Episode 1384 - Bruce Wagner
Guest:Lock the gates!
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what the fuck stirs what's happening i'm mark maron this is my podcast wtf welcome to it how's it going bruce wagner is on the show bruce fucking wagner one of my favorite writers he's an author screenwriter
Marc:And a guy who has had a serious influence on my brain.
Marc:And every time I read his book, I don't know if I've been invented by him or not.
Marc:I'll try to talk about that more clearly.
Marc:But Bruce Wagner is here.
Marc:He's got a new book out, Roar, which I didn't finish.
Marc:Doesn't matter, though.
Marc:Doesn't affect the conversation.
Marc:So that's happening.
Marc:That's coming.
Marc:OK, I would like to say that my HBO special taping is coming up on Thursday, December 8th at Town Hall in New York City.
Marc:The first show is sold out.
Marc:But I think you can still get tickets to that second show.
Marc:It's 930.
Marc:And it's all part of the taping.
Marc:I'm running it twice.
Marc:You can go to wtfpod.com slash tour for ticket info or go to thetownhall.org.
Marc:Not townhall.org.
Marc:Thetownhall.org.
Marc:The other one is some Trump-related thing.
Marc:Much to my surprise and chagrin.
Marc:I don't know if I can fully explain the impact that Bruce Wagner has on me.
Marc:I don't know how many of you know him.
Marc:He's, you know, he's a genius writer, but it's dark stuff, man.
Marc:It's dark stuff.
Marc:And I think I read Force Majeure.
Marc:I'll tell him about it.
Marc:I think I read Force Majeure probably in the early 90s.
Marc:I believe Janine Garofalo gave it to me.
Marc:And it's a Hollywood satire.
Marc:Just darker than Day of the Locust.
Marc:Darker than What Makes Sammy Run.
Marc:Darker than The Greats.
Marc:It's like it is the guts of it.
Marc:I was fucking on board.
Marc:I believe it was Force Majeure's 1991.
Marc:I'm Losing You's 1996.
Marc:But I was reading one of those books when I auditioned for Lorne Michaels.
Marc:I was in the middle of reading one of those books.
Marc:It's probably Force Majeure.
Marc:And because of the nature of the way that Bruce writes, and he weaves in real characters in with...
Marc:fictional characters in this primarily show business driven, you know, psychic fucking apocalypse.
Marc:Every book, psychological apocalypse.
Marc:There was I was a little buzzed and I didn't know if I was actually meeting what Lord Michaels or if it was in the book.
Marc:But that's because my brain was different, a little more porous, a little more problematic.
Marc:But I'm losing you.
Marc:I'll let you go.
Marc:And still holding is sort of it's not I don't I talk to him about it's not really a trilogy, but I didn't read.
Marc:I'll let you go.
Marc:I read I'm losing and still holding still holding great fucking book.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:There's I talked to him about the plane crash anyway.
Marc:So Bruce has been, you know, he's been always on my periphery.
Marc:He was always around.
Marc:Then he calls me or emails me out of nowhere, wants me to read part of the audio book for his new book, Roar, wants me to play the main character in his audio book.
Marc:So that gets me and Bruce together.
Marc:And I had ordered...
Marc:his book the marvel universe origin stories because he had had trouble publishing it because he was being sensitivity uh screened and the publisher bailed on him so he he self-published it or not really self-published he released it into public domain on the internet and then anyone could print it so i ordered one of those but i couldn't read it because the print was shitty and there were no page numbers so when he calls me up to uh or or gets me to do
Marc:The audio book, I'm thrilled to do it, even though I haven't read Roar.
Marc:He said it didn't matter.
Marc:I still haven't read it, but I will.
Marc:But I just read Marvel Universe.
Marc:Doesn't matter.
Marc:Sorry, I'm excited.
Marc:But he sent me this beautiful copy of Marvel Universe and I burned through it.
Marc:So fucking disturbing.
Marc:The spiritual, emotional, psychological bankruptcy woven through these characters.
Marc:And there's a kind of a mythological element.
Marc:There's a whole second part.
Marc:And Bud Wiggins is back.
Marc:from force majeure and just the fucking pure darkness and just sort of almost kind of, I don't know what you would call it.
Marc:There's a thickness to the satire.
Marc:There's a kind of a dark, viscous malignancy to the whole thing, just creeping through these characters.
Marc:And there's show business running through these characters and drugs.
Marc:I mean, I can't even fucking explain it to you.
Marc:But when I read his stuff, I read a lot of people.
Marc:I have friends who are writers.
Marc:But when I read his stuff and the way that he captures the consciousness and what's going on in the heads of these particularly kind of morbid and disturbing characters, I don't know where it comes from.
Marc:It doesn't seem like just writing to me.
Marc:It seems like he's a vessel of some kind.
Marc:And I get very tweaked out by the writing.
Marc:And years ago, when I was at Air America, and you can go listen to the history of that show, where I got started on these mics.
Marc:If you have the WTF Plus, there's new bonus material.
Marc:It's Brendan and I talking about Morning Sedition.
Marc:the original radio show we met each other on and worked on for Air America.
Marc:But I interviewed, I came out here once and I interviewed Bruce and I didn't know what I was doing as an interviewer.
Marc:And I brought a dat and we sat at a restaurant.
Marc:I must have talked to him for three fucking hours just probing.
Marc:I wanted to know.
Marc:I needed to know.
Marc:What are you?
Marc:What are you, Bruce Wagner?
Marc:Where is it coming from?
Marc:Who's delivering this?
Marc:Are you a dark wizard?
Marc:Are you channeling something?
Marc:Where are you getting these voices?
Marc:How is it moving through you?
Marc:What is happening, man?
Marc:Why do I feel that there's no boundaries between me and your book sometimes?
Marc:Is it because I am a broken man?
Marc:I am a psychologically hobbled person that I...
Marc:integrate so thoroughly with the perverse and horrible streams of consciousness of these people not that i'm one of them but but it because it's my business and because i've always since back in the day since back when i had the cocaine psychosis since back in the late 80s when i would stand out on the porch of the comedy store looking at the then gutted sunset tower building where i ate the other night and went to the bad guys party and had dinner
Marc:I would look at it in my full psychotic state, believing I understood the mystical foundations and the eternal darkness of what became Hollywood and what manifested Hollywood and what Hollywood really was and what was moving through it.
Marc:It wasn't some simple Illuminati conspiracy.
Marc:It wasn't some simple Kabbalistic or Talmudic conspiracy about Jews in Hollywood.
Marc:It was something more profound about illusion and imagination and about the sort of corrupt darkness of
Marc:of of manufacturing the dream and everyone that was involved in it and i would run through that that fantasy on the porch of the comedy store in my cocaine psychosis looking at the gutted sunset towers and the altar on the top you can read my book jerusalem syndrome for a more detailed account of my my paranoid visions but somehow or another that part of me gets reactivated when i read wagner
Marc:And it's not a bad part of me.
Marc:It's just dark and mystical and without boundary and without cap.
Marc:And that is the experience of me reading him.
Marc:So talking to him again, he's such a funny, sweet guy.
Marc:Every time I've met him, I'm like, you're the guy?
Marc:You're the wizard?
Marc:You're the fucking wizard?
Marc:God damn it.
Marc:Well, okay, well, let's get to it.
Marc:Tell me about it.
Marc:Tell me where it comes from, wizard.
Marc:Especially that Marvel Universe, man.
Marc:When the obese character transitions, and I can't even spoil it for you.
Marc:I don't know if you can handle the books.
Marc:But if I were you, I'd read Force Majeure.
Marc:I'd read I'm Losing You.
Marc:I'd read Still Holding.
Marc:But Marvel Universe, the last book before Roar, the new one, fucking dark shit, man.
Marc:Dark wizard.
Marc:That's who we're going to talk to.
Marc:But he's a sweet guy and he's a funny guy.
Marc:Me and him and Jerry Stahl and my buddy Mike Marcus, we all went to Cantor's after a show at Largo the other night.
Marc:It was a meeting of the dark minds.
Marc:It was hilarious.
Marc:Bruce Wagner, man.
Marc:I have him sitting here.
Marc:I'm going to try and get at it again.
Marc:Whatever the hell I'm looking for, it's not clear to me.
