An Interview with Bruce Wagner

Bruce Wagner is a novelist, screenwriter, and producer based in Los Angeles who’s written twelve acclaimed novels. His darkly comedic depictions of Hollywood and the intersections of wealth, desire, desperation, fame​​, spirituality and metaphysics draw from his own experiences living and working in Los Angeles to deliver transgressive, surreal, and sometimes cynical narratives.

Wagner is a cornerstone of Hollywood lore, having gone from chauffeuring stars as a limo driver to having Rob Pattinson play the limo driver protagonist of David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars (2014), a screenplay Wagner wrote twenty-three years prior to its release. An autodidact, he acknowledges you’ll never know the life your work will have, how people will respond, or who will adapt it, so he writes and edits for no one but himself.

He’s best known for his "Cellphone Trilogy" (I'm Losing You, I'll Let You Go, and Still Holding), his debut, Force Majeure, as well as Dead Stars and The Empty Chair.

Gabby Sones, co-editor of The Big One, sat down to speak with Wagner about his life and legacy.

Bruce Wagner: You should call the issue “unwell,” “unwellness.”

TBO: I am unwell. I wanted to start with a brief synopsis of how your career transpired and how you've become an iconic fixture of Hollywood and LA fiction.

Bruce Wagner: I suppose I had always had a kind of destiny that I would [become a fixture]. I would write short stories that mimicked other writers. All writers, until one inhabits one’s specific destiny, try on the costumes of others writers' destinies. It depended on my age; for me it was Capote, it was Henry Miller, who introduced me to the world of global voices, and then it was the French, it was Rimbaud, although I knew my destiny was not to be a poet. What I wanted was to inject poetry into prose. Then it was Genet, Marquis de Sade, it was Faulkner, it was Dickens. So many fathers in essence. Each writer has a scent, a specific scent. Without that scent, one certainly can be an extraordinary writer, and there are exceptions I believe. For some writers, that scent is difficult to locate. One can have an overwhelming, overpowering scent that becomes treacly or unpleasant.

I was so overwhelmed by the idea of writing a novel, and even a short story. I came across the so-called prose poems of Kafka, and I was alarmed and shocked that this man known for the perfection of his short stories and the mystery of his novels was writing in a form that could last a paragraph, or three, or a page, so that was challenging for me. And I was already a Hollywood screenwriter at that point. Many cases of novelists like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, many, many cases were outsiders that came to Los Angeles to write screenplays...

I didn't know too many writers until I was a known writer myself. I was a high school dropout, I never went to workshops or university, I never went to Yaddo. I was considered to be kind of garish or not to be taken seriously because my DNA was that I was raised in the slums of Beverly Hills, tainted for the New York crowd.

I think there was a resentment among the literati that my second book was reviewed by John Updike in the New Yorker, and there was a kind of combative, effete regard for me. I remember Gary Indiana trashed me in interviews. No one knew quite what to do with me. It would have been far more convenient had I not been writing in the manner that I wrote. I was never interested in being king of the hill of the perverse, as perverse and as dark as my books are.

But there’s always an aspect of the sacred. And the two go neck and neck for me. You cannot have the perverse without the sacred, or you're just a nihilist, you’re a satanic peacock. I have no interest in that.

TBO: When you say that you tried on the destinies of others, do you mean that you tried to emulate their trajectories as a writer or their style of writing?

Bruce Wagner: Their style. I mean, every writer does that. Hemingway was very important to me. Any writer where you’re dumbstruck and find yourself occupied in an analysis of how that writer did what he did. How is that magic trick done? Some writer famously said you can learn much more about writing from a terrible novel than you can an extraordinary one. I don't think that's true.

So I became possessed by writers, any writer worth his weight along that journey until those costumes are burned or jettisoned. That was an essential part of my education, because I’m what they used to call an autodidact, I didn’t have a syllabus, I was just in the great oral tradition, writers were passed on to me or mentioned in certain things that I read and then I explored the tributaries, and found myself back on the Nile or Mississippi of the deathless authors and then more tributaries.

All of these things contribute to a reaffirmation of one's own scent. You find those who are like-minded. Hemingway once insulted the work of Faulkner because Faulkner’s use of language was so arcane, so dense, so florid, but this is simply Faulkner’s scent not appealing to Hemingway. But, you know, I was on the internet the other day, and Glenn Gould was trashing Rachmaninoff, you know, Henry James trashing Dickens. None of this is relevant. It means nothing.

TBO: You've built your knowledge base and style or scent over time without formal education. Do you think anyone can benefit from an MFA or from formal education in writing fiction?

