Rob Wagner

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Rob Wagner
May 11, 1940 issue
Born	2 August 1872 Detroit, Michigan U.S.
Died	20 July 1942 (aged 69) Santa Barbara, California U.S.
Occupation	writer, artist, film director, magazine publisher

Robert Leicester Wagner (1872-1942) was the editor and publisher of Script, a weekly literary film magazine published in Beverly Hills, California, between 1929 and 1949.

Rob Wagner was a magazine writer, screenwriter, director and artist before founding the liberal magazine that focused its coverage on the film industry and California and national politics. Its leftist leanings attracted many of the best artists and writers during the Depression.

Early years

Born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 2, 1872, Wagner graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree in 1894. He worked as an illustrator for the Detroit Free Press before moving to New York in 1897 to illustrate magazine covers. He served as art director for The Criterion, a literary magazine considered the forerunner to the New Yorker. His illustrations of coverage of the Spanish-American War and the rising star of Theodore Roosevelt increased circulation and gave considerable weight to the magazine's political commentary and coverage.

In 1900, he moved to London to work as an art director for the Encyclopædia Britannica. He returned to Detroit in 1903 to marry Jessie Brodhead, and then moved to Paris to study art. In 1903-04 he studied at Academies Julian and Delacluse, initially working in charcoal before focusing on oil portraits. When he returned to Detroit he took commissions to paint portraits of the city's high society families.

In 1906, he moved to Santa Barbara, California, when Jessie, who was suffering from tuberculosis, could no longer endure the harsh Michigan winters. In Santa Barbara Wagner continued taking commissions for portraits. The couple had two sons, but Jessie's health deteriorated rapidly, and she died the year they arrived at the age of 28. With two young motherless boys, Wagner left them with his own mother, Mary Leicester Wagner, in Santa Barbara and opened a studio on South Figueroa Street in Los Angeles to pursue his art.

Motion picture background

Instead, he became intrigued with motion pictures as an art form. He wrote his first scenario for The Artist's Sons in 1911. The semi-autobiographical two-reel film produced by Selig Studios explored the bohemian lifestyle of a Los Angeles artist and his two young sons. Wagner's own sons, Leicester ("Les") and Thornton, played themselves in the film, which also featured dozens of Wagner's original oil portraits. In this period, Wagner taught for a number of years at the Manual Arts High School, where his students included Frank Capra, Jimmy Doolittle^[1] and Leland Curtis. Wagner went on to write scenarios for Charles Ray, Hal Roach and Mack Sennett, and wrote and directed films for Will Rogers, including Two Wagons, Both Covered (1924).

In 1914, Wagner married Kansas City newspaperwoman Florence Welch, who told her new husband that he could make a better living writing about the motion picture industry than working as an artist. He covered the film industry writing for the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty, Photoplay and other magazines. His series of articles on the film industry in The Saturday Evening Post resulted in the book Film Folk (1918), one of the first serious examinations of the movie business.

Motion Picture & Television Fund

In 1921, Wagner, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith co-founded the Motion Picture Relief Fund, which later became the Motion Picture & Television Fund, to provide financial aid to film industry workers who fell on hard times. The creation of the program eventually led to the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital retirement facility in Woodland Hills. Acquisition of the 48 acres (190,000 m²) of land and building started in 1940.

Wagner was an original member of the Board of Trustees. Other members included Harold Lloyd, William S. Hart, Jesse L. Lasky, Rupert Hughes, Irving Thalberg and Mae Murray among others.

Script

The Wagners founded Script in February 1929 and enlisted noted writers and film people to contribute articles without pay.^[2] Edgar Rice Burroughs, Walt Disney, William Saroyan, Ogden Nash, Dalton Trumbo, Chaplin, Hughes, William DeMille, Ray Bradbury, Leo Politi and Stanton MacDonald-Wright among others wrote for the magazine. Bradbury was a regular contributor with a series of short stories from about 1940 through 1947. MacDonald-Wright provided art reviews. Gladys Robinson, wife of actor Edward G. Robinson, wrote a Hollywood gossip column. Script was liberal, witty and fond of tweaking the noses of the country's movers and shakers.

Rob Wagner (r.) with artist Leo Politi on Olvera Street, Los Angeles, 1940.

Leftist leanings

Wagner, a Socialist, was a progressive advocate dating to at least 1909. By 1915, he attempted to found a community cooperative with author Jack London to establish a utopian community. The project failed. Wagner also sent his sons to Boyland, an avant-garde boarding school with a progressive, if not unorthodox, approach to education. Pacifist Prynce Hopkins operated the school. However, Hopkins was arrested under the Espionage Act in 1918 for making an anti-war speech in Los Angeles. Hopkins was charged and pleaded guilty in federal court of interfering with military recruitment. Federal authorities interrogated Wagner about Hopkins. Although Wagner defended Hopkins, it put Wagner in the spotlight of the government’s attempt to crush the anti-war movement. His defense of Hopkins cost him his job as a teacher at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.^[3]