Marc:But his new book is called Roar, American Master, the Oral Biography of Roger Orr.
Marc:And it's now available wherever you get books.
Marc:And this is me going at it, talking with Bruce Wagner.
Marc:Are you one of those fellas that reflects fondly on when you had a lot of money?
Marc:Were you living large, Bruce?
Guest:I feel like you were... I'm still living large.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, largesse.
Guest:No, you know, my father was... And do tell me when we start.
Guest:We started.
Guest:Oh, we started.
Guest:My father was a spendthrift.
Guest:You know, so I was at the Mark Hopkins getting manicures when I was like six years old.
Marc:Really?
Guest:And our mother was outraged and raged.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he was... What we had kind of... What we did is we lived...
Guest:In extremely wealthy neighborhoods.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Outsiders.
Guest:So we lived in Hillsboro.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We lived in Pacific Heights, cheek by jowl with the Gettys and then Beverly Hills.
Guest:But we never had any money.
Marc:No.
Marc:But he wanted profile or what was it?
Guest:I think he was grandiose, you know, and he wanted to look good.
Guest:What did he do?
Guest:He was in broadcasting.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:And he would go around the country with dumb, shiny ideas on how to revivify moribund radio stations, you know.
Guest:And so it was...
Guest:And this was in the 60s?
Guest:This was in the, yeah, in the 60s.
Guest:And then he had a nervous breakdown.
Marc:How did that manifest?
Guest:Well, he was, I think, a little bit dodgy in that regard.
Guest:Mentally?
Guest:A little bit prone to depression, et cetera.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Exactly like me.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Grandiose prone to depression.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he I think he was he wanted to.
Guest:Oh, actually, what he did is he started to produce television.
Guest:So he produced The Les Crane Show.
Guest:Les Crane was the guy with a shotgun mic, the first guy that would wander into the audience.
Guest:Very handsome, slick guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was a topic, an issue show?
Guest:Yes, and entertainment as well.
Guest:I remember we lived in Beverly Hills down the street from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Guest:Romanoff's was the restaurant.
Guest:And at the age of 10 or 11, there was a 24-hour-a-day pharmacy called Milton F. Christ.
Guest:You could go there at 2 in the morning and see Groucho or Tony Curtis.
Marc:And you remember this?
Guest:I remember going to Milton F. Christ to pick up variety for my father.
Guest:And it was only later in my teens when friends and I actually had the sovereignty to go there by ourselves.
Guest:Did they have a lunch counter?
Guest:They had a counter.
Guest:They did.
Guest:But they also had booths.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they also sold hairbrushes, like Dunhill hairbrushes.
Guest:This was my first exposure to extreme wealth.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Some of them, they all had price tags and they made sure you saw them.
Guest:They were $800.
Guest:For a brush.
Guest:$1,200 for a hairbrush.
Guest:And this was in 1964.
Guest:It was madness, but it appealed to me enormously.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Well, I mean, what's interesting about the new book, which I haven't finished, but I don't think it should stop us because I did play Roger Orr in the audio book with limited direction and just a spontaneous engagement.
Marc:But in talking about this stuff and in seeing how you structured this book in the way that you have,
Marc:that your obsession or your need to excavate celebrity has now led you to an oral history.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Which is interesting.
Marc:So you've taken the load off in a way to go into the guts of the minds of these people and have them express themselves in relation to a historical character.
Marc:Yes, and half are real, half are completely made up.
Marc:Right, exactly.
Marc:But what I noticed is that you're a little older than me, maybe a decade.
Marc:And this guy, Roger Orr, moves through the world that we grew up with when celebrity was an intimate world.
Marc:It was a handful of guys.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And all the different tiers.
Marc:We cover all the different tiers from kind of underground comedy, beatnik writers, movies, television, fine art.
Marc:I mean, this guy moves through everything.
Marc:But it was, unlike the more recent books, this mostly takes place in a world where the intellectual circles were part of television.
Marc:They were part of the celebrity universe.
Marc:We all kind of knew them from talk shows, from Dick Cavett, from whatever.
Marc:But it really strikes me as nostalgic.
Guest:Well, you know, the oral history was something that appealed to the inner gossip freak that I am.
Guest:And I was always captivated by it because you could dip into it.
Guest:I certainly don't want people to dip into this because this is a true novel.
Guest:It's a full-dressed novel.
Guest:But it appealed to me.
Guest:And when I was beginning it, I've been germinating the idea of this for a long time.
Marc:How's that?
Marc:What is that process like?
Marc:You start the germinating is around this guy or?
Guest:Well, no, it was around the form.
Guest:Can I write a novel in the form of an oral history?
Guest:And it appealed to me as a writer because I'm the human voice for me is operatic and idiosyncratic.
Guest:And I could I could pull out all the stops with.
Guest:Without having as a writer to do the ligaments of that skeleton, which is Bruce pulled up in his truck at Mark Maron's and then came in.
Marc:So you don't need any of that.
Marc:It's all recollection.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I mean, I love simile and metaphor.
Guest:And as a writer, I revel in that.
Guest:But there are only so many.
Guest:You reach a kind of glass ceiling with that.
Marc:So the Marvel Universe, the last novel, that did it.
Marc:No more metaphors.
Marc:A woman became a bird.
Marc:I'm done.
Guest:Well, people do become things in this particular book.
Guest:But the idea, you know, now we've reached this point, a really grand theme of the book is that all is illusion.
Guest:And that sounds so glib.
Guest:But, you know, one of the people that I adore as a writer...
Guest:is a Russian woman named Svetlana Aleksevich from Belarus, where my people are from.
Guest:I'm from Belarus.
Guest:You're from Belarus as well.
Marc:But you're not Jewish, are you?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, really?
Marc:Stone Jew.
Marc:Oh, that.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Me too.
Marc:I just remember, because we've talked before, and I'll get into the backstory of my experience with you as somebody who read the books and then the last time we talked, which was years ago.
Marc:But Belarus, okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So she writes these astonishingly moving and dark books, oral histories, Chernobyl, the mothers of children that go to war, etc.,
Guest:And she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So there's emerging and that the world of fiction and invention is as true as that of nonfiction.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is this a good thing?
Guest:I think it is the only thing in essence, because the idea people have so many they cling to so many false truths.
Guest:And what we have to look at ourselves, we are told stories all through our lives.
Guest:That's all we hold on to.
Guest:It's all we hold on to.
Guest:And I've told you a story about my father.
Guest:Much of it is a story I heard because they divorced at 13, and I really didn't see much of him again.
Marc:So you're saying the premise then is that anything we get and receive as information, as story, it can't be true.
Guest:Well, there's an axiom that lawyers and law enforcement people use all the time, that the most unreliable witness is the eyewitness.
Guest:So if you start from there, the catastrophe of that, that our fantasy that whatever we are reporting is authentic and true, then if you shatter that particular vase, I think you're in much better shape, though.
Guest:It's like psychedelic journeying.
Guest:I think Terrence McKenna, I might have told you this.
Guest:The worst part is that moment when identity disassembles.
Guest:That's the most terrifying part of any psychedelic journey.
Guest:But once you get through that, you have a good time.
Guest:Hopefully.
Marc:Or you become insane.
Marc:But that's interesting because Burroughs said that grammar or was it language is a dogmatic system.
Marc:So the idea of cut-ups was really his attack on basically what you're saying.
Marc:That if you have a narrative and you string it along as a story and you cut it up and rearrange it spontaneously or so without any real...
Guest:design what you get is some sort of time travel hallucination yeah which which when you read a novel that you adore or even a work of non-fiction a biographical or historical within two weeks it becomes very very foggy within a year you can barely remember if you read the book you certainly could not recount the well my experience with your book
Marc:with your books are different specifically uh um the first one force majeure and then i'm losing you and then uh which was the kit lightfoot book i'll call still holding still holding and then you know i just you know thank god i got uh marvel universe you know i've i've sort of started to read the uh uh the stars what is it the dead star dead star yeah
Marc:But I think that a lot of the ideas in that kind of get tighter in Marvel Universe, right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But my experience with what you're saying is that there have been times because I am a little bit boundaryless and psychologically probably at different points in my life.
Marc:Porous.