Bruce Wagner: I think there’s no benefit unless one has an inherent proclivity and talent. Nothing will help. But many extraordinary writers have come from MFA programs. It's not a litmus test at all. Writers come from all nooks and crannies, and sometimes from the temples of academia. In the end, it’s a wash.

TBO: Yeah, I presume it can definitely be a waste of money.

Bruce Wagner: So many things can be a waste. I think probably 90% of writers that go into MFAs wanting to be fiction writers don’t achieve that goal, and some of that has to do with lack of talent, but one can have an abundance of talent and go nowhere.

Where we’ve been in publishing now for a number of years is a wall. I now work with Arcade, and I know firsthand how difficult it is. Forget cancel culture, which I think stymied and suppressed or destroyed some writers. Young writers with families who had their first novel accepted were far more likely to make alterations in that novel in bad faith because they needed to keep the work and to provide.

It’s always been almost a joke to be an artist in our culture. It’s presenting itself with enormous obstacles, but now those obstacles are confirmed and verified by the abysmal state of publishing.

TBO: I wanted to ask you about your first big release, Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories. I understand you self-published that. Tell me about that process.

Bruce Wagner: What happened with that really flows from what I was talking about with Kafka.

I was in the right place at the right time to come across The Pat Hobby Stories by Fitzgerald. Many of those were published posthumously in Esquire after he died. He was desperate for money, had already written his great novels and was writing these short stories for Esquire about a hapless alcoholic screenwriter, Pat Hobby. And they remain some of the funniest and darkest things I ever read.

Because I had been working in Hollywood as a hack screenwriter for years, writing stories became an escape route for me. It was my experiment in “can I do this,” and it came naturally to me at that point in my life, I was in my early 30s then, I’d had life experiences. I was an ambulance driver, I worked in bookstores, I was a paramedic, a limo driver. I was working in boiler rooms selling ink and toner. I had lived a bit, and these stories came to me in tripartite. Main theme, sub-theme, and overall scent.

So, I thought, I would write short stories about Bud Wiggins, he would be my Pat Hobby. Bid Wiggins was less an alcoholic, more an addict, which is my story. These stories allowed me to explore the cataclysm of working in Hollywood in bad faith.

My stories were called Force Majeure: The Bud Wiggins Stories. And Force majeure was taken from a clause that was in every contract screenwriters signed which said in the instance of an act of God, writers shall not be paid, which means earthquake, war, etc. I had hand typed these things and passed them out among friends, and someone said you got something here.

I had a friend named Cotty Chubb, who was kind of a wannabe producer in those days. And Cotty had some experience publishing books, he published the books of Lloyd Fonvielle, who’s now dead.

My goal was to take it so much farther than Fitzgerald would or could,either by inclination or by the spirit of the times. Those books ended with Bud Wiggins committing a pedophilic act and becoming psychotic or killing himself in a homeless encampment off a freeway. So they were filled with hallucinatory things, and the most grossly humiliating things that could happen to a person.

Based on that, I got a book deal with Random House to expand those short stories into a novel, which became my first novel, and that was later optioned by Oliver Stone, because we sold these books out of Book Soup, on Sunset Boulevard. And we printed a thousand and sold a thousand. So suddenly I was getting reviewed in the New York Times.

TBO: How did you promote those?

Bruce Wagner: I certainly didn't do any promotion. They just became kind of a hot number. They were so unlike anything that you would read about Hollywood. And people were itchy.

I can't tell you how many times I've had people say to me that was the reason they came to Los Angeles to be in show business, or the reason they got off the plane and then decided they were going to go back to their hometown, you know, it was like one or the other.

I consider myself to this day to be kind of neurodiverse in that I have a complete focus on the symphonic aspects, the operatic aspects, of language, but really nothing else. I don't even read anymore. I have a pathology where it’s almost impossible for me to read, particularly writers that I’m obsessed with. It’s too rich.

TBO: Can you listen to an audiobook?

Bruce Wagner: I can’t.

TBO: I just listened to the Dead Stars audiobook, which you narrate yourself, and got a completely new experience of it that it didn't have when I read it on paper. Totally new texture.

Bruce Wagner: I don't think I've ever even listened to that. It’s a different animal for me, because I don't need to hear myself. Certain writers, many writers, I know James Ulroy is one of them, I think Hemingway was another, read their work out loud to see if the sentence or paragraph holds. I'm not one of those people. For me, the actual looking at a word is like looking at some kind of sacred puzzle, or hieroglyph.

