Narrating a Life: Biography and the Biographer
Roy H. Wagner’s life story is informed with as much drama as any film or television show that he shot . . .
When I published my first book, The Cinema of Tom DiCillo: Include Me Out, back in 2018, I had no idea that in the short temporal space of six years I’d be working on my tenth tome and promoting the release of my eighth (ninth coming soon). What’s even more surreal to me is that portions of my oeuvre are collaborations with filmmakers whose work I grew up admiring greatly and which directly influenced me to pick up the pen. Indeed, the titular co-author of my new book, Roy H. Wagner: A Cinematographer’s Life Beyond the Shadows, is one of those whose photographic eye informed the mise en scene of many films that comprised my youthful renting sprees: Pray for Death, Return to Horror High, Witchboard, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Drop Zone, Nick of Time. And that’s only a small portion of his films, then there’s the TV shows which bear the unique Wagnerian photographic signature: Beauty and the Beast, Quantum, Leap, Mann and Machine, Party of Five, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Elementary, House, Burn Notice, and The Beast.
The genesis of this project goes back to my 2022 book, Welcome to Elm Street: Inside the Film and Television Nightmares, a project on which I first met Roy to discuss his great work on the lauded third entry of that franchise. We became friendly, as we recognized in each other the love of film history and shared desire to preserve it on paper. Roy suggested we could work together, and I thought that, yes, this would be a very interesting entry in my works of film analysis: “Roy has done some wonderful films,” I thought, “I could easily write about all of these!” But after a few weeks’ worth of preliminary research work and, most importantly, after several in-depth discussions with Roy I knew this was not going to be my usual kind of book. Roy’s prolific body of work is indeed ripe for theoretical and technical analysis and there would be no better man to detail exactly the art and science that went into every frame, but I duly discovered that the heart of the book was to be Roy himself, for he is a teacher, an artist, an archivist, he is walking, talking film history, and his own story is more intriguing than any single film or television show that he worked on. And so, it became obvious that this was to be my first venture into the realm of biography, rather than critical commentary and study.
I have often been mistakenly referred to as a biographer, as I guess some people interpret my books as being about the person rather than what I they really are, which is about the art of the artist. I have sometimes balked at the suggestion that I was a biographer, because I have never been much of an admirer of such books; if I am interested in an artist I will find, or at least look for, what I need to know about them in their art. But in getting to know Roy’s story I soon realized that the only way to do his cinematic career justice in literary terms, and with appropriate context, was to detail this life which overcame many obstacles and struggles to get to the point in the film industry that he has. And most crucially for me as the author was that I identified with many elements inherent – we both fell in love with the cinema at a very early age, we are both dedicated to documenting the history of the artform, and we both worked hard to break past the barriers in our path to work in our chosen professions.
There were other aspects of writing a biography which never drew me down that road before, and one such cause of hesitation was the fact that, aesthetically speaking, I have often found the writing in biographies to be boringly composed, simply relating their factual narrative with minimal style or creative flourish; rote, linear, prosaic and, well, written just fine. So, there was a challenge for me to write this better than just fine, to construct a story more expressive and inspired, worthy of the subject and his own aesthetic. At least that is one’s hope; readers will be the judge of that.
Here I was blessed with material, as Roy’s life story is informed with as much drama as any film or television show that he shot, and his rise to eminence in his field is filled with struggle and fuelled by survival. And so, I agreed to write this biography with Roy because, first and foremost, I felt his life’s tale needed to be told because it pulls back the veil of glitz and glamour to reveal hard truths about showbusiness and the film industry. It is also a story of great scope, taking the reader from the starlit family farmlands of rural Missouri to the heady illusions and neon illuminations of Hollywood; and it is a window into an artist’s soul, complete with introspective and educational contemplations on the theoretical, scientific, and spiritual influences that inform his strikingly designed cinematic and televisual frames.
But perhaps meaningful to me, I did this book to honour the precocious young film enthusiast who rented out A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 too many times in 1988 and never wanted to bring it back, racking up several pounds’ worth of overdue charges at Screen Test video shop in Naas. That kid, now a writer, never would have believed in a million years that he would one day work in collaboration with the directors of his cinematic childhood: Tom DiCillo, Nick McLean, Walter Hill, and Roy H. Wagner. Hell, that kid never even dreamt of being a writer – how could he when he never even bothered to open a book, for he was far too consumed by the motion picture for such literary toil. But somehow, perhaps the result of an errant wish to one day tell a story himself, literature found him.
Finally, I can accept the title of biographer. But perhaps in some obscure alternative manner I have been such all along; if one looks carefully enough, my own subliminal autobiography exists between the lines of the books I’ve written. At the end of the day, my interpretations of art are never truly objective, for they reflect my own class, cultural, and cinematic sensibilities. In projecting my thoughts and ideas of someone else’s work and what it means to me onto the page, I am perhaps telling you who I am.
(c) Wayne Byrne
Wayne Byrne is an Irish author and film historian. He has written on film and music culture for a variety of notable publications and on subjects such as Tom DiCillo, Burt Reynolds, Nick McLean, Elm Street, and Walter Hill.
About Roy H. Wagner: A Cinematographer’s Life Beyond the Shadows
Named by Kodak as among the “100 Top Cinematographers in the World,” Roy H. Wagner is responsible for some of the most striking and unique photography in American cinema and television of the past forty years. Mentored by legendary cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age and beginning his career during the revolutionary aesthetic shifts of the New Hollywood era, Wagner has brought both a studio craftsman ethic and maverick artistic sensibility to his work that includes A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Beauty and the Beast, Quantum Leap, House M.D., among many others.
This autobiography charts Roy’s life as a young small-town Midwestern dreamer to his career as an acclaimed, award-winning Hollywood filmmaker. Together with co-author Wayne Byrne, Roy takes the reader on a candid journey behind the scenes on a selection of his most notable film and television productions, revealing some of the highs and lows of a lauded Hollywood career, and detailing his professional collaborations with fellow filmmakers and industry figures such as John Badham, Richard Franklin, Seymour Friedman, Bill Froehlich, Peter O’Fallon, William Fraker, Diane Keaton, Dennis Maguire, Harry Stradling, Patrick Swayze, Kevin Tenney and many more.
Pre-order your copy online here.
