Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine – Page 3

A Profile of George Lansbury
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1945)

The attached article is disguised as a Hollywood fluff piece about actress Angela Lansbury (b. 1925), who at that time was about to earn her first and only Academy Award, but journalist Peter Churchill devoted the majority of column space to the life and career of her socialist grandfather George Lansbury (1859 – 1940), one time Member of Parliament and star of the British Labor Party:

Old George was born, bred, lived and died among the poor of London, and never had any money, and yes, that goes for the time he was a member of His Britanic Majesty’s Cabinet, too. But the folks down at the less desirable parts (we don’t talk of slums) of the Bow and Bromley district of London where he lived could tell you what a difference it made to have a Cabinet Minister for a neighbor.

Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…

You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…

A Profile of George Lansbury
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1945)

Click here to read George Lansbury’s account of time he met Lenin…

You Might Also Want to Read an Article About Lady Nancy Astor, M.P.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…

Frank Lloyd Wright Hated the U.N. Building
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1947)

When architects and builders howled in protest when the firm of Wallace Harrison (1895 – 1981)was commissioned in 1947 to design the United Nations Center in New York City, the editors of SCRIPT MAGAZINE dashed off asking Frank Lloyd Wright to pick up his quill and ink-up his arguments against the project – and here it is.

Discrimination in West Hollywood
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1947)

This is the story of Harry Crocker, a full-blooded Iroquois who lived in a house that was reserved for white people…

Hollywood and the Game of Bogus Plagiarism Law Suits
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1935)

A bitter article written by a Hollywood veteran concerning what was at the time recognized as a growing cottage industry: recreational law suits that lay claim to falsified violations of movie plagiarism.
Robert Lord (b. 1902, Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 1932) penned this two page article and outlined it all quite clearly as to how the plagiarism game was played in 1930s Hollywood.

An Interview with Leon Trotsky
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1938)

This magazine interview with Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) was conducted by Gladys Lloyd Robinson: Beverly Hills doyenne, matron of the arts and wife of actor Edgar G. Robinson – in the parlance of the dearly departed Soviet Union, she was what would have been labeled a useful idiot. Easily impressed by the goings-on at the worker’s paradise, she avoided such uncomfortable topics as the Soviet famine, the class privileges extended to Party Members or his own war on private property, but regardless of that, and much to her credit, she was able to get the most famous of Soviet refugees to speak about the 1938 world stage while conducting this interview.

Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.

Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…

Louis L’Amour on Post-War Paris
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

During the course of the Second World War, Western fiction writer Louis L’Amour (1908 – 1988) served as a U.S. Army lieutenant in a transport unit. He penned this nifty article about 1946 Paris while waiting to return home:

It is cold in Paris now. There are chill winds blowing down those wide streets. The fuel shortage is serious, and will probably continue to be so as transportation is not yet what it should be.

Vivid with historical background, the city somehow remains modern. It has kept step with the world without losing its beauty or its patina…Easy enough when riding along the Rue St. Antoine to forget that where the jeeps and command cars roll now, there were once Roman chariots. No corner of Paris is without its memories.

The Career of Lilian Gish
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

Attached is a decidedly pro Lilian Gish (1893 – 1993) article concerning the silent film actresses‘ meteoric rise under the direction of D.W. Griffith, her mediocrity when paired with other directors and her much appreciated march on Broadway.

Lilian Gish is the damozel of Arthurian legend, tendered in terms of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her heroines perpetually hover in filtered half-lights, linger in attitudes of romantical despair. They forever drift farther from reality than the dream, and no matter how humble their actual origins, the actress invariably weaves them of the dusk-blues, the dawn-golds of medieval tapestries.

Click here if you would like to read an article in which Lillian Gish recalls her part in Birth of a Nation.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

Rockwell Kent: Artists of Democracy
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

The U.S. had only been actively engaged in World War II for five months when the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882 – 1971) felt the impulse to write about the unique roll an artist must play when a democracy goes to war:

The art of a democracy must be, like democracy itself, of and by and for the people. It must and will reflect the public mood and public interest…Awareness of America, of its infinitely varied beauties and of its sometimes sordid ugliness; awareness of the life of America, of its fulfillments and its failures; awareness, if you like, of God, the landscape architect supreme – and political failure: of the promise of America and of its problems, art has been, or has aimed to be, a revelation. It is for the right to solve these problems our way that we are now at war.

The Career of Lilian Gish
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1942)

Click here if you would like to read an article in which Lillian Gish recalls her part in Birth of a Nation.

Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

Joseph Cummings Chase: Soldiers All
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1942)

Joseph Cummings Chase (1878 – 1965) was an American painter who’s name is not likely to be associated with World War I artists but, like Sir William Orpen, he had a comfortable place within fashionable circles and he, too, was commissioned to paint portraits of the anointed within his nations military establishment. This article appeared in 1942 and primarily concerns the W.W. I portrait that Chase painted of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur during the closing days of the war:

Joseph Cummings Chase is without doubt one of the world’s greatest portrait painters, and as luck would have it, he was in Paris when World War I began, at which time the Government commissioned him to paint the Distinguished Service Cross men, both enlisted men and officers, wherever he could catch up with them; some in dugouts, some in trenches, and some behind the lines.

Click here to see a few trench war images by German Expressionist Otto Dix.

Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.

David Niven Returns to Hollywood
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1946)

After six years of war British actor David Niven (1910 – 1983) came back to resume his rightful place among the anointed swells of Hollywood. This single page article is interesting and not only touches upon his war years but also his earliest days in North America toiling-away on a series of menial jobs.

He isn’t talkative about what happened to him during that dark period [during the war]. He says his outlook has changed some. Even the gayest and most lighthearted can’t participate in a ghastly war without some mark being left. The fight with the Nazis made David Niven conscious of other things than the drama pages.

Niven’s first post-war film roll was in the Hal Wallis production of THE PERFECT MARRIAGE, co-starring Loretta Young.