The posts were jokes and they were several years ago. Yes, they were tasteless. Disney can do what they want, but we’re moving toward a pretty crappy world when you can get taken down for jokes you made nearly ten years ago by people who disagree with your politics and have nothing better to do than search through old deleted social media posts.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Agreed. Theese tweets have been known for YEARS. IIts a little silly hes fired for them now.

Also, its a little ironic that they were brought to life by a man known for spreading the pizzagate bullshit.

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

It's the reign of terror. Where is Robspierre when you need him.

Well if, IF, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 gets made, I'll wait to see it. If at all. Gunn's style made those movies. Bringing in a new director to copy that formula will likely fail.

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

Yeah, but it's no different than your friend taking out an ad in the local newspaper to prank you, and you take out another one to retort. Yours is not offensive to your friend, but read as a standalone newspaper insert, it's offensive to others.

If someone don't understand Twitter et al are the same thing, they have no business using social media.

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Brian

Gonna buy a fast car, put on my lead boots, take a long, long drive
I may end up spending all my money, but I'll still be alive

I havent read all the tweets, but if some did link to child open sites, then theres no place for that. But Disney should have known this when they first hired him.

Is there a political angle? I read a couple articles and didn't see one.

But I did noticed that Ted Cruz is now after him. Does that mean this is like a retaliation for Roseanne Barr or something?

From what I can tell there was no link to child porn, and that's a myth. There was a link that advertised itself as a link to child porn, but linked to a video of young girls singing "I Touch Myself" by the Divinyls. Which is super creepy and stupid, but not child porn.

The Verge put together a nice montage of the offending tweets. Pretty poor attempts at humour but as far as I can see he's not actually linked to anything inappropriate or illegal.

Doesn't have to be illegal to get fired though.

If i made them jokes at work i guess I'd get fired, so would many other people.

I certainly would. I'm not sure whether I'd be fired for making them 10 years previously when I wasn't working for my current employer though.

This is why I don't have much sympathy for him. When I read the Tweets, I thought he made them when he was 21, and just young/stupid.

But at 40? Nope. This wasn't a momentary lapse of reason. He says he was trying to be "edgy" but I have to wonder if we're seeing the real James Gunn in those Tweets.

He cut his teeth in troma films. Based on that, the tweets should surprise no one.

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

They did. I cant find it now, but i saw on reddit an article that was written about it in 2012

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

Apparently Some trump supporting dumbass got mad at him for his dislike of ben shapiro and trump or something and made a stink about the tweets in retaliation.

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

There’s nothing in those tweets that would get me fired.

I own the company, though..

Anyway, I don’t see what the big deal is.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

This.

Damn people are snowflakes.

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Proud member of the MSF (Maple Syrup Mafia)

Fired for talking about raping a child. Huh? If he'd done it instead of talking about it he'd have an Oscar by now.

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________
It doesn't really matter what Phil is saying, the music of his voice is the appropriate soundtrack for a bicycle race. HTupolev

The guy who pulled up the old tweets and brought them back to public notice (Mike Cernovich) is a right wing internet wing nut (sometime guest host for Alex Jones) who objects to Gunn’s anti Trump stances.

He’s out to get some other liberal entertainment types too.

https://www.thewrap.com/...t-michael-ian-black/

Somewhat ironically, Cernovich was charged with rape in 2003, and pled down to misdemeanor battery charges.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

And more from Gunn’s brother about how none of this is new information, and that Gunn has openly talked about these posts in the past, and credited working on the Marvel/Disney movies as helping him find a different voice.

https://www.thewrap.com/...dians-of-the-galaxy/

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

There’s some fan talk about getting the director who did Thor: Ragnarok to do Guardians 3. That could definitely work.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Hey that article has the link i referred to earlier!

The problem with this firing. Is that it gives zero impetus for anyone to ever change for the better. He apologized 6 years ago, made 2 blockbuster hits since then, and no longer makes those types of jokes. Yet hes still fired. The exact same result if he had never changed. So whats the reason for the next guy to apologize?

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

If Disney really wanted to seperate themselves from him, shouldn't they stop production on the movie completely since he was the writer, plus eliminate all of his past Disney contributions from their catalog?

This reminds me of another thread on here. How much of a bad persons work are you willing to accept?

This seems easy to me as its only entertainment, if you want nothing to do with him, get rid of all his past contributions.

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Just Triing
Triathlete since 9:56:39 AM EST Aug 20, 2006.
Be kind English is my 2nd language. My primary language is Dave it's a unique evolution of English.

Never apologize.

Never.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

I agree. Two professional athletes got in trouble in the last six months for tweets they send out while in high school. Why is anyone sharing anything remotely personal on social media anymore?

