.
The war was already over.
Now, while our guys were actually getting blown up and shot at, they were making films about evil American GIs raping Iraqi women, committing murder, going crazy.
And I started to say, you know, that's wrong.
You're perfectly welcome to hate the wars and oppose the wars, but you can't make propaganda for the enemy while our guys are getting shot at.
That's despicable.
And I even went to Afghanistan.
I had myself embedded with the troops to give myself some authority to speak about this.
My phone shut down.
I thought it had been disconnected.
I mean, it stopped ringing so completely that I started to call my agent and say, you think I'm being blacklisted?
Oh, no, no.
Nobody in Hollywood cares about your politics, all about money.
I thought, you know, I don't know.
That was awfully quick and awfully complete.
My income, I mean, I was still, look, I was still making money from books and doing a lot of work, a lot of different kinds of work.
But my income went from up here to flatline.
I mean, my Hollywood income was gone.
And the way I felt about it, and I said this to my wife at the time, who, of course, she wasn't thrilled to have our income disappear, but I said, you know, guys are having the, you know, guys a little older than our son are having their legs blown off or being killed fighting these really bad guys with these real, this really bad philosophy.
I'm just, I'm just losing a little money, you know, I'm losing a little money.
And I'm willing to do that.
I think we have to do that because I think we have to speak up for them while they're actually out there fighting these wars.
But I won't lie.
I mean, I never thought not to do it.
I never considered playing it safe.
I never considered keeping my mouth shut.
But it wasn't easy.
It wasn't happy.
Eventually we had to sell our house.
We had to move.
I mean, it was, you know, it was a genuine hit on my income.
But the funny thing about it, the thing that's interesting now is I look back on it.
There's two things.
One is that if I had not done that, I would now be out of work.
I now have more movie assignments and writing assignments than I've ever had.
Probably.
I'm probably as busy as I've ever been.
That wouldn't be true if I had kept my mouth shut and just towed the line and done what they wanted me to do, because now they've gotten so woke they won't hire white men after a certain age.
Even younger white men are not getting hired right now.
My agent just told me, he said, you know, I couldn't get you hired, but you're working as much as any client I've got.
So you never know, first of all, what's going to happen when you do what I still think was the right thing to do.
But the other, and I think far more important point is this.
I know all the guys who kept their mouths shut.
I know the guys who towed the line.
I know the guys who got the work that I wasn't getting anymore.
And I look in their eyes and I listen to the things they say and the excuses they make.
And I know for a fact they paid a much, much higher price than I did.
You know, I never starved.
I never was out in the street.
I had a bit of a hard patch.
But I always was able to wake up and know that I was the guy that I meant to be, that I started out to be, the guy who said what was true, words in my life, writing things in my life.
If my words don't mean anything, I don't mean anything.
The price those other guys paid was much, much higher than the price I paid.
I mean, of course, nobody says you're blacklisted, kid.
Nobody says, you know, get out of town or you'll never work in this town again.
That doesn't really happen.
So I can't swear that I was blacklisted.
But it was pretty coincidental that just as I began to express my opinions, the phone stopped ringing as suddenly as it's possible for it to stop.
And, you know, I get this question so often.
Words That Matter00:01:32
You know, how do I tell my professor, you know, what I think without losing my grade, without getting a lower grade?
How do I tell my boss that I don't agree?
How do I say to HR that I don't want to take the anti-whiteness class or whatever?
And the thing is, you just do it.
There's a price you pay for everything.
There is a price you pay for everything.
And the price of buying into lies and pretending to believe what you don't believe is exorbitant.
It is incredibly high.
The business that you're really in, no matter what you do, whether you sell insurance or work in Hollywood, drive a cab, no matter what you do, the business that you're really in is in the soul-making business.
You're in the business of forming your own soul.
And when you get to a certain point, any act of courage, any act of truth-telling, any act of sacrifice for the right is going to have built you up in ways that you didn't even think about.
And it's going to have made you somebody that you can look in the mirror and say, hey, I'm that guy.
I'm that guy.
Instead of the excuses, the constant rationales, the bitterness and the emptiness that you get from throwing it away.
You're given a great gift.
When you're born, you are given a great gift, which is the gift you're given is the person you're meant to be.
The little gesture that you make, I really do believe this, the little gesture that you make, if the guy next to you makes one, the guy next to him makes one, the lady on the other side of you makes one, those little gestures actually do turn the tide.