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Bruce Wagner | |
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| Born | Bruce Alan Wagner March 22, 1954 Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. |
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| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Beverly Hills High School |
| Notable works | I'm Losing You (1996) |
| Spouse | |
| Parents | Morton Wagner Bernice Maletz |
Bruce Alan Wagner (born March 22, 1954) is an American novelist and screenwriter based in Los Angeles known for his apocalyptic yet ultimately spiritual view of humanity as seen through the lens of the Hollywood entertainment industry.
Wagner was born in Madison, Wisconsin, [1] to Morton Wagner and Bernice Maletz. When he was four, his family moved to San Francisco, then to Los Angeles four years later. His father was a radio station executive who eventually moved into television, producing The Les Crane Show , before becoming a stock broker. When his 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 the 8th grade. He attended Beverly Hills High School [1] 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.
In his twenties, Wagner began writing articles for magazines and writing scripts. His first screenplay, Young Lust , was produced by Robert Stigwood but was never released. It was that experience that ultimately led him to write his modern take on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby" short stories about an alcoholic screenwriter who never gets ahead.
Wagner self-published (with Caldecott 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 2015 film directed by David Cronenberg. The book was well reviewed and led to a publishing deal with Random House.
He has written essays and op-ed pieces for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Art Forum and Vanity Fair. His novel I'm Losing Youwas 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, and painters Ed Ruscha and Richard Prince.
Wes Craven read an unproduced script of Wagner's ("They Sleep By Night"), which led Craven to ask Wagner to co-write A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (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 that he wrote for Details magazine. 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, David Cronenberg directed Wagner's script, Maps To The Stars, a film that 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 stated that "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 no profit. The book is also 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. [2]
Wagner married actress Rebecca De Mornay on December 16, 1986, and the couple divorced in 1990. [3] He married Laura Peterson in 2009. They later divorced also. He currently is in a relationship with actress Jamie Rose.
After interviewing Carlos Castaneda for Details magazine in 1994, [4] Wagner became part of Castaneda's inner circle under the assumed name of Lorenzo Drake. He directed the first videos on Tensegrity for Cleargreen. Wagner continues to be close to the group since Castaneda's death in 1998. His first autobiographical piece about his experience with the shaman and author Castaneda appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Tricycle magazine. After Wagner's novel Memorial was favorably reviewed in that magazine by a Buddhist monk, Wagner wrote its editor, James Shaheen, a letter of thanks, and Shaheen invited him to contribute an essay about Castaneda. Wagner and two partners own the television and film rights to all of Castaneda's books. More recently, Wagner studied with Indian guru Ramesh Balsekar. [5]
Carlos Castañeda was an American writer. Starting in 1968, Castaneda published a series of books that describe a training in shamanism that he received under the tutelage of a Yaqui "Man of Knowledge" named don Juan Matus. While Castaneda's work was accepted as factual by many when the books were first published, the training he described is now generally considered to be fictional.
Sidney Sheldon was an American writer. He was prominent in the 1930s, first working on Broadway plays, and then in motion pictures, notably writing the successful comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), which earned him an Oscar in 1948. He went on to work in television, where over twenty years he created The Patty Duke Show (1963–66), I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70), and Hart to Hart (1979–84). After turning 50, he began writing best-selling romantic suspense novels, such as Master of the Game (1982), The Other Side of Midnight (1973), and Rage of Angels (1980).
The Dead Zone is a 1983 American science-fiction thriller film directed by David Cronenberg. The screenplay, by Jeffrey Boam, is based on the 1979 novel of the same name by Stephen King. The film stars Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Martin Sheen, Anthony Zerbe, and Colleen Dewhurst. Walken plays a schoolteacher, Johnny Smith, who awakens from a coma to find he has psychic powers. The film received positive reviews. The novel also inspired a television series of the same name in the early 2000s, starring Anthony Michael Hall, the pilot episode of which borrowed some ideas and changes used in the 1983 film.
John Wagner is an American-born British comics writer. Alongside Pat Mills, he helped revitalise British comics in the 1970s, and continues to be active in the British comics industry, occasionally also working in American comics. He is the co-creator, with artist Carlos Ezquerra, of the character Judge Dredd.
Terry Southern was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and university lecturer, noted for his distinctive satirical style. Part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village, Southern was also at the center of Swinging London in the 1960s and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. He briefly wrote for Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
Beverly Hills Cop is a 1984 American buddy cop action comedy film directed by Martin Brest, screenplay by Daniel Petrie Jr., story by Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie Jr., and starring Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, a street-smart Detroit detective who visits Beverly Hills, California, to solve the murder of his best friend. Judge Reinhold, John Ashton, Ronny Cox, Lisa Eilbacher, Steven Berkoff, Paul Reiser, and Jonathan Banks appear in supporting roles.
Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and originally trained as a psychiatrist. He wrote numerous dark fantasy and horror stories. As an editor, he created a three-volume set of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian fiction restored to its original form as written, and edited the long-running and genre-defining The Year's Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books. His Carcosa publishing company issued four volumes of the best stories by some of the major authors of the so-called Golden Age pulp magazines. He is possibly best known for his creation of a series of stories featuring the character Kane, the Mystic Swordsman.