For me, I’m kind of hung on the cross of words. To hear the screams of Christ is not as interesting to me as to watch the spectacle of the crucifixion.

TBO: I've heard you speak about having a very emotional attachment to words. You’ve said that's what holds together your writing, that personal relationship to the flesh of words.

Bruce Wagner: Yeah, my relationship to the English language is much like that of a lover. I feel betrayed by words, I feel some will never leave me, have an unconditional regard for me, as I do for them. I'm repelled by words. I become enraged by the misuse of words. I mispronounce words.

The sacred irony is that words will fall away at the end. And perhaps before. You have that cerebral hemorrhage, and the words, I don't know what my relationship to them will be. Will they be caregivers? I just don't know.

TBO: Tell me about how you write representations of yourself into your work.

Bruce Wagner: There's a certain, I wouldn't call it narcissism, but there's great value in exploring the extremities of one's own desires or biases, it’s the insult of being human. One can balance the hypomania and beauty of being human. I'm very interested in the grandeur of narrative, and for me to be the focus of that grandeur doesn’t attract me because then immediately, the grandeur is lost.

Because again, I use that phrase, a writer worth his weight. A writer of gravitas, whether that writer is comedic or the comedy is commingled with tragedy, has an automatic conscious and unconscious desire as a body of water to flow everywhere. That means I can find myself deeply embedded in a female character, in a child character, whether that child is abused, or whether that is a child of extraordinary intellectual powers and capabilities, whether that child has physically deformed, I can become the murdered and I can become all the lesser characters, the fringe characters that populate our lives and books. I think once a writer finds his voice, this idea of being on a loudspeaker and continuously announcing one's presence falls away.

TBO: It seems like a lot of young writers today like to write from a first person perspective, about themselves and their experience, from an autofictional standpoint. It sounds like you’re not necessarily attracted to that.

Bruce Wagner: Well, I really need to be clear. You have someone like, Karl, is it?

TBO: Ove Knausgård?

Bruce Wagner: Yes. So I was not a big reader of his, but it’s certainly case by case. You can have a voice that is so strong, such as Céline, such that you constantly feel you are reading about Céline. But the superlative of talent has a way of obliterating all of that. So at this stage in my life, I never disparage anyone's efforts because there may be great value if someone writes 10 volumes, you have Casanova’s work, you know, you have Saad's work, all these works. Then you have someone like Sartre writing about Genet, Saint Genet, I think it was three volumes, or Flaubert, and these books were essentially about Sartre as well, so I think it’s case by case.

TBO: The Terrence Malick movie, Knight of Cups, is one of my favorite films. You didn’t write the screenplay, but you make a cameo as your character Bud Wiggins. How did that come to be?

Bruce Wagner: So my old friend went to Harvard with Terry Malick, and he wanted a real Hollywood writer for the part, and he might have tangentially been aware of me. My friend called me and said, “do you wanna do this?” And I said “Yes.” They asked me at the end, do you want to be [credited as] Bruce Wagner or do you want to be Bud Wiggins? I said Bud Wiggins all the way.

TBO: Do you think that getting a story adapted is the only way to make a lucrative career out of writing fiction today? I know you're a screenwriter first, but from the perspective of someone who considers themselves a novelist in a dwindling publishing industry, should people be writing and marketing their stories with the intent to have them optioned?

Bruce Wagner: Yeah, but it doesn't always work, I've talked with Bret [Easton Ellis] about this a lot. The days of writing a spec script without being paid, thinking it will be made into a movie are completely gone. And they were never completely here because it’s an impossible thing, you can’t do it. You can write a television show, you can even be hired to write on a show that becomes a successful show and then have an idea for another television series and nothing happens. It just doesn't work that way. I think that the important aspect of writing is to take great pleasure in it. And you have to enter into that and then have another job if you need to – I’ve done that – without this fantasy that someone will do something with your work, it’s so unusual.

I wrote the movie I did with David Cronenberg, Maps to the Stars.

TBO: That's what I wanted to talk about next.

Bruce Wagner: People erroneously believe it was [my book] Dead Stars adapted into a movie, but it wasn’t, it was something I wrote out of utter exasperation. I was writing these hack screenplays in my late twenties, I was doing it 6-8 years, until I was 32, I was writing 2 or 3 of these a year and getting paid to do them and I got trapped in that, because before that I’d been making no money at all as a limo driver, so I was thrilled at that young age to be making an income. I wrote Maps to the Stars when I felt stillborn.

