Rob Wagner's Script

"Rob Wagner's Script" was a weekly literary film magazine published in Beverly Hills, California, between 1929 and 1949 by the journalist couple Rob and Florence Wagner.

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.

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 Encyclopedia 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, Calif., 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.

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 and Thornton, played themselves in the film, which also featured dozens of Wagner's original oil portraits.

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. He continued film making, directing a series of comedies for Will Rogers and working as a gag writer for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach.

The Wagners founded Script in February 1929 and enlisted noted writers and film people to contribute articles without pay. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Walt Disney, William Saroyan, Ogden Nash, Dalton Trumbo, Charlie Chaplin, William DeMille, Ray Bradbury, Leo Politi and Stanton MacDonald-Wright among others wrote for the magazine. It was liberal, witty and fond of tweaking the noses of the country's movers and shakers.

The magazine was an ardent 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 and questioning the wisdom of interning Japanese-Americans.

During the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign, Script gave considerable editorial space to Socialist 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. Wagner was an ardent Socialist but kept his own politics out of the magazine. He was responsible for shaping into words Charlie Chaplin's leftist leanings by introducing him to Sinclair and noted leftist Max Eastman. During Sinclair's campaign for governor, his coverage nearly sank the magazine as advertisers and subscribers began to pull out

Still, 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.

Wagner died of a heart attack on July 20, 1942, less than two weeks before his 70th birthday, in Santa Barbara. His son, Leicester, 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.

Florence Wagner kept the magazine going, but it lost much of its punch because the personality of the magazine 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 need punch in film comment. While the magazine's circulation rose to its pre-war levels of 50,000, it failed to attract the necessary advertising. It folded in 1949. Florence Wagner died in 1971 in La Jolla, Calif.

ources

*"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)