Dead Ringers is a 1988 psychological thriller film starring Jeremy Irons in a dual role as identical twin gynecologists. David Cronenberg directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Norman Snider. Their script was based on the lives of Stewart and Cyril Marcus and on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, a "highly fictionalized" version of the Marcuses' story.
Wild Palms is a five-hour miniseries which was produced by Greengrass Productions and first aired in May 1993 on the ABC network in the United States. The sci-fi drama, announced as an "event series", deals with the dangers of politically motivated abuse of mass media technology and virtual realities in particular. It was based on a comic strip written by Bruce Wagner and illustrated by Julian Allen first published in 1990 in Details magazine. Wagner, who also wrote the screenplay, served as executive producer together with Oliver Stone. The series stars James Belushi, Dana Delany, Robert Loggia, Kim Cattrall, Bebe Neuwirth, David Warner, and Angie Dickinson. The episodes were directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Keith Gordon, Peter Hewitt and Phil Joanou.
After Dark, My Sweet is a 1990 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by James Foley and starring Jason Patric, Bruce Dern, and Rachel Ward. It is based on the 1955 Jim Thompson novel of the same name.
Lawrence George Cohen was an American screenwriter, producer, and director of film and television, best known as an author of horror and science fiction films — often containing police procedural and satirical elements — during the 1970s and 1980s, such as It's Alive (1974), God Told Me To (1976), It Lives Again (1978), The Stuff (1985) and A Return to Salem's Lot (1987). He originally emerged as the writer of blaxploitation films such as Bone (1972), Black Caesar, and Hell Up in Harlem. Later on he concentrated mainly on screenwriting, including Phone Booth (2002), Cellular (2004) and Captivity (2007).
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is a 1987 American fantasy slasher film directed by Chuck Russell. The story was developed by Wes Craven and Bruce Wagner and is the third installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and stars Heather Langenkamp, Patricia Arquette, Larry Fishburne, Priscilla Pointer, Craig Wasson, and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger. Nancy Thompson, now a psychiatrist, and Kristen, a patient who can bring others into her own dreams, team up with other kids to launch a daring rescue into the dreamland and save a child from Freddy Krueger.
Nancy Thompson is a fictional character in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. She first appears in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as a teenager hunted in her dreams by enigmatic serial killer Freddy Krueger. In this film, she was portrayed by Heather Langenkamp—who reprises the role in the sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987). Langenkamp later portrayed a fictional version of herself who embodies the role of Nancy in Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994). A reimagined version of the character, Nancy Holbrook, is portrayed by Rooney Mara in the 2010 remake.
Jeffrey David Boam was an American screenwriter and film producer. He is known for writing the screenplays for The Dead Zone, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Innerspace, The Lost Boys, and Lethal Weapon 2 and 3. Boam's films had a cumulative gross of over US$1 billion. He was educated at Sacramento State College and UCLA. Boam died of heart failure on January 26, 2000, at age 53.
Double Indemnity is a 1943 crime novel by American journalist-turned-novelist James M. Cain. It was first published in serial form in Liberty magazine in 1936 and later republished as one of "three long short tales" in the collection Three of a Kind.
Michael Joseph Cassutt is an American television producer, screenwriter, and author. His notable TV work includes producing or writing, or both, for The Outer Limits, Eerie, Indiana, Beverly Hills, 90210, and The Twilight Zone. In addition to his work in television, Cassutt has written over thirty short stories, predominately in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. He has also published novels, including the 1986 The Star Country, the 1991 Dragon Season, the 2001 Red Moon and the 2011 Heaven's Shadow, in collaboration with David S. Goyer. In addition, Cassutt contributes non-fiction articles to magazines and is the author of the non-fiction book, The Astronaut Maker, a biography of NASA legend George W. S. Abbey (2018).
Will Beall is an American screenwriter and former Los Angeles Police Department detective. He is best known for writing the scripts for Gangster Squad (2013) and the DC Extended Universe films Aquaman (2018) and Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021), and for developing the police TV series Training Day and Deputy, which were canceled after a single season.
Brandon Cronenberg is a Canadian director and screenwriter. He is the son of renowned filmmaker David Cronenberg and the brother of Caitlin Cronenberg. He is known for his science fiction horror films Antiviral (2012), Possessor (2020) and Infinity Pool (2023). He has won several accolades for his work.
Maps to the Stars is a 2014 internationally co-produced satirical drama film directed by David Cronenberg, and starring Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon, and Evan Bird. The screenplay was written by Bruce Wagner, who had written a novel entitled Dead Stars based on the Maps to the Stars script, after initial plans for making the film with Cronenberg fell through.
1428 Elm Street, also known as [the] Elm Street House, is a fictional residential house and street address in Springwood, Ohio, and is an important location in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, where it has been the home of Nancy Thompson and her mother, later Jesse Walsh and his family, and finally Lori Campbell and her father, throughout the film series. It has also been implied to have been Freddy Krueger's home at some point before the events that take place in the films. It appears in some form in nearly all the films, as well as literature, comic books, toys, and music videos. The house, like Freddy Krueger, Nancy Thompson, Tina Gray, and Kristen Parker, were all conceived by Wes Craven.
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