Marc:Yeah, porous and maybe almost borderline at different times depending on the drugs.
Marc:But there were times where I didn't know whether I was a character in the book.
Marc:Nice.
Marc:And then during Marvel Universe, I was sort of upset.
Marc:Like, why am I not a character in the book?
Marc:Half of my friends are in this book.
Marc:I can't be a character in the book.
Marc:But I've had this moment because there's something that happens in your prose around the kind of psychic, psychological, and...
Marc:Moral corruption of show business that, you know, you constantly think about when you're in show business.
Marc:So the sort of porousness in terms of like reading I'm losing you or something.
Marc:I believe one of them I was reading when I when I met with Lorne Michaels and I was slightly high.
Marc:And really, there were moments where I'm like, is Bruce writing this right now?
Guest:Or am I really here?
Guest:Well, you know, it kind of has happened to me with this book itself because people report back to me.
Guest:In this oral history, I pose that Fred McMurray, the old movie and television actor, was a heroin junkie.
Guest:And people are they're stunned and say, I didn't know that.
Guest:And of course, he isn't.
Guest:And then the people I write a lot about Ernest Hemingway's trans feminine son, Gregory.
Guest:And that's in Roar.
Guest:That's in Roar.
Guest:And people say, wow, that that's a fantastic scenario.
Guest:But that actually is true.
Guest:So by the end of my experience, months after I finished writing the book, I am still puzzled and have to check myself as to what was real and what isn't.
Guest:Another thing that happened to me, and I talked with you briefly about this, during the recording of the audio book, I had a massive identity theft.
Guest:And that was the perfect metaphor for me.
Marc:So they got your social?
Guest:My social, my address, everything.
Guest:A bunch of accounts opened.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And they were, you know, I would lock my credit card and then I would get immediately a text saying, congratulations, you've unlocked your credit card.
Guest:It was very comprehensive and deep.
Guest:And it really mirrored my experience with the writing of this oral history because every writer likes to feel that they disappear in their work.
Guest:But the vanity and ego of a writer precludes that.
Guest:You always hold on to this fantasy that you are in charge, you are in control.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All gone.
Guest:400 voices all speaking.
Guest:And in fact... But some of them dug in characters, right, that you knew from your whole life.
Guest:Yes, true.
Guest:It becomes a kind of diorama or really a Rorschach for every reader, including myself...
Guest:But for me, it was the best writing a writer does is when he gets out of the way.
Guest:And what is the easiest thing to instigate that for me, what was, was this form.
Guest:I was gone.
Guest:In fact, it doesn't say by Bruce Wagner on the cover.
Guest:It says compiled and edited by Bruce Wagner.
Guest:So that was vital for me.
Guest:And it did leave me with a sense of...
Guest:You know, this that I Bruce Wagner was gone.
Guest:And yet I also felt that it was there was something so deeply satisfying about that to simply have the chorus of voices.
Marc:And also, it seems like it enables you to be a spectator in the process of creating this as opposed to, you know, I imagine I don't know how much risk you feel when you are sort of moving through some of the you're more disturbing characters.
Marc:But here, I mean, it seems like some of them are fairly established people that you could use as a canvas.
Marc:And then it seems like Roar himself was kind of this nebulous force that was capable of anything.
Guest:True.
Guest:And, you know, Stephen Fry, we did an audio book and you were very grateful to have you do Roger Roar.
Guest:And just as a parenthetical, I want to say that I had an idea of how Roger Orr would talk, like a kind of an American Anthony Hopkins.
Guest:And then you came and you read him like a street poet.
Guest:And I thought, yes, but this is my idea.
Guest:You know, the person that supposedly invented these people had his own fixed ideas even about them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So that for me was was an interesting development in the terms of writing the book.
Marc:Well, what what was it about creating or what I mean, what was the intent?
Marc:How did that sort of evolve that this guy?
Marc:Because he's not really a zealot.
Marc:He's just a guy.
Marc:He is a repository of of everything creative over an arc of 50 years.
Guest:Yes, I mean, as someone says, I think Woody Allen actually says in the book that he's not Zelig, but everyone that stands next to him is Zelig.
Guest:But back to just briefly to what you were saying, Stephen Fry was one of the audiobook characters.
Guest:He read himself and others, and Stephen knew Francis Bacon.
Guest:He knew John Richardson.
Guest:He knew so many people that he was doing their voice, Barry Humphreys.
Guest:And Stephen said to me that the freedom that this allowed me to have in writing others' voices, he was glad that I didn't check beforehand with him and say, this is what I want you to say or what I'm going to have you say in the book.
Guest:Are you all right with that?
Guest:So I sought no one's permission whatsoever.
Guest:And I had to impersonate those people as I was moving along.
Marc:Well, it was funny because when we were doing the reading, there's a thing we'd seen you and I did where I'm or Roar and you're Arsenio.
Marc:And I said to you, I said, you could probably get Arsenio to do this when you didn't even think to do that.
Marc:But I think you could have.
Guest:You know, I wound up.
Guest:producing the audiobook, and it was hell.
Guest:I mean, it was beautiful.
Guest:Is it done?
Guest:It's done.
Guest:I'm hoping that it comes out when the book does around the 15th.
Guest:That's our goal.
Guest:It had the most moving parts, I think, of any audiobook ever done.
Guest:I don't think anyone's ever done anything like it.
Guest:We had...
Guest:Wally Shawn reading himself, Graydon Carter, Griffin Dunn.
Guest:We had, you know, we've got Billy Lord.
Guest:We had Jennifer Grey, Kelly Lynch.
Guest:I mean, it's an endless group of people that are reading themselves and others.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I'm hoping that we finish it in time.
Guest:But it was it was suddenly I became a producer and that's not my thing.
Marc:Well, now, yeah, but now in terms of extending the world that you weave between, you know, your life and you're talking to me about these people that are part of this audio book, that it just seems like the event itself is an extension of the work that you do.
Marc:That like, you know, I know you may know these people, but everybody sort of is, no one is safe from the Wagnering.
Guest:It's true.
Guest:You know, I'm telling you that this book is probably a kind of hoax autobiography.
Guest:And I've heard the same thing from many people that have read it of my age and yours and even younger people.
Guest:That it's it's people project themselves onto whatever they're reading.
Guest:And many people in the book know many people that are in the book.
Guest:The average reader may not.
Guest:But many of the people that I first showed the book to.
Guest:So it does become a kind of a diorama, you know, of everyone's life.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I do that.
Marc:I used to do it took years for, you know, I'm.
Marc:good friends with Sam Lipsight, and every time I read his book, he's always the guy.
Marc:And when I've interviewed him before, I go, okay, so when you're in the store, and he's like, it's not me.
Marc:It's not me, it's a character.
Marc:Like, I can't, you know?
Guest:Well, you know, I'm almost kind of, I love Sam, by the way, in his work.
Guest:um my i'm almost the opposite yeah every single person is me um i noticed that from the most monstrous to the most innocent and there's a lovely buddhist story of of a bodhisattva taking a terrified student to a mountain yeah climb to the top of the mountain and the bodhisattva says look down and the student is is quivering whimpering trembling as the story says and
Guest:says, this is a mountain of skulls.
Guest:I don't want to look.
Guest:And the Bodhisattva says, indeed, it is a mountain of skulls.
Guest:But every skull, without exception, is your own.
Guest:You nested dreams, desires, delusions in every one of those in all of your past lives.
Guest:So make no mistake, none of these skulls belong to others.
Guest:They are all yours.
Guest:So in writing any of my books...
Marc:All the skulls are mine.
Marc:Well, let me let's go back now, because, you know, let's talk about Bud Wiggins.
Marc:Let's talk about the inception of your work in the sense that, you know, I remember giving, you know, having being given force majeure by, I believe, Janine Garofalo probably shortly after it came out.
Marc:And I read it and I'm like, Jesus Christ, this is like, you know, this is right up there with Day of the Locust.
Marc:This is this is Hollywood satire at its best.
Marc:And I do think you still write satire, don't you?
Marc:Well, I mean, like this, like when you take a form like the oral history and take the liberties that you took and create this sort of like strange, you know, character that's propelling through history, sexually, intellectually and creatively.
Marc:And people are reacting to him and telling his life story.
