This still gets me utterly gobsmacked. He said shocking and offensive and outrageous things when it was his job to be shocking, offensive, and outrageous, working for a company for whom that's been their mission statement since day one. Yes, it probably says something about the sorts of people who can work there, and succeed (not talking about the actors who started with Troma, like Samuel L. Jackson or Marisa Tomei -- when you're an actor a job is a job, and I'd take working in a crappy, 'sploitative, B-and-lower-grade horror flick over getting trapped in a soap opera any day)...
But what really gets me is that he
has grown as a person since then. Yeah, the underlying mouthy-a**h***-******* personality is still there, but he said back at the time how making GOTG forced him to grow as a person into something unrecognizable to his past self and he was stunned by the impact it had on him. I agree that punishing people for things they said (
said, not demonstrably
did) at an earlier stage in their life is moronic. If it doesn't matter if you've grown and changed as a person, why bother growing and changing? I still remember how hiring RDJ to play Tony Stark was a
huge risk, because the last thing anyone remembered about him was all the stuff he kept getting arrested for in the late '90s. Wasn't just that he was on ALL THE DRUGS, but the things he did while on them. If he gets another shot at it, when he actually, demonstrably, provably
did things, absolutely I stand by that tasteless, crass ******* James Gunn.
Here's the thing... Howard Stern? Sam Kinison? Andrew Dice Clay? Trey Parker and Matt Stone? Hell,
Troma? If they were objectively and universally as reviled as some of the opinions herein would seem to imply,
they would never have had so many fans or been so successful. Some people
do enjoy such material. I don't. But I would never tell anyone they're not allowed to make or enjoy such stuff. This truly is a "vote with your wallet" level of thing. Just keeping things to Hollywood directors, compare what James Gunn
said when it was part of his job... to what Roman Polanski
did when it
wasn't.
ETA:
Getoninja, both Gunn and Barr have histories of nonspecific offensive tweets, yes, but what Roseanne got fired for was using seriously racist language to insult a specific person.