Hollywood and Whine.

You'd think we have enough to worry about without even bothering with the inanities of celebrity. We do, though, in part because bemoaning the power over our culture we've given celebrities and all the dumb stuff they've done with that power is itself a form of entertainment. Years ago, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham devoted his "Notebook" column to the notion that celebrities had become as gods, that Hollywood was our Olympus. It wasn't news back then, either, but it was balm for the soul of anyone who enjoys a good tsk-tsk at the state the world. In other words, pretty much everyone.

Novelist, director, screenwriter and occasional actor Bruce Wagner understands all this so well he's devoted the bulk of his considerable creative output to the cause. An excerpt from Force Majeure in some magazine - Esquire, back in the heyday of its fiction issues? - was the first sample of his writing to catch my attention. Bud Wiggins drives a limo for a living and uses his time off to try to salvage his screenwriting career. He's just come out of a meeting, if I remember this correctly, where he's been offered a horrid property to adapt. The producer, the star (I remember mentally casting Bill Murray in the role of the star) and a few other suits kept throwing ideas at him even more horrid than the junk at hand. Absurd, crazy ideas. But Wiggins, desperate for work, strains to conjure ways to fit it all in, to give them what they want. And now, he's back in his limo, and there, sitting in the back are the producer, the star and those suits. They don't recognize the driver as they fall over themselves laughing at the desperation of the miserable bastard so eager to sell off his last thread of dignity. Turns out they're putting a project together, a comedy, a scathing satire of Hollywood and the star's going to be this struggling screenwriter who... sure enough, all along, Bud Wiggins has been the brunt of a joke, the subject of the star's research into the spiritual, moral and intellectual squalor of any human soul drawn to the movie business.

That same year, 1993, Wagner made a mark of sorts with the ABC mini-series Wild Palms (see Scott Woods's 1996 piece comparing it to David Lynch's Twin Peaks and this short bit on The Wild Palms Reader), and ten years on, a few novels behind him as well as his own adaptation of one of them, I'm Losing You, he's got a new one, Still Holding, excerpted in the current issue of LA Weekly and tagged as "a weird, coprolaliac amalgam of Buddhism and Us Weekly" by John Homans in New York. Actor Kit Lightfoot is hardly struggling but he's also hardly happy. Here, he meditates:

A few months ago, he'd made vague plans to travel with Meg Ryan at Christmastime to see Ramesh, a disciple of the great sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. But now he was thinking he should make the trip alone, confining his visit to Bodh Gaya, where this year's Kalachakra would be held.

He readjusted himself on the cushion and focused his breath, suppressing a smile as the mischievous, deconsecrated image of his old friend Alf bobbed before him. Alf wanted to go to a Golden Globe party at the Medavoys', but Kit had bailed because he didn't have a film out and was envious of those who did, jealous of the actors - some unknown, others long forgotten and now rediscovered - whose fates had contrived to cast them in one of those overrated, dark-horse indies that infect hearts and minds each awards season like a designer virus.

More Wagner: David Abrams in January reviews I'll Let You Go, "a 549-page saga chock-full of characters that would make Mr. Dickens proud as Pumblechook... David Copperfield Will Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again." And Dan Epstein's interview with Wagner for Spike with a wonderful intro featuring a cameo by David Cronenberg.

Shorts and more tomorrow.

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2003 10:11 AM