Marc:The premise is.
Marc:The context is satirical, no?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I think in the end, I'm always a novelist.
Guest:And this began, it was so ambitious.
Guest:I didn't know how the fuck to begin.
Marc:But that doesn't mean it's not satirical.
Guest:No, but let's say I thought maybe I'll do an extended shouts and murmurs like New York style.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And I'll really do something, quote, satirical.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then I thought, no, I had that idea because I didn't know how to approach it.
Guest:It was too large.
Guest:I thought, let me just go to base camp.
Guest:I'm not going to climb the mountain of skulls.
Guest:And then I thought, well, no, this has to be an authentic novel.
Guest:It can't be a satire.
Guest:But satire is a word that's pretty plastic.
Guest:So I would agree with you that I write satire, yes.
Marc:But when you wrote Wiggins, because I'm trying to, the woman I'm seeing now, I gave her the book and she's like, I can't, it's too dark for me.
Marc:And I'm like, all right.
Guest:Was that a deal breaker for you?
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:I'm kidding.
Marc:I get it.
Marc:My sense of humor is different.
Marc:But where do you come into celebrity culture?
Marc:I mean, we started to talk about that.
Marc:You grew up in Beverly Hills.
Marc:You're going to that place, the drugstore.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Groucho's still around.
Marc:Because you're just a little older than me, you're seeing that changing of the guard.
Marc:I started thinking about the other day that those 70s actors, when they were still in the same universe with the 40s actors, that must have been the most fucking exciting time in the world.
Marc:And I kind of remember that, but all that shit is gone.
Marc:But that's how you enter...
Marc:Hollywood, right?
Guest:You know, it's like that was my fate.
Guest:In other words, I went to school with Liz Taylor's kids.
Guest:I lived next door to Broderick Crawford, who would answer the door drunk in a terrycloth robe.
Guest:I was friends with his daughter.
Guest:His daughter, her mother, she and her mother lived.
Guest:Her name was Joan Tabor, the mother.
Guest:She was a starlet, lived with Broderick Crawford and wound up overdosing in her apartment on Doheny after they divorced.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was always a nexus of darkness and extreme wealth.
Marc:But the way you came into it, though, you weren't of them.
Marc:So you were able to sort of visit.
Marc:You were tourists.
Guest:Yes, I was.
Guest:And then I went to Beverly Hills High School, dropped out and became a limousine driver.
Guest:So you dropped out of high school.
Guest:dropped out of high school, became an ambulance driver first, and because the panic zone was my comfort zone because my upbringing was so chaotic.
Guest:Why was it so chaotic?
Guest:My father was a terrible alcoholic, and there was a lot of violence in my home, yes.
Guest:So I would be dragged in the middle of the night by my mother to referee some half-nude fight that they were having.
Guest:So later, I became a drug addict.
Guest:And later, they told us that often people that are addicts and come from homes like that do go into emergency room work or ambulance driving.
Guest:Because it's comfortable.
Guest:It's comfortable.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:is to expel or a kind of catharsis for the terror that I endured.
Guest:And the terror, I've given an overlay of glamour, so there's an operatic quality to it.
Guest:But Bud Wiggins originally, you know, he was a limo driver based on my work.
Marc:What was your experience as a limo driver?
Marc:I mean, like in terms of like ambulance driving.
Marc:I mean, you were 17 driving an ambulance.
Marc:Anyone could drive an ambulance?
Marc:Anyone.
Marc:Anyone.
Guest:I was 18, and the primo job to have as an ambulance worker was the driver.
Guest:You worked your way up from the back of the fucking ambulance to drive.
Guest:That's when you were on top of the world.
Guest:But you didn't need paramedic experience?
Guest:There were no paramedics then.
Guest:You just did a Red Cross training.
Guest:So I would be in the back with catatonic people, people that were dying.
Guest:And I was so terrified I forgot to turn the oxygen on.
Guest:I mean, it was endless.
Guest:But the limousine was kind of the same work in an odd way.
Guest:There was a lot of... Driving sick people?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:I mean, I drove Olivia de Havilland, Audrey Hepburn.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I mean, endless.
Guest:And I also drove people that I later worked for at studios.
Guest:You know, just people that were...
Guest:Horrendous to me, men and women.
Guest:And they had no memory, of course, that I drove them.
Guest:Why would they?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But another really interesting thing about that work is that I would wind up, once I wound up going to a speakeasy in South Central that belonged to Lou Rawls' mother.
Guest:Huh.
Guest:And I would be the only white person at a club called Mr. Mitch's Another World.
Guest:I was literally that day at night, I was driving around a prize fighter.
Guest:And I was treated so beautifully as that outlier.
Guest:So I had a lot of extraordinary experiences.
Guest:One of them, super Bud Wiggins-esque, I had a girlfriend in elementary school.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I went in my full limo outfit to pick someone up at the airport.
Guest:And she and her twin sister are waiting for someone to get off the plane.
Guest:So I'm wearing my hat and sinking as far as I can into the wall.
Guest:And off comes Mongo Santa Maria.
Guest:That's who they were meeting, their dear friend.
Guest:I don't know, lover.
Guest:I just don't know.
Guest:And but it was very intimate.
Guest:And that I skulked out of the airport.
Guest:And that night I got taken by a con man.
Guest:Sometimes you could grab jobs that weren't on the official.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:You know, and there would be a payoff to the person that was dispatching.
Guest:I drove this guy around for 10 hours, and we would stop at hotels, and he would disappear into the hotel, come out with people from the hotel, point to the limousine.
Guest:This happened over and over again.
Guest:Finally, we celebrated.
Guest:He's going to buy me a lobster dinner at the airport, and he walks out.
Guest:So I lost $600 and the humiliation of it.
Guest:But Wiggins was a way that, you know, at that point in my life, I was 25, 26, 27.
Guest:When you were writing Force Majeure?
Guest:No, Force Majeure was a little bit later, but I was in the saddle writing just, I was a hack, as Gore Vidal writes beautifully about this.
Guest:Oh, you're writing screen points.
Guest:I was a shit hack, but I was making enough money at 25 or 26.
Guest:I mean, I went from selling ink and toner and copy machines, that scam, to doing the scam of writing just horrific scripts two times a year.
Guest:And selling them?
Guest:Selling them, yeah, because I had a movie in the can that was never released.
Guest:Which one was that?
Guest:Young Lust.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Is that a B movie or a good movie?
Guest:Young Lust was a great script that was fucked up by the director.
Marc:So this was your intention, was to be a screenwriter?
Yeah.
Guest:My intention, you know, I was obsessed with books from a young age, stole books, thousands of dollars worth of books, worked at bookstores in order to steal books.
Guest:I've made amends.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:But my intention was to write screenplays, but always in the back of my head, it was to write prose because that's the only thing I could really control.
Guest:Screenwriting is too ephemeral.
Guest:It's too collaborative.
Marc:It gets away from you.
Marc:As soon as you sell it, it's over.
Marc:Yeah, it's over.
Marc:So, yes.
Marc:So what was the story like on force majeure?
Marc:You know, so obviously Bud Wiggins is probably more identifiably you than as characters later where, you know, everything just becomes part of your psyche.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Wiggins was, you know, I really had read F. Scott Fitzgerald's book of short stories, some of which are published posthumously, the Pat Hobby stories, which is about a failed alcoholic over the hill screenwriter.
Guest:So I was writing about myself as a failed opiate addicted screenwriter who constantly sold himself out and was an embarrassment to himself and the world.
Guest:And that was a catharsis.
Guest:If I could be in control of his falling apart, if I could orchestrate that, be the architect of it.
Marc:Maybe you could save your life.
Guest:Maybe I could save my life.
Guest:And actually, I think it worked because I think that I would have died if I did not have something that I could hold fast and
Guest:And something that I loved, which was writing prose.
Guest:I'm built to be a prose writer.
Marc:It was exciting because I got hold of Marvel Universe because you gave it to me.
Marc:Because I'd gotten one of the ones that were released onto the internet and the print was too small and there were no page numbers.
Marc:But you gave me this beautiful copy of it.
Marc:And Bud is back.
Marc:Bud Wiggins is back.
Marc:And we haven't seen him since Force Majeure, right?
