Rodger Jacobs

Rodger Jacobs (March 12, 1959 – July 5, 2016) was an American journalist, writer, author, film producer, columnist, playwright, editor and screenwriter.

Career

Jacobs was a journalist for publications such as Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Las Vegas Sun, Eye, Hustler and PopMatters. He also worked for many years as an AVN award-winning adult film industry screenwriter and trade journalist.

In 1999, Jacobs wrote an essay, Running with the Wolves: Jack London and the Cult of Masculinity. In 2010, Jacobs provided the preface for Jack London: San Francisco Stories, an anthology for Sydney Samizdat Press.

Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller, a play based on actor Jason Miller, known for the role of Father Damien Karras in the film The Exorcist, that Jacobs co-wrote with Tom Flannery, had its world premiere in 2007 and continues to be displayed in various theatrical venues in Pennsylvania and upstate New York with actor Robert Thomas Hughes, a childhood friend of Jason Miller. Writing in Stage magazine, critic Jack Shaw hailed Purgatory Diaries as "a stirring examination of celebrity madness." Go Irish was performed again in 2015 by Robert Thomas Hughes.

In 2007, Jacobs wrote and directed a live presentation, The Ragged Promised Land, for the Vesuvio Cafe and The Beat Museum in San Francisco to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In 2009, he released Mr. Bukowski's Wild Ride, a collection of original surrealist fiction, for exclusive consignment sale at City Lights Books in San Francisco; writing in the Self-Publishing Review, author Henry Baum cited the book as "another piece to add to (Bukowski's) towering myth … it also gets to the soul of the man … as funny as any of Bukowski's own writing."

Jacobs' controversial series for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Las Vegas Sun, The New Homeless, about Jacobs and his girlfriend Lela Michael and their experiences with homelessness in Las Vegas, elicited praise and commentary from LA Weekly, Witness LA, The Awl and La Presse. The series was also the subject of a three part documentary by Katharine Euphrat featuring Rodger Jacobs and Lela Michael.

Silver Birch Press published Jacobs' original work The Furthest Palm in August 2012. Jacobs describes "Palm" as a series of "heavily autobiographical stories that were woven into the tapestry of a novel", and "postmodern L.A. noir heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler, Leonard Gardner ("Fat City"), and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Pat Hobby Stories", as well as Ernest Hemingway’s "The Nick Adams Stories."

In December 2012, Jacobs' collection of short fiction and novellas, Invisible Ink (The Book Motel), was lauded as the "most exemplary L.A. book of 2012" by Joseph Mailander in his City Watch L.A. column.

Salon and Los Angeles Review of Books published Jacobs' Franz Kafka themed essay in January 2013 entitled Did Kafka Invent Noir?

Jacobs was also a film producer best known for being the screenwriter and producer of the 1998 documentary Wadd: The Life & Times of John C. Holmes.

Passing

Jacobs died at home on July 5, 2016 in Los Angeles, California.

After learning of Jacobs' death, Jacobs' former girlfriend Lela Michaels attempted to preserve his archives yet failed to do so since the two were never married. Lela Michaels called off her efforts and died from cancer in Lake County, California on July 28, 2016, twenty-four days after Jacobs' passing.