I felt that everything had died, in essence, so I wrote something like a dream journal. I wrote something that I felt would be impossible to make into a film. Not that it wasn’t cinematic, but that it didn't cohere or imitate or feel remotely compatible with Hollywood movies, even as an independent or a foreign film.

Occasionally you imagine you’re going to shoot an arrow into the sky toward Lars von Trier and somehow someone responds saying “Lars loved your script."

TBO: I understand you had the same agent as Cronenberg.

Bruce Wagner: This was a guy that I went to high school with named John Burnham. David always said he was more influenced by books than film, so I had John send him a copy of Force Majeure, not the short stories, but the actual novel. He liked the book and I wanted to meet with him so I flew to Toronto and that became the beginning of a lifelong friendship, but I had somewhere along the line sent him Maps to the Stars, and I didn't send it to him saying, “Hey, what do you think?”

David called me and said he wanted to make Dead Stars and he wanted Julianne Moore to be in it. I flew to New York, Julianne said she would do it, but David wanted to film the entire thing in Hollywood and it was completely cost-prohibitive. It would have been far more costly than what David was prepared to make the movie for. So the movie fell apart. And I think I went into rehab.

It was just a distressing, awful period of my life. Then David made three or four movies. He made Eastern Promises. He made A History of Violence. And then years later, when he was at Cannes for Cosmopolis, he said “I want to make Maps to the Stars and I've already spoken to Rob Pattinson and Rob has signed on without having seen the script.” So that's when it was real. I went to Toronto for the entire shoot and we did wind up shooting a week in LA, scenes on Hollywood Boulevard, beneath the Hollywood sign.

TBO: Chateau Marmont cameo.

Bruce Wagner: Yes, Chateau Marmont. And that cost a million dollars.

TBO: Just to shoot at Chateau?

Bruce Wagner: No, just to shoot in LA for one week, but this was 10 years ago. And I think the movie probably had a 12 million dollar budget. Agatha, the burn victim [character], I wanted her to be much more burned than what David did.

TBO: Yeah, you'd think since he's such a body horror guy it would be a little bit gnarlier.

Bruce Wagner: Yeah, but so be it. I was thrilled. So there's an example of a script that no one knew was 23 years old by that time. You just don’t know, you can’t know; if you knew, then everything you did would be golden. So you can’t write knowing what the trajectory or destiny of your writing will be, who it will touch, who will ignore it, and who will decide to make something, a film or television show. Then that film or television show is panned and trolled. At this point, the only suggestion I give is what gets you high, what gets you loaded in essence in terms of joyfulness or satisfaction – I’m notorious at this point for saying, writing a book for me is hellish. It's nightmarish. And for others, I don't think that's the case. It's a difficult, difficult craft to pursue. But any craft that is pursued with vigor in the world of art is a mixture of misery… and it's a kind of delicious misery. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

TBO: There's a part of Dead Stars where Bud Wiggins says “No one wants to write screenplays anymore and novels are the new screenplays.” Do you think that's true?

Bruce Wagner: Well, it's kind of like these terms, like “autofiction” for example. You get to the root of that, and what does it actually mean? There was a time when the trope was that series like The Wire were novels, you know what I mean? They're actually novels. It's kind of a meaningless, half-sexy thing to say.

TBO: Yeah, like calling Mad Men a novel.

Bruce Wagner: It's a talking point. There are films or television shows that are novelistic. I think Better Call Saul is a perfect example of that. It has a novelistic care for detail and coherence and for exposition, and light mixed with dark. And the denouement or the finale of Better Call Saul is novelistic in a sense. There's a sorrow to it. There's inexorability to it, there's a logic to it and that's something that not all works of film or television possess, not that they should.

TBO: You said when you write, you can't think about who it's going to touch or who's going to make something out of it. Is there anyone that you feel like you write for or is it truly just for yourself? Because it seems to bring you a lot of anguish.

Bruce Wagner: I don't write for anyone. I wouldn't even say it's catharsis because that would be pretentious. I would say it's a further exploration of my own scent, as masturbatory as that sounds. It's me spraying the world like an animal. I have never written for anyone. I wouldn't know where to begin.

TBO: Obviously, in today's culture, there's the specter of censorship that passes over all art forms. You've had books dropped because you write about controversial topics, there are depictions of real depravity in your work. But when you’re considered a controversial writer, there's a silo you can get forced into. I was curious if you’ve felt that silo at all, and do you feel like that reaction has changed your writing or any decisions you make in terms of your career?

Bruce Wagner: No, my career is sepulchral at this point. Leonard Cohen once told me that the idea of legacy to him was an absurdity. I am in that camp, I'm 71 now, you know what I mean? I feel that I was fortunate to be writing books at a time when … there’s always been censorship, right?

