
Hejazi Railway Museum, 2015.
Hejazi Railway Museum, 2015.
Rob L. Wagner is a Middle East media consultant and retired journalist who covered Saudi Arabia for print and digital media. He covered Islamic tourism for Thomson Reuters and other publications. His work has appeared in numerous English-language daily newspapers in the Gulf region, most notably in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Wagner was previously the managing editor for the Jeddah-based Arab News and Saudi Gazette daily newspapers. This website is an archive of his published articles and photos.
“The only problem with film biographies is that they’re usually of the wrong people. Alfred Hitchcock lived a legendary life, and his new Boswell, Peter Ackroyd, has already written doorstops on Shakespeare, Dickens and others. Still, did the Master need yet another close-up? In Alfred Hitchcock, Ackroyd ably follows Hitch from pudgy young PA (motto: “I’ll do it”) to sad, dying Bel Air recluse with nothing to do. But think of all the fascinating figures from cinema still waiting for booklength treatment. Where are the memoirs of L.A.’s Robert Towne and Walter Hill? Where’s the saga of Achmed Abdullah, born of supposedly royal Russian-Afghan parentage, rumored a British spy, and ultimately an Oscar-nominated Muslim screenwriter? Ackroyd’s graceful retread will prove catnip to Hitchcock completists, but for something fresher, check out Hollywood Bohemia, Rob Wagner’s captivating, crude, crackerjack account of his namesake great-grandfather. This 1930s L.A. radical edited Script, a magazine some called a West Coast New Yorker, and befriended everybody from Chaplin to the unsung L.A. classical music writer Jose Rodríguez. Despite its low-profile June publication — by a Santa Maria genealogy publisher! – here’s the rare film bio where we didn’t already know too much.”
— November 2017
(Script is) a fascinating journal that came on like a cross between a west coast version of The New Yorker and a Hollywood lit-zine, Script was published weekly out of Beverly Hills by Rob Wagner, a writer, artist, activist and film colony insider. It featured contributions by Tom Mix, Charlie Chaplin, Upton Sinclair and Eddie Cantor, along with early short stories by William Saroyan, Ray Bradbury, and Louis L’Amour. The magazine’s unapologetic socialist leanings were noteworthy as well, and serve as the subject of Hollywood Bohemia, a recent book by Wagner’s great-grandson, Rob Leicester Wagner.
— December 1, 2016