Marc:And I like that you updated that this is an old man now and he fucked up on meth and the lottery.
Guest:You know, Marvel is interesting.
Guest:I had to release it into the public domain because the publisher canceled it.
Marc:Yeah, I want to talk about that, but I also want to talk about, let's start with Force Majeure because you self-published that too.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Why was that?
Marc:You couldn't sell it?
Guest:Well, no, I didn't know any better.
Guest:I was writing short stories and passing them around with friends.
Guest:I would type them up, make copies of them.
Marc:And at this point, you have famous friends?
Marc:No.
Guest:Not so, but there was a gentleman named Cotty Chubb, Caldeca Chubb, who's a producer now, and he had some experience in publishing books.
Guest:Pretty great name.
Guest:Yes, and he had worked, I think, on a book with the late Lloyd Fonville, a screenwriter about William Eggleston.
Guest:He had some experience.
Guest:So he said, let's just publish this.
Guest:We're getting such good feedback.
Guest:We did a thousand copies, sold it out of BookSoup.
Guest:Ed Pressman optioned it.
Guest:Oliver Stone optioned it.
Guest:I got reviewed.
Guest:And based on a review, I got a book deal with Random House to expand those short stories into a novel.
Guest:I didn't know anything.
Guest:I didn't know any better.
Marc:Oh, so the self-published was short stories, and then Force Majeure became the novel that Random House put out?
Guest:Yeah, it was Force Majeure, the Bud Wiggins stories, and that just became Force Majeure.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:I wonder.
Marc:That must be hard to find, the Bud Wiggins stories.
Marc:I'll get you one.
Marc:You will?
Guest:I think they're like, it's like $150 on eBay or something like that.
Marc:But then like you do like, how do you get from there to Wild Palms to do like the graphic thing?
Guest:That was, let's see, someone introduced me to James Truman who became a good friend of mine.
Guest:James Truman became the creative actor.
Guest:head of Conde Nast.
Guest:And that was when they made him the editor of the new details.
Guest:They were revamping details.
Guest:And someone told him that he should talk to me.
Guest:And he said, what about a cartoon?
Guest:And I thought that was odd enough.
Guest:And then I came up with Wild Palms, which is a very subversive cartoon.
Guest:And we did that.
Marc:Why?
Marc:Because of the politics of it?
Guest:Again, I did a lot of what I did with Roar.
Guest:There were real people in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We would storyboard it.
Guest:And if it was Marc Maron in this, I would do storyboards of you, photographs of you.
Guest:And I could do whatever I wanted.
Guest:So it was darkly, darkly paranoid.
Guest:Is that where you were at?
Guest:I'm always.
Guest:It's always where I'm at.
Guest:So we did that.
Guest:And then I had an agent that also represented David Lynch, Tony Krantz, who was a kind of very old school agent, did what agents are supposed to do, brings people together.
Marc:Again, the proximity to old Hollywood is kind of...
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So that kind of Oliver, who knew me through force.
Marc:Oliver Stone.
Guest:Yeah, asked me, said that he would come aboard as a producer.
Guest:And I holed up at the Chateau Marmont just like any proper.
Guest:Drug addict.
Guest:Elegant dope fiend.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Guest:And did it, you know.
Marc:And wrote it out.
Marc:Lived there for three months.
Marc:You wrote the script for the miniseries.
Marc:Yep, yep.
Marc:And how was that received?
Marc:Because it seems like the politics of it are kind of prescient.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It was... Right-wing Scientologist?
Guest:Yes, yes.
Guest:Everyone's in it.
Guest:With children who kill.
Guest:It was pre-Dahmer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But, you know, it's two camps.
Guest:Those who feel it was prescient, as you say, and liked the kind of operatic camp nature and literacy of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:People quoting...
Guest:I mean, it was just you'll never see anything like it again on television.
Guest:And then others that were confused and thought too ambitious, et cetera.
Guest:And it wasn't helped by I think ABC had an 800 number where you could call in to kind of find out exactly what happened that week.
Guest:Not a great idea, you know.
Guest:That's crazy.
Guest:But I had the time of my life, and we had people like Catherine Bigelow directing it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:But again, before I knew anything, what a showrunner was, I had a kind of good fortune and misfortune to be dropped into the cauldron through my life.
Guest:I know.
Guest:What do you attribute that to?
Marc:Just luck?
Marc:Yeah, I think it's just karma.
Marc:Is it karma?
Marc:I mean, when do you get sober?
Marc:Or are you?
Marc:12 years ago.
Marc:Oh, so you stayed at it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Adderall brought me down, too.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Got tired of thinking?
Guest:Well, you think too much with Adderall.
Guest:But I was taking large amounts of Vicodin, and then the Adderall is like a- Get the balance going?
Guest:It's like a speedball.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And you get very sophisticatedly paranoid.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And so you can talk when people are saying you're not yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You can give a profoundly good argument as to why you are yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But all the while, you're a stone's throw from psychosis, you know.
Marc:Well, yeah, the psychosis with the speedy stuff is pretty prevalent.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, it comes.
Marc:The voices come, Bruce.
Marc:I want to hear more about it.
Yeah.
Marc:But the trilogy then, I'm losing you, I'll let you go and still holding.
Marc:Did you see that as a trilogy to begin with?
Marc:No, I'm a title freak.
Marc:Okay, so that's me too.
Marc:I think I stole it from you.
Marc:I have a series of CDs.
Marc:One's called Not Sold Out.
Marc:One's called Tickets Still Available.
Marc:And the last one is Final Engagement.
Marc:It's good.
Marc:Yeah, it's good.
Marc:I didn't think it.
Marc:It just became a thematic thing.
Guest:Yeah, titles for me have always been some kind of weird engine to whatever it is, whatever book I'm working on.
Guest:If I can come up with a title that's worthy, then it's like Warren Zebon.
Guest:Your ride's here.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So that's where you start?
Guest:That's the entry?
Guest:Often.
Guest:And if I can't find a title, I'm in distress.
Marc:Because it seems like I'm losing you.
Marc:Who was the cancerous guy at the heart of that one?
Marc:What was his name?
Marc:Zev... Zev Turtletob?
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Zev Turtletob, and then the Stealer of Energy, right?
Marc:The massage therapist?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But it was just... What struck me about that book, and it blew my mind after Force Majeure, was just...
Marc:you know, the sort of way you could move through consciousness of different people, you know, and capture, like, it is a psychological landscape that you're creating, and there's inner dialogue, inner monologues of everybody, right?
Marc:And you just kind of move through, like, 15 to 20 in that book, probably, right?
Marc:And you get kind of attached to these streams of consciousness, and they all kind of weave together into this horrible, psychic gunk.
Guest:Well, if you get out of the way and you are in love with your characters, and I mean in love with the worst.
Marc:The Steeler of Energy is one of the best characters in the world.
Guest:Well, thank you.
Guest:If you're in love with the very worst, meaning the worst of yourself, then you can disappear.
Guest:And there's a great beauty in that process for me.
Guest:Identity theft all around.
Guest:The identity theft of energy.
Guest:So that becomes me.
Guest:And you do black out in a sense.
Guest:It becomes a really profound meditation to do that.
Marc:So you're channeling?
Guest:Yes, you are.
Guest:But what are you channeling?
Guest:You're channeling your own mountain of skulls.
Marc:Yeah, I get that.
Marc:And I understand the repetition of that.
Marc:And I went through this.
Marc:This is where the back story I was going to...
Marc:talk about was because of my profound experience with whichever book it was, it was either I'm losing your force majeure, you know, that I interviewed for Air America once.
Marc:It was supposed to be a 10 minute interview, but I come out here, you know, we're doing the show in New York and I've got a dat recorder and we sit at some restaurant and it felt like it was nine hours.
Marc:We like sat there for nine because I had decided in my head,
Marc:And it still holds.
Marc:I'm like, where the fuck is Bruce Wagner getting this shit?
Marc:He's pulling it out of the sky, but there's something important about it because it transcends just a guy making shit up.
Guest:Well, it's lovely to hear.
Guest:It's lovely to hear.
Marc:Like the last time I was with you, I'm like, where's the magic?
Marc:You're some sort of wizard.