TBO: Yeah.

Bruce Wagner: I mean, Lady Chatterley's Lover, we're not even talking about Howl, or Naked Lunch. There's always been censorship. There always will be, because it's part of human nature to suppress, to censor, and to destroy.

Dead Stars is a good example because there was a kind of famous New York Times review of the book saying that it was pornographic and grotesque, but Dead Stars was published by a major house, you know? So it was not ignored or suppressed. And now we're in a different time.

People ask me, do you think we're coming to the end of that, et cetera? And I really don't know. It's convenient to say, oh yes, we are.

I felt very fortunate that it was late in my career that one of my books, The Marvel Universe, was canceled. We just published it in Argentina. Beautiful translation. There’s a custom edition, online public domain publication. My current publisher, Arcade, reissued it.

They published the most beautiful editions of my work that I've ever had. And I've been with all the major publishers on the East Coast. They're in the process of publishing my entire back catalog. I'm very lucky because I landed with a publisher for life.

TBO: I understand you’re not only published by but working for Arcade now.

Bruce Wagner: Arcade was originally founded by a man named Richard Seaver, the man that discovered Beckett, so he brought him to Grove Press and then worked there for years and then started his own house called Arcade, which went bankrupt a number of years ago.

We decided a few years ago that we would bring Arcade back more to its mission statement, or the spirit of what it once was. So in that regard, we publish so many millennial writers, right? Noah Kumin, Ross Barkin, David Mamet's first novel, we are publishing William Vollmann's three volume, 3,000 page work next year.

We have writers like the playwright Matthew Gazda, Ben Faulkner. It's a long list of writers. We are a sanctuary for writers of great worth who would be publishing themselves or online like I did with The Marvel Universe. I got so disgusted that I just released it into the public domain.

I'm just honored by this peculiar fork in the road that I've come to where I'm able to pursue not only my own fiction, but that of others. And it's been a little heartening for me because as much as I talk about the disarray and dead-end aspects of publishing, I'm kind of living the opposite of that. And it's also heartening to find young writers, mostly millennials, who have the same fetishized passion for the language that I do.

TBO: I know you said you struggle to read lately, but are there any writers that you've been adoring recently? If not, anything you’re watching?

Bruce Wagner: I've been asked to do the introduction to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, so I'm reading that now. It's often an assignment; in my past work if someone was obsessed with Dead Souls by Gogol, then I would read Dead Souls. It's what got me to Don Quixote, which is one of the most important books for me. When I was writing The Met Gala: Tales of Saints and Seekers, a book that had one of the greatest influences on me is The Conference of the Birds, which is a gathering of birds who are seeking transcendence, seeking the godhead.

As far as television, when I’m not writing I become a drooling idiot. I just play casino games on my phone, or I watch Shark Tank. Occasionally I become engrossed in a series, like Slow Horses.

TBO: Do you have a wellness routine?

Bruce Wagner: I think if I can string together an hour or two of relative equanimity during the day, that's my wellness routine. But usually it happens without my intervention. I think one of the most important things for me is nighttime, dreaming. I think sleep is the most essential thing in terms of wellness. I probably have more energy than most; there's an excitation,even if I'm exhausted, upon awakening, that the day will be almost more hallucinatory because I did not get the amount of rest that I require. But I really note that I see things knitting together at night.

TBO: How many hours do you sleep per night?

Bruce Wagner: Well, not a lot. I can get by on five and a half hours. Then occasionally I'll have a nap during the day, but it's rare because I'm chewing so much Nicorette.

But I think the most important aspect, along with sleep, is this: if we can kind of strengthen this muscle idea that nothing matters. All of these petty concerns we have, these ambitions, these notions of self, what we look like in the world, what we look to others, what we look like to ourselves are complete illusions. If you can look at these things from the perspective of death – because death is imminent. This is something that we all share as a tribe that we all deny. So I think if there’s a time during the day when one can meditate upon that, a formal meditation, on the absolute futility of us graduating into a sphere that for us represents the next level of security. That there is no security. There's great security in embracing that. There's wellness in embracing that to me. Because this idea of “wellness” is too often allied with this idea that we are “unwell.” Which is true, we are inherently unwell. And our birthright is to be well.

But there's too much of this idea of control; that we have control over anything is the source of unwellness. So if we can relinquish control, not in a way that is anarchic or self-punishing, but if we can let go for a moment or two each day of this idea that we are in control, I think that that is a very effective antidote to many things.