Joseph McBride
Film Historian
Quote of the Day
Welcome to the personal website of film historian Joseph McBride, author of many books, veteran journalist, and an associate professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.
"Eighty percent of success is showing up."
-- Woody Allen
See Previous Quotes
"When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends."
-- Mark Twain
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
"You say someone's called me the greatest poet of the Western saga. I am not a poet, and I don't know what a Western saga is. I would say that is horseshit."
-- John Ford
"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
"I am a completely
horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down in a bed or stretched out on a couch ... "
-- Truman Capote
"But Hodge shan't be shot. No, No, Hodge shall not be shot."
-- Dr. Samuel Johnson
"No man but a blockhead
ever wrote, except for money."
"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid."
-- Abraham Lincoln, 1855
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JOSEPH McBRIDE BIOGRAPHY
Joseph McBride is the author of fifteen books on film, including Steven Spielberg: A Biography (1997, updated 2011), What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006), Searching for John Ford (2001), , Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992, 2000), Hawks on Hawks (1982), John Ford (1974, with Michael Wilmington), and Orson Welles (1972; revised and expanded edition, 1996). His next book, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless , is available for purchase from Feb. 28, 2012.
He was born in Milwaukee in 1947 and attended Marquette University High School, where he won a National Merit Scholarship, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was president of the Wisconsin Film Society. He was a reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal before moving to California in 1973 and was a film critic, reporter, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood for many years. McBride spent six years in the 1970s playing a film critic in Orson Welles's legendary unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind .
McBride's screenwriting credits include co-writing Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) and five American Film Institute Life Achievement Award tributes, to James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Frank Capra, John Huston, and Lillian Gish, on CBS-TV (1980-84). He wrote the segment on war movies, War and Peace , for the American Film Institutes ten-part series on film history, 100 Years . . . 100 Movies (AFI/TNT), 1998. McBride also co-wrote Let Poland Be Poland , the 1982 United States Information Agency worldwide live television special paying tribute to the Polish Solidarity Movement. He has received a Writers Guild of America Award for The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (1983), four other WGA nominations, two Emmy nominations, and a Canadian Film Awards nomination for the 1978 film Blood and Guts .
McBride co-produced the 1997 documentary Obsessed with "Vertigo": New Life for Hitchcock's Masterpiece (produced and directed by Harrison Engle for American Movie Classics/MCA Universal Home Video/Signal Hill Entertainment) and the 2002 documentary John Ford Goes to War (produced and directed by Tom Thurman for Starz/Encore).
McBride was a consultant and interviewee for the Twentieth Century Fox documentary Becoming John Ford (directed by Nick Redman and written by Julie Kirgo, produced by Redman and Jamie Willett), released in 2007 as part of the Ford at Fox boxed set of DVDs, which also includes his audio commentaries for the Ford films The Grapes of Wrath , How Green Was My Valley, and Pilgrimage . Ford at Fox won the Film Heritage award from the National Society of Film Critics and was chosen as DVD of the Year by Time magazine.
The French edition of Searching for John Ford, A la recherche de John Ford, 2007, won the Best Foreign Film Book of the Year award from the French film critics organization, le Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma, 2008.
McBride is an associate professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching film history and screenwriting since 2002. He lives in Berkeley with his partner Ann Weiser Cornell, a writer and teacher. He is the father of two children, Jessica and John.
McBride is the subject of a new documentary film by Hart Perez, Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History , which will have its world premiere in April at the Tiburon International Film Festival in Marin County, California.
CV rev 2011.pdf
McBride before introducing his favorite film, Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, California.
Click here to see photos of Joe, his
family, friends, and colleagues
Curriculum Vitae
Joseph McBride is the author or editor of sixteen books, including what are considered the definitive biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. He is one of the world's leading film historians and a pioneer in that field.
McBride's latest book is Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless , a lively and unconventional guide described by Peter Bogdanovich as a "comprehensive yet very succinct work [that] should become a standard text."
Click on each image above for more information about the book.
Click here for information on
McBride's previous books.
Click here for an article on Joe's
work as a biographer
Click here for a schedule of upcoming book events.
SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD
by Joseph McBride
John Ford's classic films -- such as Stagecoach , The Grapes of Wrath , How Green Was My Valley , They Were Expendable , The Quiet Man , The Searchers , and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance -- have earned him worldwide admiration as America's foremost filmmaker, a director whose rich visual imagination conjures up indelible, deeply moving images of our collective past. Ford's films about American history are profound explorations of the national character and the crucibles in which that character was forged. Throughout his long and prolific career, Ford became best known for redefining the Western genre, setting his dramas about pioneer life against the timeless backdrop of Monument Valley.
When Orson Welles was asked which directors he most admired, he replied, "The old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." As a man, however, Ford was tormented, conflicted, and deliberately enigmatic. He protected himself by concealing his true personality from the public, presenting himself as an illiterate hack rather than as the sensitive artist his films show him to be. He shrewdly guided the careers of some of Hollywoods greatest stars, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara, and Katharine Hepburn, but he could be abusive, even sadistic, in his treatment of actors. His personal politics veered from progressive to reactionary; his body of work is impossible to categorize politically. Little wonder that those who have written about Ford have either strained to reconcile the daunting paradoxes of his work and personality or avoided those issues entirely. They have printed the legend and ignored the facts -- or printed the facts and obscured the legend.
In its depth, originality, and insight, Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker. It has been hailed as definitive by both the New York Times and the Irish Times , and won the award for Best Foreign Film Book of the Year from the French film critics association in 2007. The Sunday Times (London) wrote, "Thirty years in the making, McBride's exhaustive book will surely be the last word on John Ford." Le Monde (Paris) called it "Prodigious . . . captivating like a novel."
Encompassing and illuminating Ford's complexities and contradictions, Joseph McBride comes as close as anyone ever will to solving what Andrew Sarris called "the John Ford movie mystery." McBride traces the trajectory of Ford's life from his beginnings as Bull Feeney, the nearsighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, through to his establishment as America's most formidable and protean filmmaker. McBride interviewed Ford at the end of his career in 1970 and more than 120 of the director's friends, relatives, collaborators, and colleagues. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford's films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands. Searching for John Ford will stand as the definitive portrait of an American genius.
Praise for Searching for John Ford :
McBride has written the best life of [John Ford] we are likely to have, and his judgments of the films, his ways of telling us about them, are invariably intelligent and sensitive. . . . He has been studying Ford for thirty years or so, and he writes of him with great skill and even, when appropriate, with eloquence. He displays his wide knowledge of American social and film history with tact, wit, and imagination.
-- THOMAS FLANAGAN, The New York Review of Books
John Ford was the most complex and fascinating man I have ever known, and Joe McBride captures that. Searching for John Ford is the best book about him that I have read. No film library is complete without it.
-- HARRY CAREY, JR., actor in ten Ford films and author
of Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company
Joseph McBride's book has the sweep, passion, complexity, and tragic grandeur of a great John Ford film. Thoroughly detailed and researched, McBride's book fills in the gaps and gives us the man in full: sentimental yet cruel, brilliant yet forever feigning illiteracy, politically liberal at one moment and conservative the next. Ultimately, McBride shows us that this artist, who balked at the very mention of the word art, could speak fully and honestly only through his films. For those of us who grew up on those films, the book is a treasure, and an eye-opener. For younger people who don't know his work, who have yet to appreciate the timeless beauty of his greatest pictures, Searching for John Ford should be compulsory reading.
-- MARTIN SCORSESE
FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS
Frank Capra's beloved films are idealistic, patriotic, full of human comedy, and often sentimental -- so much so that skeptics have called them Capracorn. Moviegoers often assume that the director's life resembled his classic films, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington , Meet John Doe , or It's a Wonderful Life : A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs. But as Joseph McBride reveals in this meticulously researched, definitive biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy.
An immigrant from Sicily, Capra came to America with his family as a child in 1903 and struggled against great odds to achieve an education and find success as a Hollywood gag man and director. His great popular and critical breakthrough with the classic 1934 romantic comedy It Happened One Night , while bringing him the triumphant vindication and social acceptance he craved, also caused him to fall into a state of crisis, doubt his own abilities, take credit belonging to others, and gradually pull his political punches. When the post-World War II Red Scare caused Capra and his work to be considered possibly subversive, because of its elements of social criticism during the Depression era and his associations with leftwing writers, he panicked and betrayed his ideals.