Marc:And now I'm here again demanding that you're a wizard, not just an aging Jew.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know, the idea of this kind of blackout where one has access to those things that I think touch and disturb all of us –
Guest:is essential to the kind of poetic process of writing a novel.
Guest:And for me, it is a poetic process.
Guest:I was able in this form also to put next to each other
Guest:very almost poignant and tragicomic musings and memories of people that are talking with hardcore comedy and satire without it jumping the rails.
Guest:But in terms of one being attuned to what's out there in the ether and meaning face-to-face now –
Guest:I can't quite explain that process, but a lot of it comes from experience.
Guest:Last night I was falling asleep, and I realized for a moment that I was in an airport, and there were two figures, and I had been worried about sleeping.
Guest:And then I realized in the dream, oh, wow.
Guest:So the idea to be able to identify dream and then to be comfortable with dream is essential for the work that I do.
Guest:And it was even more essential for Roar because the ligaments of typical and traditional writing were gone.
Guest:and it was an oratory, it became oratorial, the chorus of voices.
Marc:That's interesting, because sometimes when I'm in waking consciousness, I'm living in a completely, relatively mundane, but different life.
Marc:In waking consciousness, I'm like, I just have, there's a whole other Marc Maron, same time zone, but doing a totally different life, but not anything spectacular, but it's just like I wake up in this zone sort of like, oh, that was the other life.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It's a very bizarre thing.
Guest:All illusion.
Guest:And it is true that we do lead multiple lives.
Guest:And what we cling to is that this life is the real one.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Oh, interesting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:My problem with being as porously boundaried
Marc:Is that like if I get too far into that, you know, things will break apart for me.
Marc:But you don't mind that space.
Guest:No, I don't.
Guest:I court it.
Guest:No, it is.
Guest:There is a certain terror, Mark, to to having a so-called identity.
Guest:And it was, um, it was instructive for me to, to have this identity theft happen.
Guest:This, this illusion that I had, um, or that we all have my social security number, mine, you know, um,
Guest:my bank mine inviolable wells fargo will not let this happen you know and it all got thrown out and you know leonard cohen had that great phrase when someone stole money from him in the millions he said it put a dent in my mood so i was concussed you know and then i woke up one morning and i was free you know this notion of bruce wagner and his finances yes
Guest:became so macabre and and ludicrous yeah that i was free from it so in essence i said let them come because you saw how easily it was just manipulated and taken away well not not only yes but not only that but how easily i was riled how easily my the things i had constructed around it but that's a fear of having all your money stolen
Guest:Well, you know, if that had happened, perhaps we'd be having a different conversation.
Guest:But you were able to catch it.
Guest:Yes, but if my money was stolen, then what?
Guest:That's where I go in my books.
Guest:In other words, it's all going to be stolen at the end.
Guest:All of it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Everything.
Guest:So that's where I go in my books as a kind of rehearsal.
Marc:So why not push it?
Guest:Yes, it's a rehearsal for death and dissolution, which most people fear, because we're not hardwired for memento mori, that use death as one's advisor.
Marc:Or to accept it, you mean.
Guest:Yeah, that death will come, and it will come either unexpectedly or accidentally, or it will come knowing that you have two years, etc.
Marc:The scene in Still Holding...
Marc:The plane crash scene, that's crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was one of the most disturbing things ever written in that poor girl, The Assistant, right?
Guest:Well, we can give it away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, John Waters is obsessed with that particular- He is?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's 2003.
Marc:We can spoil it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:So I have a woman who is terrified of flying and she lives in Los Angeles.
Guest:Her father's dying in New York.
Guest:She takes a train because she's so terrified.
Guest:She gets there too late and she says, never again.
Guest:So there is in real life a course.
Guest:I don't know if they have it anymore, but at the time I was writing the book in San Francisco where it's a three week training where you come into a hangar, you sit in a jet, they play tapes of what all the sounds on the jet are, et cetera, et cetera.
Marc:Just to comfort you.
Guest:It's a comfort and to give you knowledge.
Guest:And the end of this real life flight is a graduation flight where they fly from San Francisco to L.A.
Guest:That plane goes down.
Guest:You monster.
Guest:But the saving grace is that she comforts the woman next to her who is completely undone.
Guest:And that is a good way to go out.
Guest:I believe it to this day.
Marc:Well, I think that you saying about this sort of like, you know, realizing death as humans and not really being wired to accept it in that, you know, when I think about that in relation to how all your characters go down, I mean, that's the great joke with you, isn't it?
Marc:It's like, if this is inevitable, I'm going to really make this big.
Guest:You know, for me, without transcendence, in other words, I didn't want my book to be a catalog raisonne of horror.
Guest:I don't want all my work to be that.
Guest:There has to be transcendence.
Guest:And in fact, in this book, Roar, he never felt comfortable in his own body.
Guest:I relate to that.
Guest:I only really felt comfortable in other people's bodies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he wants to – he's thinking of transitioning from an early age.
Guest:He becomes friends with Jan Morris, the famous writer who was one of the first people to become trans femme.
Guest:And he decides that he wants to have that surgery.
Guest:So he does in his 60s.
Guest:Then he decides that he wants to undo that surgery.
Guest:And the way our culture is now is that there is no nuance whatsoever.
Guest:Roger Orr decides to go back not because he feels he made a mistake.
Guest:He doesn't feel that.
Guest:He feels that he's embarrassed that he wants to be either gender.
Guest:He's much more of a Buddhist.
Guest:He wants to be outside the third gender.
Guest:The idea that the body is a hotel and to redecorate the hotel room when you're going to be moving on becomes something repulsive to him.
Guest:So there are a lot of subtleties that that, you know, that one can't explore.
Guest:But that's transcendent.
Marc:No, I get it.
Marc:And I think that was that is what balances it is that, you know, somehow or another, the humanity of these monsters is is is totally sympathetic.
Marc:I mean, you know, you do deal with, you know, I think morally corrupt people who do evil things, but most of them are just tragic.
Marc:And somehow the humor of them, like the desire to become more obese in and of itself, consciously, it's hilarious and it's brutal.
Marc:But before we get into the canceling of that whole thing, when did the Buddhist thing happen?
Marc:Because I remember it seemed at first appearance really in a big way and still holding, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Like that was literally a book of the dead trip in a way.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And when did that?
Marc:Because it seems like you believe this stuff.
Guest:Well, I believe that often when I write about Buddhism or American Buddhism,
Guest:I apply the same hierarchy that I do to Hollywood because humans bring so many flaws to the party.
Guest:There's a famous story about- That's interesting.
Guest:It's like Burroughs Western Lands.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And there's a famous hermit, a Buddhist hermit, whose downfall was that he wanted to be the most famous hermit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, you know, Hollywood can transmigrate, you know.
Guest:So I generally, I write about things in their purity, you know, in a form that feels pure and intuitive to me.
Guest:But when you enter into dogma, even American Buddhism, et cetera, then I go to town, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In what way?
Guest:Well, I basically run my truck through the plate glass of that particular Starbucks.
Guest:OK.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, because I want to disrupt that.
Guest:And if something hits me wrong and feels hypocritical to me or.
Marc:So you disrupt it by by putting flawed people into it.
Marc:Well, we are all really flawed, but I want to- Yeah, what are we judging ourselves against?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Yeah, because I say that too, like everyone's flawed, everyone's mentally ill, but what is the barometer of integrity on that one?
Marc:Do you got a guy?
Marc:I can't picture anybody.
Guest:Well, I think the only same one among us is James Corden.
Guest:Oh, yeah, sure.
Marc:Yeah, hang your hopes on that guy.
Marc:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:But but but OK, that's interesting, because like it seemed that in in in still holding like, you know, there was a there was a whole secondary narrative around the language of that Buddhism.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Oh, yes.
Guest:And in fact, there's the Bardo guidebook.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And Lincoln's Bardo.
Guest:George Saunders great book is a part of Roar as well.
Guest:There was a – I used the Bardo guidebook and many other Buddhist texts, and when it came time for me to get permission, no one would give it to me.
Guest:These Buddhist texts where I was using three or four sentences, except –
Guest:This man who was a rempoche who wrote the Bardo guidebook, he said, use whatever you like free of charge.
Guest:And I went to thank him.
Guest:He has a retreat up in Northern California.
