Force Majeure

by Bruce Wagner

Overview

Force Majeure was called a “smashing debut novel” by the Kirkus Reviews upon its original publication in 1991. A sardonic and absurdly dark, yet hilarious take on the “business as usual” of Hollywood’s twisted class system that proved Bruce Wagner was not just an author, but a cultural anthropologist.

The perpetually up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter, Bud Wiggins, drifts aimlessly in and out of the lives of others and from one script idea to another. Moonlighting as a limo driver to pay his bills, he finds himself immersed in a world of vanity and degradation.

Wagner infuses his novel with the familiar archetypical characters of Hollywood—a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul—and exposes the madness that drives them all. 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781648210549
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	11/12/2024
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576

About the Author

Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” I’m Losing You (PEN USA finalist), I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-finalist Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s film Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary mini-series Wild Palms for producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’sState of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
 
Bruce Wagner has written twelve novels and bestsellers, including the famous “Cellphone Trilogy,” (I’m Losing You, I’ll Let You Go and Still Holding), Dead Stars, The Empty Chair, and the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Chrysanthemum Palace. He wrote the screenplay for David Cronenberg’s film Maps to the Stars, for which Julianne Moore won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014. In 1993, Wagner wrote and created the visionary mini-series Wild Palms for producer Oliver Stone and co-wrote (with Ullman) three seasons the acclaimed Tracey Ullman’sState of the Union. He has written essays and articles for the New York Times, Artforum and the New Yorker.
 

Editorial Reviews

Heavily in debt and depressed, forever-up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter Bud Wiggins, who chauffeurs a limo to earn a steady income, drifts aimlessly from bed to bed and from one wacky script idea to the next. Bud, striving to feel ``rooted and mature, in the Now,'' lives with his suffocating, kvetching mom, Dolly, master of the Jewish guilt-trip. Bud is haunted by memories of Jeanette, the ``smart hillbilly Baptist from Tennessee'' he almost married, and of Brian, a surgeon roommate who committed suicide. Screenwriter Wagner ( Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills ) peoples this wickedly sardonic, literate, frequently hilarious novel with familiar types--a nihilistic producer, an aging film star, an obnoxious mogul--and with startling characters like The Rav, a wild-eyed mystic would-be rabbi. Wagner gleefully rips out the livid, still-beating heart of Hollywood to expose its class system, its built-in vulgarity, its shrinks, AA meetings, starlets, harlots, climbers and burn-outs. Wagner is a hip sociologist of ferocious veracity and methodical precision. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Once Hollywood screenwriter Bud Wiggins was hot; now he's not. Now, scrambling to take meetings so he can pitch projects, he's driving a limo and living with his mother. But with a contact or two (Bud still knows people) and some luck, he gets a part in a B horror movie and writes its sequel, becomes companion to the hottest ``script doctor'' in town (who leaves him a script to make his own), and hooks up with a self-described hack who can't help making money. All of which keeps alive the dreams--of the big project, or the perfect wedding--which finally turn sour. The messages here are that there are no new ideas in the story business and that it's hard to get a second meeting or a third act. But Hollywood as setting for satire or black comedy gets tiresome, and despite some nice one-liners and bits here, few beyond film buffs or those in The Business will go the distance with Bud Wiggins. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/91.-- Michele Leber, Fairfax Cty. P.L., Va.