Using declassified U.S. government documents about the director's response to those charges, and drawing on extensive interviews with Capra and 174 of his collaborators, family members, friends, and colleagues, McBride chronicles Capra's creative and personal downfall. While examining in detail the evolution of Capra's great films, McBride shows that the conventional view of the director's life, propagated in his autobiography The Name Above the Title , is far from the truth. The life story of this celebrated director of human comedies was, in fact, tragically at odds with the ideals his films so movingly espouse.
Praise for Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success :
Masterly, comprehensive, and frequently surprising.
-- BARRY GEWEN, The New York Times Book Review
Easily the best -- certainly the most realistic -- biography of a film director in the age of the Auteur, to which this is a counterbalance.
-- GORE VIDAL
Revelatory and important biography . . . Frank Capra is a milestone in its quiet but firm rejection of the legend in favor of facts . . . McBride has delivered the evidence through magnificent and resourceful research.
-- DAVID THOMSON, The Boston Globe
A formidable -- and resolutely iconoclastic -- life of the director, one that wears its ample research so lightly that its seven-hundred-odd pages are a constant pleasure to read.
-- DENNIS DRABELLE, The Washington Post Book World
A major book . . . Superbly researched and almost continually surprising.
-- GAVIN LAMBERT, The Los Angeles Times Book Review
Joseph McBride has cleared away all the Kris Kringle cobwebs from the illustrious life and career of Frank Capra. The most authoritative study of the director to date reveals Capra the troubled, complex, ultimately controversial player in Hollywood's classic power struggle and Faustian ordeals. This book is chock full of facts and figures and marvelous insight.
-- ANDREW SARRIS, author of The American Cinema
This is more than just another biography of a movie director. It paints a lively picture of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the horrors of the anti-Communist witch hunt and blacklist that followed. But it remains above all the dramatic story of one of the most interesting characters ever to emerge in Hollywood.
-- PHILIP DUNNE, The Chicago Sun-Times
While the book may crumble our iconic preconceptions of who Frank Capra was, it does a greater justice to him in its documenting the life of a complex man, who struggled for respect from his peers and family, but never received it on his own terms or to his own satisfaction . . . The reader is likely to be left with a compassionately balanced understanding of what was both good and bad about Frank Capra as a human being and artist, and also a great appreciation of the mammoth work turned in by McBride.
-- CARL BENNETT, Silent Era website
WRITING IN PICTURES
Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless
Praise for WRITING IN PICTURES :
"Impressively readable, unpretentious, and remarkably useful."
-- Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter, director, and film historian
"A short course in how to think cinematically. It will change the way you write. It will change the way you watch."
-- Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman, Batman Returns and "Homecoming"
When veteran screenwriter Joseph McBride started teaching screenwriting, he looked for a manual to use. To his surprise, he couldn't find one he felt worth using. They all focused on how to write a formulaic script that will sell, but he knew that in order to have any hope of success, one has to first learn the actual craft and to find one's own voice as a writer.
In WRITING IN PICTURES: SCREENWRITING MADE (MOSTLY) PAINLESS (A Vintage Original, on sale February 28, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-307-74292-6) McBride delivers this book. Practical and readable, it walks the reader through the actual process step by step, including research, outlining and the various stages of writing the script. Drawn from decades of experience, it's filled with plenty of colorful anecdotes along the way, from director Howard Hawks discussing how to write "crazy" dialogue that is more entertaining than ordinary speech to screenwriter-director Francis Ford Coppola explaining how young screenwriters can avoid the occupational hazard of writer's block and find success by writing daringly original screenplays.
Delving into the nitty-gritty of the craft and providing a clear framework, McBride breaks down the daunting process of writing a first screenplay into a series of easy, approachable tasks. Focusing on literary adaptation rather than an original screenplay in order to best concentrate on the elements of the craft, he uses the classic short story "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, to illustrate the full path from outlines to treatment and, ultimately, to screenplay.
Along the way are helpful and illuminating tips and examples from such Golden Age icons as Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and John Huston and such contemporary masters as Robert Towne, the Coen brothers, and Diablo Cody. Advising writers to learn the rules in order to break them, McBride encourages readers to get to the essence of the story and in so doing discover their own voice. At the heart of the book is McBride reminding readers and aspiring writers that the best reasons to get into the business are not the money, fame, or perks, but love of the actual craft and the sheer joy of writing.
Written with the expertise of a writing professor and the empathy of a fellow writer, WRITING IN PICTURES is the essential book for the film lover and aspiring film creator in all of us.