The only thing society loves more than an underdogs is tearing people down.

What he wrote was incredibly disgusting, but it was 10 years ago not last week. I'm not the same person i was 10 years ago and I'd hate to lose my job over something I said back then. Still, I'm blown away by what people put on social media.

hahahaha! good one

It's business more than than entertainment. Shareholder value. So sever the current relationship, maintain the valuable property.

The other problem with this firing, is that it is by a company that released some incredibly racist and inappropriate material in the past, but has now "changed". Yes, it was longer ago, but does that really matter?

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Starting from scratch...

Gunn is a silly goose who didn't realize that the mob always eventually consumes its own and that the internet is (and, by extension, tweets are) forever. What, he never learned or bothered to educate himself about the ultimate fate of Robespierre?

Case in point: the director himself jumped on Twitter recently to cheer Roseanne Barr's defenestration over her comments about Valerie Jarrett. Unfortunately for him, he had those tweets (icky at minimum, gross and disturbing to 'normal' sensibilities, at maximum) laying like skeletons in the closet that is his past.

And so the same mob in which he'd proudly stood as a member came for him, much as the mob came for the leader of France's Terror during that country's revolution. Unfair as such a thing is, it serves as an object lesson about the vagaries of mob justice, I'd say.

Personally, I condemn both episodes. Both Barr and Gunn had the right of free speech on their side and it was only speech, as unpopular as it was in both instances, that led to their downfall at the hands of a crazed mob that would dearly love to silence all 'incorrect' speech of which they disapprove. How dare they.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

While I like Gunn's films he should have kept his mouth shut about Trump and politics in general

Good point!

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who's smarter than you're? i'm!

Why?

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Basic rule of polite society: You don't talk about politics, religion, or money. Guys like Gunn drop a big, smelly shit in public then are completely surprised to find out others think it stinks.

In this case there was instant justice. Gunn used an old tweet of Shapiro's to attack him. Not the smartest move from someone with a history of tweeting about child rape and bestiality.

Look on the bright side. Maybe he'll get back to making films like Slither instead of Disney's film making by committee.

what Arch said :)

He was a big cheerleader for the Twitter outrage mob, that's for sure. And Disney, as his employer, certainly had a right to sever its relationship with him for his tweets, just as ABC had the right to do the same thing with Roseanne Barr. The First Amendment exists particularly to prevent government from infringing on speech, with certain specific exceptions, but private individuals and employers are free to do as they'd like. It's still not what I'd do to someone under any circumstance, though, but that's just me. And I don't like it that people are losing their livelihoods simply because a few people on Twitter don't like what someone said.

At any rate, even though the roaming outrage mob took down Gunn and Barr, I think that we here in the LR are probably safe. Probably. ;-)

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."

First, how are we supposed to have national discussion and debate about the important issues that impact a collective democratic society if we're not allowed to talk about politics, religion, or money? Why are you here in the LR? Pretty sure that, to some extent, it's so you can talk with people about politics, religion, and money.

Second, Gunn was not "completely surprised" to find out some people didn't like his tweets. He's openly talked about them in the past, and acknowledged their offensiveness and how he's grown as a person from where he was when he posted them.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Somehow I think that this conversation, both nationally and in the LR, would be going differently if the director had been, say, Clint Eastwood or Vince Vaughn.

Honest question that I don't know the answer to, may need JSA for the legal opinion. Do they have a right to fire him for actions prior to him being hired, which they knew about prior to hiring him? Can they legally change their mind after the fact?

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Starting from scratch...

Arch Stanton wrote:
slowguy wrote:
Runguy wrote:


I'm guessing he doesn't think his LR posts are big, smelly shits.

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-----------------------------Baron Von Speedypants
-----------------------------RunTraining articles here:
http://forum.slowtwitch.com/...runtraining;#1612485

I don't know the basics of his employment contract with Disney, which would answer a lot of your questions, is my guess. He may have signed a personal services contract, perhaps with a "language and morals clause," or he may have signed an industry standard union-type contract (there are actors unions/guilds and I imagine the same is true for most Hollywood jobs) with some sort of broad clause covering his misstep. Or he could simply be an at will or independent contractor employee of the studio. Or a combination of the three, which is likely. He's probably not a direct employee of the studio, however. Disney may have just decided to sever its relationship with him, with neither side having any obligation to each other, and the media -- lazy as always in its reporting -- is characterizing it as a firing, which in most peoples' minds conjures up a traditionally understood employer-employee relationship.

Hollywood contracts have many clauses and such in them, and the studios can pretty much do what they'd like, I think. And they often do, if Harvey Weinstein and his ilk are any indication.

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"Politics is just show business for ugly people."