Rex Weiner

LONG STORY SHORT: Rex Weiner is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and reporter on contemporary culture, writing for many publications in the US and Europe. He is also an editor, stage & screen writer, singer/songwriter, and a co-founder and co-director of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop.  He has served on the board of trustees of Beyond Baroque, the renowned LA literary center. He is based in the pueblo magico of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, MX, which has been his second home for forty years.

              Rex Weiner’s articles archived here.

FROM THE BEGINNING: Son of a New York City newspaperman, Weiner’s first stories appeared in the underground press of the late 1960s, Weiner was a founder and publisher of the New York ACE in 1971-72, partially financed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, pioneering a new generation of “alternative media.” He is one of the founding editors of High Times Magazine, one of the era’s legacy publications, regarded as a prescient, and still authoritative, resource on cannabis culture.

He is the co-author of The Woodstock Census: Nationwide Survey of the Sixties Generation, with Deanne Stillman, published in 1979 by Viking Press. The Woodstock Census continues to serve as a unique sociological reference, with its findings based on a 1005-person survey conducted in 1977-78 in association with the Yankelovich polling firm. Cited in scholarly studies and often quoted in popular books and articles, the book is recognized as a key text on the politics and culture of the Sixties.

As a staff reporter and feature article writer at Variety from 1993–97, Weiner covered international film, film finance and entertainment technology. His column on film industry history, Lost and Found, appeared weekly in the trade paper. His articles have been published in Vanity Fair, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Observer, LA Weekly, Paris Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, along with European magazines such as L’Officiel in France, GQ Italia and Rolling Stone Italia. His investigative reporting appears in Capital & Main,and Los Angeles Magazine. He is a winner of a 2021 SoCal Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club.

One of the first writers hired to help launch the TV series, Miami Vice, Weiner’s film and TV screen credits include writing and Associate Producing Forgotten Prisoners, The Amnesty Files, one of TNT Network’s first feature movies, based on his original journalism. His fictional stories about a detective working in the music industry, serialized in the New York Rocker and LA Weekly in 1979-80, became the controversial Andrew Dice Clay starrer, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, directed by Renny Harlin for 20^th Century Fox, released in 1990. Those original stories have been published recently by Rare Bird Books as The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n’ Roll Detective Stories. His noir/crime fiction stories appear in Switchblade Magazine, EconoClash Review, Hoosier Noir, and Broadswords & Blasters.

The downtown theater scene of 1970s Manhattan provided formative experiences in playwriting, leading Weiner to study with Murray Mednick, María Irene Fornés, Roxanne Rogers, and John O’Keefe at the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop, the LA-based group co-founded by Sam Shepard. Weiner’s full-length drama, Be Bop A Lula (Three Steps To Heaven), first produced by UK rock star Adam Ant and Doors drummer John Densmore, has been performed many times, including a two-week run he directed at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Rex Weiner has lived in Los Angeles since 1981 and in the town of Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico, where he is Co-Director and co-founder of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop. He has served on the board of trustees of Beyond Baroque, the literary center in Venice, California. For an archive of Rex Weiner’s stories, click here.