FURTHER COMMENTS ON WRITING IN PICTURES: SCREENWRITING MADE (MOSTLY) PAINLESS
"An impressively readable, unpretentious, and remarkably useful handbook on how to, and how not to, write a screenplay. Based on a lifetime of experience and observation, as well as conversations with some of the greats (like Orson Welles, John Ford and Howard Hawks), Joe McBride's comprehensive yet very succinct work should become a standard text."
-- Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter, director, film historian
"I must confess that I had never read a how-to book straight through for the sheer pleasure of it, and I never expected to until I got my hands on the splendid Writing in Pictures . Of course, Joe McBride has spent the bulk of his distinguished career working alongside, talking to, and writing about great American filmmakers, so it should come as no surprise that his war stories are as irresistibly entertaining as his professional wisdom is sound.
"A word of warning to would-be screenwriters: in this book you will not find the Six Keys to Compelling Characters, the Seven Secrets of Successful Plotting, or the Eight Jungian Archetypes No Studio Executive Can Resist. There are no magic formulae here, but if you do have a story to tell, this book will give you the solid practical advice you need to tell it, and sell it, in the most effective way. Writing in Pictures is a short course in how to think cinematically. It will change the way you write. It will change the way you watch."
-- Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman, Batman Returns, and "Homecoming"
" Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless represents a real contribution to a much-abused genre. Most screenwriting how-to books are either formulaic, craven, or both. They are less intelligent considerations of the craft than nostrums, sold to the hopeful, proffering the best ways to increase one's odds in the lottery.
"McBride's book is something else. It's a straightforward, considered and lucid meditation on the arts and crafts of storytelling for the screen, informed by McBride's unsurpassed knowledge of, and deep love for, the movies."
-- Howard A. Rodman, screenwriter ( Joe Gould's Secret, August, Savage Grace ); professor and former chair, Division of Screen and Television Writing, University of Southern California; vice president, Writers Guild of America West
"In this unique contribution to the screenplay literature, Joe McBride invites writers to connect themselves to literary tradition, relying less on formulas and more on intelligent uses of classic storytelling technique. Writing in Pictures blends general precepts, concrete examples, hard-won experience, and lively anecdotes into something more than the usual script manual: an invitation to participate in the great human adventure of sharing stories."
-- David Bordwell, author of Poetics of Cinema
"If this isn't the greatest screenwriting book ever, I'll eat my hat! Writing in Pictures is the kind of how-to book Ben Hecht would have written on that subject: a Socratic tour of the profession the novice aspires to enter into, filled with screenwriting lore, for illustration and entertainment. If you want to judge someone's work by how personal it is, Writing in Pictures may just turn out to be Joe McBride's masterpiece."
-- Bill Krohn, author of Hitchcock at Work and Hollywood correspondent, Cahiers du Cinéma
"If it is possible for only one book to embody the ethos of screenwriting, this is the one, a guide to screenwriting that is more than a guide -- craft, history, practical advice, philosophical bedrock, wisdom, wit -- and through it all, as in the very best screenplays, the reassurance of one clarion voice. This is a book for starters and practitioners and scholars of the form."
-- Patrick McGilligan, film biographer and editor of the Backstory series of interviews with screenwriters
"Joe McBride is one of the few film scholars to whose books even the already-wise go to refill their wisdom tanks. In this latest work he provides a first-rate primer for the screenwriters of tomorrow, born of long experience and exceptional insight. Joe McBride offers the kind of friendly but honest advice that will make him the mentor to a new generation of aspiring screenwriters."
-- Julian Hoxter, screenwriter and author of Write What
You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters
To_Build_A_Fire.pdf
To download Joe's screenplay adaptation of
Jack London's short story "To Build a Fire" from WRITING IN PICTURES , click this PDF >>
Click Here for a Schedule of Upcoming
Writing in Pictures Book Events
Film Credits
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0564323/
See more information about
McBride's screenwriting credits:
Rock 'n' Roll High School
Blood and Guts
TV Specials
Click here for information on the documentary
Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History , which had its world premiere on April 10, 2011 at the Tiburon International Film Festival in Marin County, CA.
Click here for information on the upcoming documentary
Dreaming The Quiet Man with Maureen O'Hara, Gabriel Byrne (narrator), Martin Scorsese, Jim Sheridan, and Joseph McBride.
Hundreds of screaming maniacs cheered the May 13, 2011 screening of Rock 'n' Roll High School at the Castro Theater in San Francisco as part of the series Midnites for Maniacs, with Joseph McBride introducting the film.