Around this time Wagner had become friends with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was eligible for the draft in both the United States and England during World War I, but was rejected for military service because he was too small. Yet he was under intense scrutiny for failing to support the war effort. Wagner waged a publicity campaign on Chaplin’s behalf to demonstrate the actor’s support. Wagner also helped organize a War Bond tour that included Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.^[3]

Wagner also introduced Chaplin to leftists Max Eastman and Upton Sinclair, and between the three men helped influence Chaplin’s left-leaning worldview. Chaplin often participated in roundtable political and moral discussions of the war, which was sponsored by the Severance Club that consisted of writers and film people, including Wagner.^[3]

Script was a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's policies. As the world teetered on the brink of war, it often took a pacifist tone. And its wartime domestic coverage took on unpopular causes such as defending the rights of Mexican-Americans during the Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots, the postwar resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan^[4] and questioning the wisdom of interning Japanese-Americans. Wagner had written extensively for Socialist publications in the first decades of the 20th century and his liberal views were reflected in his columns and interviews with leftists Upton Sinclair, Max Eastman and William C. deMille. The magazine also conducted extensive interviews with Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky in 1938.^[5] Script also published articles written by blacklisted screenwriters, including Dalton Trumbo and Gordon Kahn.^[6]

Politi, the magazine's art director, often used the illustrations of his Mexican child characters, Pancho and Rosa, to advocate pacifist and anti-fascist arguments.

Upton Sinclair association

During the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign, Script gave considerable editorial space to Upton Sinclair's candidacy while the rest of the film community waged a smear campaign against him by claiming his radical economic policies would bankrupt the movie studios. During Sinclair's campaign for governor, his balanced coverage nearly sank the magazine as advertisers and subscribers began to pull out. Keeping a low profile, Wagner also worked on Sinclair's EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign writing writing the text for pamphlets and designing the organization's logo.

The magazine's free-thinking attitudes appealed to most of its readers. The magazine, with a circulation that never rose above 50,000, was illustrated with cartoons from various contributors. The art often were unrelated to the articles and only occasional photographs beyond the covers were used.

Script's demise

Wagner died of a heart attack on July 20, 1942, less than two weeks before his 70th birthday, in Santa Barbara. His son, Les, a reporter for the original Los Angeles Daily News and later a war correspondent for the Office of War Information in India, took over the editing duties until his India assignment in 1944. Under Les Wagner, the magazine took on a more news-oriented approach. It took up populist causes and critiqued local media, often criticizing as fascist Hearst newspaper coverage and editorials on Constitutional issues and the civil rights of Mexican- and Japanese-Americans.^[7] In 1943, Script published editorials defending Charlie Chaplin, who was named as a defendant in a paternity lawsuit by Joan Barry, while Los Angeles newspapers were critical of the filmmaker. Blood tests ultimately determined that Chaplin did not father Barry's child. In 1944-45, Wagner filed dispatches for Script from Calcutta, India, on U.S. and British forces in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Leicester "Les" Wagner wrote a column and later covered science and aviation for the Los Angeles Mirror-News after Script ceased publication.

Florence Wagner kept the magazine going, but it lost much of its punch because the personality of the publication was driven by Rob Wagner. In March 1947, she sold the magazine to Robert Smith, the general manager of the original Los Angeles Daily News. Smith brought in new writers that added new voices and a much needed lift in film comment. Smith also arranged to have Salvador Dalí contribute cover illustrations. While the publication's circulation rose to its pre-war levels of 50,000, it failed to attract the necessary advertising. It folded in 1949. Les Wagner died in 1965 in South Laguna Beach, Calif. Florence Wagner died in 1971 in La Jolla, Calif.

Filmography

The Artist's Sons (writer) (1911), Our Wonderful Schools (director/writer) (1915), Mabel, Fatty and the Law (writer) (1915), A Yoke of Gold (writer) (1916), A Dog's Life (actor) (1918), Dangerous Business (writer) (1920), R.S.V.P. (writer) (1921), Smudge (writer) (1922), Gee Whiz, Genevieve (additional gags) (1924), Two Wagons, Both Covered (director/writer) (1924), Going to Congress (director) (1924), High Brow Stuff (director) (1924), Our Congressman (director) (1924), It's a Bear (assistant director) (1924), Fair Week (director) (1924), Smilin' at Trouble (writer) (1925), Heads Up (writer) (1925), So This is Paris (titles) (1926), Ladies at Ease (writer) (1927) and Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (writer) (1928).

References

Sources

The Best of Rob Wagner's Script by Anthony Slide (1985)
Tramp: The Life of Charlie Chaplin by Joyce Milton (1998)
Rob Wagner's Beverly Hills Script (Vol. I)
Rob Wagner's Script (Vols. II-IV)

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Rob Wagner.

Authority control	VIAF: 33421420

Persondata
Name	Wagner, Rob
Alternative names
Short description	American magazine publisher and editor
Date of birth	August 2, 1872
Place of birth	Detroit, Michigan U.S.
Date of death	July 20, 1942
Place of death	Santa Barbara, California U.S.

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