Guest:I consider him to be a teacher.
Marc:Are you practicing?
Marc:No.
Guest:I mean, I practice through my work.
Marc:You may practice through this.
Marc:But this makes sense to you.
Marc:This is a spiritual system that you find comfort in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know if I find any spiritual systems comforting.
Guest:The spiritual systems I find comforting to me are when I am out of the way and in the river of my books, in that stream, because there's no self there.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's so difficult to remove self from spiritual work from.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:But you you fill yourself up.
Marc:You are a curious person because like that's one of the things that you see, you know, from even from like I'm losing you, which was, you know, about cell phones that you were able to evolve with the culture into dead stars, which has is driven a lot by texting.
Marc:Oh, my God, yes.
Guest:I mean, just this morning I was looking at a picture of Christina Ricci and her husband, and it said a rare red carpet photo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I was thinking the genius of that, you know, like they're going to sell this at Sotheby's or something.
Guest:This is a rare red carpet.
Guest:The absolute anomalous genius of that.
Marc:So I'm plugged into pop culture.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, yeah, because in Marvel Universe, it's so driven by Instagram posts and the language of Instagram posts that your sensitivity to it, like you must just have, like, I don't know if it comes from a shattered need to connect from your childhood or whatever, but you seem to be constantly absorbing, you know, out of compulsion.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think that, as you said, I am all the doors are open for me.
Guest:You know, God, I'm you know, when I finish a book, I'm I'm just so emotional.
Guest:You know, I'm so hyper attuned to the world in a sense.
Guest:And I was listening, you know, that Stevie Wynwood song back in the high life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I just was sobbing listening to it because I'll give you my take on that.
Guest:Back in the high life again, all the doors that once were closed will all open.
Guest:And for me, that is a ghost story.
Guest:That's a grave song.
Guest:Haunted, haunted.
Guest:And the doors opening is leaving this particular costume party and moving to the next one.
Guest:That's where the real party is.
Guest:So it's complicated with me.
Guest:I'm wide open to the culture and to rage and horror.
Guest:But I'm also...
Guest:kind of joyously open to the proximity of of death the shortness of this life yeah and love you know when you you meet someone that uh is is part of your tribe in an in a recognizable way i mean we're all the same tribe but then yes you know so that's the joyousness for me so you appreciate that i i'm i'm
Guest:super appreciative but i'm also um i do i'm i'm i absorb you know uh i i i i close my i black out in a sense and i absorb the detritus of of the culture yes and and then i sink down deeper into the the the agony of the culture yeah and then hopefully i rise to the transcendent aspects of that you know oh yeah yeah that sounds right
Marc:I love it.
Marc:So let's talk about the journey of that Marvel Universe book because you chose to take it away from your publisher because of their fear, their sensitivity.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What happened there?
Guest:You know, the cancel speak word is problematic.
Guest:And I had written about a social media, beloved social media character who you referenced earlier.
Guest:Fat Jones.
Guest:Fat Jones.
Guest:She's like six or seven hundred pounds.
Guest:And wants to break the thousand pound barrier.
Guest:She named herself after the fat Jew or the fat Jewish.
Guest:That guy's annoying.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Fine.
Guest:But she was into him.
Guest:And so she called herself Fat Joan.
Guest:And the publisher took a long time to get back to me and said that that's unconscionable.
Guest:His words were, you cannot even have a fictional character call themselves that.
Guest:The irony of that is, did he read the rest of the book?
Guest:Jesus fuck.
Guest:This was someone that was a long term fan of mine.
Guest:So I felt for him because this this publishing house was a kind of jewel box for him.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think he around that time made a deal for distribution with Simon and Schuster.
Guest:Roar is distributing now ironically.
Guest:OK.
Guest:I felt that he had sensitivity readers.
Guest:He had someone read it for body positivity.
Guest:He had racial and gender readers.
Guest:And I think this is my idea, my narrative, my fantasy.
Guest:I don't know if it's true that they told him you're in danger of losing this house.
Guest:If you publish this book, it's not going to be worth the heat you're going to get.
Marc:Holy shit, because that book, those are minor transgressions, if you want to look at it that way.
Guest:What was in the book?
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:They're so on the top.
Guest:They're floating on the top.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:The iceberg of the book.
Guest:He didn't even want to get into it, and I don't blame him, but I did feel for him.
Guest:So I decided to release it onto the internet, which I was told not to.
Guest:And I've gotten more response from Marvel Universe than many of my books.
Guest:It's the only book that will never be out of print.
Guest:It lives on the Internet.
Guest:It was immediately available by a company in Vegas that publishes public domain.
Guest:My friend Sam Wasson started a publishing house called Felix Farmer.
Guest:They published it in a limited edition.
Marc:That's the cup I have.
Guest:Yes, at BookSoup, just like Forest Majeure.
Marc:So it kind of came full circle.
Guest:Full circle, yeah.
Guest:But Roar, I pitched to a big house on the East Coast.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And a good man was vice president, huge fan of mine, said everyone at the house was a big fan of my work.
Guest:And as we got further along, I gave him the first 15 pages of what's in the book now.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he loved it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It got to a certain point, and I think that people realize that this is a 68-year-old Jewish man, white man, who is talking.
Guest:His main character is a biracial, transfeminine man, originally, who decides then to reverse his surgery, et cetera.
Guest:I don't even think they got that far.
Guest:They just needed to hear it.
Guest:That a an old Jewish white guy was writing about a biracial character.
Guest:I think that that was it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he on the phone kind of had the the guy before him from Marvel Universe had the audacity to tell me that I really shouldn't be writing about outsiders.
Yeah.
Guest:When this is what I am, an outsider, and fuck anyone that wants to challenge me on that.
Guest:And the people that I embrace and love and want to memorialize are those on the outside, always has been.
Guest:So they turned it down.
Guest:Roar.
Guest:This big house on the East Coast.
Guest:Roger Orr, yeah.
Guest:And Roar then, my agent, Andrew Wiley, turned me on to, I think, the single bravest publisher in America now, Tony Lyons, whose company, Sky Horse, owns an imprint called Arcade.
Guest:Arcade was started by Richard Seaver and...
Guest:published samuel beckett yeah a lovely um historicity to it yeah and tony said yes let's do it and he wanted the book to look like a real biography yeah so it's got a flat matte finish it's got deckled edge pages it's got end pages it's hefty it's beautiful and he the marketing people wanted me to say buy bruce wagner he said no leave compiled and edited by bruce wagner yeah the back of the book
Guest:has 12 blurbs from people that are very well-known people, and many of them are dead.
Guest:But the blurb says the exact same thing.
Guest:So the legal argument would be that no reasonable reader could be reading and look at James Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, Sharon Tate, Jonathan Lethem, Amanda Gorman.
Guest:And believe that they were all saying the exact same thing about the book.
Guest:Well, this is something that in their sleep, lawyers say, no, don't do it.
Guest:Don't do it.
Guest:You can't do it.
Guest:But Tony's a lawyer and thought, no, this is...
Guest:This is a novel you've written.
Guest:This is satire.
Guest:And it will be, you know, it's understood.
Guest:So I had a very brave publisher.
Guest:Otherwise, I would have put it on the Internet again.
Guest:I just would have in the public domain.
Guest:I wouldn't have charged a dime for it.
Guest:To this day, the Marvel Universe is out there.
Guest:You can make a movie of it.
Guest:Someone's doing an audio book and changing the ending of it.
Guest:All I care is that people say, here's where it lives in its original form.
Guest:on brucewagner.la, whatever.
Guest:I don't even know the name of this website I created, really, for the Marvel Universe.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I didn't want to say, it's $1.90.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's $2.30.
Guest:It's Mother's Day.
Guest:It's $0.59.
Guest:I didn't want any of it.
Guest:It's like...
Guest:It's gone and that was a very liberating thing for me.
Guest:That was like the woman on the plane that crashed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I found myself with a book that was dying and now it lives.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it's great.
Thank you.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:I couldn't not read it.
Marc:I was so happy that you got me another copy.
Marc:I hope you feel the same way about Rama.
Marc:Yeah, well, I did.
Marc:I played the part, and I started it.
Marc:I'm in it, but I just got overwhelmed.
Marc:I couldn't get it done before I got here.