Library Journal

Smashing debut novel in which screenwriter Bud Wiggin, a Thomas Wolfe for failed screenwriters, seems to be a stand-in for author Wagner—screenwriter of the stupid but successful Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills and Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Wiggin never achieves Wagner's modest triumphs, however: his scripts only blacken his standing in the Business. Force Majeure novelizes some high-class short stories about Wiggin that struck loving chords in Hollywood when published earlier: they join here with compelling density into one large arc of characterization as Bud falls from failure to total moral disaster. The episodes trace his horror story from script to floppo script, each chapter giving him one large antagonist to play against: giant studio-exec Joseph Harmon, who seduces Bud in Harmon's white Bentley convertible; aging genius Caitlin Wurth, Hollywood's most dazzling screenwriter, who has mental problems and makes endless, raging phone calls on outdoor phones and at last gives Bud her brilliant screenplay of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove for him to rewrite and sell as his own; Jerry Linley, alias the mystically wise Rav, a con man who grants himself a background as a Holocaust survivor and now believes it—and many other huge rascals. The darkly downbeat climax is intentionally unfilmable (Bud has fellatio with a ten-year-old girl), although Oliver Stone has already optioned Wagner's screenplay of the novel. Despite a lack of rising action and some verbal leaps that never find a foothold, this is superb stuff—the best yet about Hollywood's humiliated lower orders as they grasp at recovery programs or head for high-priced mental farms.Bud is magnificently memorable, his brain in flood with three-act scripts that rival Postcards from the Snake Pit, Miss Lonelyhearts, Sunset Boulevard or Look Homeward, Oscar. Richly done boffo winner.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Bruce Wagner’s Force Majeure
 
“Bruce Wagner’s stories about Hollywood—and about many other places—are the best I’ve read since F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West; in short, the greatest.”
— Terry Southern
 
“Quite simply a masterpiece.”
— Janet Coleman, The Bloomsbury Review
 
“Wagner takes this genre to its most extreme literary outpost yet—and the competition’s been pretty healthy. . . . Much like Tom Wolfe, Wagner has an unerring gift for pitch—perfect character nuances and authentic contemporary dialogue.”
— Charles Paikert, The Nation
 
“Wagner gleefully rips out the livid, still-beating heart of Hollywood to expose its class system, its built-in vulgarity, its shrinks, AA meetings, starlets, harlots, climbers, and burnouts. Wagner is a hip sociologist of ferocious veracity and methodical precision.”
— Publishers Weekly
 
“Force Majeure will delight movie buffs. . . . a cynical Hollywood scribe tickles and tests the system from within.”
— David Finkle, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Great fun and singularly well-written.”
— David Walton, The Philadelphia Enquirer
 
“A writer without mercy. This book is like a wire stretched across the throat.”
— Oliver Stone
 
“Wagner has a feverish brain and a cool eye for the social distinctions that rule the film industry.”
— The Wall Street Journal
 
“If Jackie Collins were seduced by Dostoevsky on the floor of the William Morris mailroom, the literary offspring might read something like Force Majeure.”
— Carrie Fisher
 
“This is no modest triumph. . . . Bud Wiggins may well rise to the status we give treasured cultural figures, like Tom Joad or Randall McMurphy. . . . His birth in this first novel is stamped in our memories for years to come.”
— Donald Newlove, The Hollywood Reporter
 
“A prose symphony of surreal episodes . . . an epic black comedy that explodes the limits of the genre once and for all. Wagner pulls out all the stops, diving into Hollywood with the kind of hyperbolic intelligence novelists once lavished on sex and the Second World War . . . one of the best Hollywood novels since Day of the Locust.”
— Christopher Walters, Movieline
 
“A work of flat-out fucking genius.”
— Terry Gilliam

Praise for Bruce Wagner

"He is a visionary posing as a farceur."
—Salman Rushdie

"[Wagner's The Empty Chair] would make a fine fictional companion to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton's writings on spiritual outrage and the impossibility of solace."
—Dani Shapiro, The New York Time Book Review

"Bruce Wagner writes really wonderfully about that whole milieu [of Hollywood] and its gothic vanity.”
—Emma Cline

"To say that [Maps to the Stars] deglamorizes the movie business is like saying that Upton Sinclair deglamorized the meat-packing industry... the medium of film allows Wagner to make his audience visualize (instead of merely imagine) the hallucinations that plague his characters."
—Francine Prose

"Wagner is the James Joyce whose Dublin is Hollywood.”
—David Cronenberg

"[Dead Stars is] A Rabelaisian masterpiece."
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Wagner writes like a wizard. His prose writhes and coruscates."
—John Updike

From the Publisher