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Bruce Alan Wagner (born March 22, 1954) is an American novelist and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. He is known for his apocalyptic yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of Hollywood.
When Bruce's parents divorced, his mother worked at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she remained for 40 years. He attended Beverly Vista Elementary School in Beverly Hills, California until 8th grade. He went to Beverly Hills High School but dropped out in his junior year. He worked in bookstores, drove an ambulance for Schaefer Ambulance Service, and became a chauffeur at the Beverly Hills Hotel. He has two older sisters.
Wagner self-published (with Caldecot Chubb) Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories in an edition of 1,000, which sold out at West Hollywood's Book Soup. It was optioned by Oliver Stone to direct but the project never came to fruition. Wagner has said that the script he wrote, based upon the stories' protagonist-a chauffeur named Bud Wiggins-later became Maps to the Stars, the 2014 film directed by David Cronenberg. The book was well reviewed and as a result Wagner received a publishing deal with Random House.
He has written essays and op-ed pieces for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum and Vanity Fair. His novel I'm Losing You was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and his novel The Chrysanthemum Palace was a PEN/Faulkner finalist in 2006. He has also written essays and prefaces for books by photographers William Eggleston and Manuel Alvarez Bravo as well as painters Edward Ruscha and Richard Prince.
Wes Craven read an unproduced script of Wagner's ("They Sleep By Night") and then Craven asked Wagner to co-write (1987). Wagner and Craven wrote the story and share screenwriting credit with Chuck Russell and Frank Darabont. Wagner and Oliver Stone co-executive produced Wild Palms, the mini-series Wagner created, based on a comic strip which he wrote for Details. Wild Palms aired on ABC in 1993. He was the executive producer and co-writer (with Tracey Ullman) of Tracey Ullman's State of the Union series (2008 - 2010) on Showtime. In 2014, Cronenberg directed Wagner's script, Maps To The Stars, a film which Cronenberg had been trying to make for a decade. For her role as Havana Segrand, Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. Wagner accepted the award on her behalf. In 2020, he wrote Mother Tongue, an adaptation of his book I Met Someone. It will be directed by Mike Figgis on location in Hong Kong, in early 2021.
Wagner signed a book deal with Counterpoint Press in 2019 for his novel The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories. When he turned in the manuscript, Wagner said that the editor and publisher told him "the language is problematic." One of their objections was to the word "fat" - a 500-lb. character in the novel playfully calls herself "The Fat Joan" (an homage to the popular social media personality "The Fat Jew")-and said "not even a character can call herself that." The writer Sam Wasson wrote about the book's journey in Graydon Carter's digital magazine AirMail ("Bruce Wagner's Woke Universe"), suspecting that Wagner's editor had been cautioned by "sensitivity readers." In the same article, Wasson quotes Wagner as saying, "My entire body of work would be thrown into a furnace if it were to be read and judged by sensitivity readers." On October 13, 2020, Wagner decided that rather than look for another publisher, he would release the novel for free, on brucewagner.la, and into the public domain. Within days, the book became available on-demand through Amazon, for which Wagner receives nothing. The book is published in a limited, signed edition by Felix Farmer Press, a new publishing house in Los Angeles, for which Wagner also receives no profit by choice.
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