Marc:No, no, no.
Guest:It is kind of an overwhelming book, entertaining, I hope.
Guest:No, it's great.
Guest:But your read, it was, again, so interesting to me because...
Guest:We had we had people reading themselves and others, and it was always unexpected.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Or but but Roger was such a roar.
Marc:I know when you asked me, I figured like, well, he knows what I do, so I'll do it.
Guest:Yeah, but you really did him as a street poet, which he is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, he's a street poet that he's like a Pulitzer or, you know, National Book Award guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Also a sculptor, a dermatologist.
Guest:I mean, you know, he covers the waterfront, but that was great fun.
Guest:I really thank you for that.
Marc:And, like, what's going on with, like, you know, in and out over the years?
Marc:You've done screenplays.
Guest:Some have been made.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, the last one was Cronenberg, you know, Maps to the Stars with Julianne Moore.
Guest:How'd that come out?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:I was like Cinderella.
Guest:She won her first Best Actress at Cannes for that.
Marc:That was crazy.
Guest:She was great in that.
Guest:She was amazing.
Guest:I accepted the award for her because she had left for New York, and then I flew to New York, gave her the award, flew home, and I was like Bud Wiggins again.
Guest:But last year, something really interesting happened to me.
Guest:I have a book called I Met Someone.
Guest:And it's about a Hollywood Academy Award winning actress who's gay and marries a much younger woman who's kind of a fledgling photographer, doesn't know what to do with her life.
Guest:And this Academy Award winning actress gave up her own baby daughter when she was 15 and never went to look for her.
Guest:She decides she's going to go look for her.
Guest:And she finds her and it's her wife.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:She married her daughter.
Guest:So a woman named Josie Ho, who is an actress from Hong Kong and a producer, decided she wanted to make that into a movie.
Guest:So Mike Figgis flew to Hong Kong and they made a movie Hong Kong for Hollywood.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's just it's it's so surreal.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's it's that it's I met someone.
Guest:So hopefully that will come out maybe to one of the festivals in spring.
Marc:Oh, that's exciting.
Guest:How do you feel about the I'm losing you?
Guest:My version?
Guest:You know, I think that it wasn't bold or radical.
Guest:It was almost kind of funereal.
Guest:And I didn't know what I was doing.
Guest:And I was operating under some fantasy that I should do something stately.
Guest:And so, you know, I don't regret it because it's impossible to regret.
Guest:But then I did a digital film after that called Women in Film, which was another section of I'm Losing You that was much closer to what I would have done.
Guest:So I've often, you know, I had the fantasy of one day doing that movie all over again, you know, but that's an absurdity.
Guest:We go through different parts of our lives.
Guest:All of my books.
Guest:And the films and even Wild Palms, things I've worked on, represent another room in that diorama.
Guest:It's the Museum of One's Own Personal Natural History.
Guest:And so you can look back and you can look forward with the same kind of thrill or creeping dread.
Guest:But it's all a wash, Mark.
Guest:It's all a wash.
Marc:It's a wash, but it's all a singular kind of conversation.
Guest:True.
Marc:When I think about all the work I've done, because comics are sort of in a situation where you do the hour, you record the hour, and then you let it go.
Marc:And it's not always because it's going to be timely.
Marc:It's just what you do.
Marc:So I have to look at everything I've ever done over the last three decades.
Marc:It's just an ongoing conversation that evolves.
Marc:It may be a wash, but it's kind of out there.
Marc:And like you said, you release the Marvel Universe into the Internet.
Marc:And five years down the road, someone's going to come up to you and go, like, the reason I wrote the new Bible is
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Was because of that one part.
Marc:So it's part of an ongoing kind of hopefully relatively eternal conversation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, I was just talking with a friend and we were talking about writers and and who reads your books and does anyone read them?
Guest:Right.
Guest:And this idea that you have a hit book and finally that moment has come where thousands, untold thousands are in love with your book.
Guest:But there's one of those people is the one that hunts you down and kills you because they loved the book so much.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's what I mean in essence.
Guest:It's all an illusion.
Marc:It's misery.
Marc:Yeah, it's misery.
Marc:That movie, Misery.
Marc:But it's interesting, though, because in your books, and I've read a lot of books, but I'm not insanely well-read, but I have very vivid sort of emotional connections to several different scenes over several different books that you've written, and they never go away.
Yeah.
Guest:That is the highest compliment that I could receive because that means the reader, you, entered into this world, this sacred world of communion, really, and everyone blacked out.
Guest:That's, to me, thank you.
Guest:I mean, it can't get any better for me than that.
Guest:Well, thank you for talking to me, sir.
Guest:Bless you.
Guest:Nice to see you, Bruce.
Marc:Thank you, Mark.
Marc:Okay, so I think I got some stuff.
Marc:I think I got it.
Marc:I got closer anyways.
Marc:I got as much as I'm going to get.
Marc:Read the books.
Marc:Roar, American Master, The Oral Biography of Roger Orr is now available wherever you get books.
Marc:I'm telling you, Force Majeure, I'm losing you, still holding the Marvel Universe origin stories if you can get hold of one.
Marc:All right?
Marc:Fucking love that guy.
Marc:Hang out, people.
Marc:Hang out.
Marc:Hey, folks, if you're a full Marin subscriber to WTF, we started something new this week.
Marc:Brendan and I are telling the oral history of our original radio show, Morning Sedition.
Marc:For those of you who remember that show from nearly two decades ago, we'll go back to listen to some of the stuff that we think made it great.
Marc:And if you never heard any of it before, it's your chance to find out what we were like before WTF when Brendan and I were figuring out how we do whatever it is we do.
Guest:As we started to evolve these ideas of characters and bits,
Guest:One thing was that like, you know, Jim Earl, who had been the one who was doing the most on-air characters, we were like, just come up with more stuff, like whatever you could think of.
Guest:And one thing he thought of, which we at first couldn't really kind of configure into the show,
Guest:was that he would do obituaries of people that were just jokes about people who had died.
Guest:And it wasn't political.
Guest:It wasn't in any way appropriate.
Guest:He would just find these things funny.
Guest:And we kind of figured this could work as satire.
Guest:If you're satirizing the kind of gauzy, maudlin, sentimental way that...
Guest:entertainment entertainment news does remembrances of people right right and so he became right the music and everything and he became this this this obit reader who is always crying he cried through the whole thing as he did it and would pretend it was just his allergies or that someone was chopping onions chopping onions
Guest:And in the meantime, it was just this cover for these jokes that were perfect, but about a person who had just died.
Guest:That day.
Guest:James Griffin, co-founder of the band Bread.
Guest:This week, the music world received word that James Griffin, founding member of the soft rock group Bread, is toast.
Guest:In a statement released today to hopeful fans, Griffin's manager said there was no truth to the rumor he's risen.
Guest:But I guess that news is pretty stale by now.
Guest:I got something in my eyes.
Guest:Who's chopping onions?
Marc:Look, we're going to keep going with this in future weeks because there's so much more to share and we're looking to bring on some guests who are there for the whole thing.
Marc:It's going to be exciting.
Marc:If you want to subscribe to WTF Plus and get the full Marin bonus material, go to the link in the episode description or click on WTF Plus at WTFPod.com.
Marc:Also, while you're in the episode description,
Marc:Click the link to submit a question for our next Ask Mark Anything episode, okay?
Marc:Upcoming dates.
Marc:Here we go.
Marc:Tomorrow, Friday, I'm in Eugene, Oregon at the Holtz Center.
Marc:Sold out.
Marc:Bend, Oregon at the Tower Theater.
Marc:Sold out.
Marc:Asheville, North Carolina at the Orange Peel.
Marc:Actually, I believe that's sold out too.
Marc:And then Nashville, Tennessee, I'm at the James K. Polk Center on Saturday, December 3rd, not sold out.
Marc:And my HBO special taping is at Town Hall in New York City on Thursday, December 8th.
Marc:There are still tickets to the second show.
Marc:Go to wtfpod.com slash tour for all dates and ticket info.
Marc:Now here's some guitar, okay?
Marc:Guitar.
Marc:A little unusual guitar for me, I think.
guitar solo
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Monkey and La Fonda.
Marc:Cat angels everywhere.