Rob Leicester WagnerCritiques

So much of what we read about Hollywood's past is familiar to us that we fail to recognize the hundreds of players who contributed to the film industry but were lost to time. Rob Wagner was a popular Hollywood journalist and contributor to films in the 1910s and '20s. He went on to found Rob Wagner's Script and remained an industry insider until his death. He has pretty much been forgotten, but the reality is that he was one of the few antiwar activists and socialists who successfully published a magazine with a leftist view of Hollywood motion pictures. Wagner's great-grandson's book, Hollywood Bohemia, covers the origins, rise and decline of this unusual, but important, publication from the 1920s until it folded in 1949. How and why a magazine that rejected national advertising and refused to pay its writers succeeded is uncovered in this excellent and scholarly examination of progressive politics in the motion picture industry. We learn that unlike the sensational movie magazines of film celebrities, Script was a serious publication devoted to the purity of this new art form and how it uncovered the exploitation of writers by film studios, animal cruelty during filming, unionization and the Russian cinematic influence of Western films. This is truly an extraordinary book.