100 Years . . . 100 Movies: War and Peace (AFI/TNT), 1998;
I wrote the segment on war movies for the AFI's ten-part series on film history
The American Film Institute Salute to Lillian Gish (CBS),
with George Stevens, Jr., 1984 (Writers Guild of America Award nomination; Emmy Award nomination)
The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (CBS),
with Stevens, 1983 (Writers Guild of America Award)
The American Film Institute Salute to Frank Capra (CBS),
with Stevens, 1982 (Writers Guild of America Award nomination)
Let Poland Be Poland (United States Information Agency), with Eric Lieber, 1982; I was the principal writer for this 1982 worldwide live television special, a tribute to the Polish labor movement Solidarnosz (Solidarity) including the leaders of twenty-two countries and many others from the political and cultural worlds
The American Film Institute Salute to Fred Astaire (CBS), with Stevens, 1981 (Writers Guild of America Award nomination; Emmy Award nomination)
The American Film Institute Salute to James Stewart (CBS), with Stevens, 1980 (Writers Guild of America Award nomination)
BEHIND THE CURTAIN: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON WRITING FILM HISTORY
A film by Hart Perez
This new documentary film presents Joseph McBride's thoughts and memories as a biographer of celebrated film directors. For decades, McBride has been considered one of the foremost biographers of filmmakers. His biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg (which were published in February 2011 by the University Press of Mississippi), are among the landmarks in the field. McBride is renowned for his prodigious research, his keen film analysis, and his rare ability to connect the personalities of filmmakers with their work and with their times. McBride's latest biographical work is updating his 1997 book Steven Spielberg: A Biography with four new chapters bringing Spielberg's remarkable story into the present day.
Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History is a wide-ranging fifty-minute film in which McBride engages in liively discussions of how he came to write his major biographies as well as his three books on Orson Welles and how he conducted his seminal interview book Hawks on Hawks . McBride discusses in detail his working methods on each book, the challenges he had to overcome on each, and his subjects' respective places in film history. With an entertainingy witty style, McBride regales the audience with amusing anecdotes about each of these colorful figures. He also discusses how he became a film critic and reporter for Variety and other publications and how he interviewed many other celebrated filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Roman Polanski, and Fritz Lang.
Writer and director Hart Perez skillfully and knowledgeably interweaves a rich range of visual materials with the interviews, including many fascinating stills from McBride's collection. The film had its world premiere on April 10, 2011 at the Tiburon International Film Festival in Tiburon, Marin County, California.
Screen capture from Behind the Curtain
For the first review of the film, see
petertonguette.com
Here is another review by Jeff
Swindoll
Click here for images from the film
Free Campus Screening
Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History
May 10, 7:30 PM, August Coppola Theater
Followed by Q&A with Associate Professor Joseph McBride
and Writer-Director Hart Perez
A new documentary feature about McBride's career as a film historian and biographer of Spielberg, Ford, Capra, Hawks, Welles, and others.
" Behind the Curtain is a testament to McBride's approach to his work, one any film
student interested in exploring the Golden Age of Hollywood should see."
-- Peter Tonguette, petertonguette.com
My Articles
AMC Magazine
Hail to the Duke
Bright Lights Film Journal
George Cukor, The Valor Of Discretion
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/32/cukor1.html
Review of In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/66/66bookswelles.php
Cineaste
An Old Master's Unheard Cri de Coeur: Alfred Hitchock's
Mary Rose
Los Angeles Times
The Convoluted Politics of John Ford
http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jun/03/magazine/tm-5876
Oxford American
Who is John Huston?: The Riddle of Adaptation and Authorship
Sight & Sound
Capra Before He Became "Capraesque"
Written By
Thank You, Mr. Wilder: Billy Wilder, 1906 - 2002
"A Very Good American!": The Undaunted Artistry of Blacklisted Screenwriter Michael Wilson
Hail to the Duke .pdf
Billy Wilder.pdf
MARY ROSE.pdf
Michael Wilson.pdf
CapraFinal.pdf
John Huston.pdf
Articles About Me
Click here to see the new feature
about me in SF State Magazine
SFSU interview about the film world
( YOUTUBE videos of the interview)
"The Searcher" by Paul Brunick
SFSU Campus Insider
"Never the Twain Shall Meet: Why Can't Cinephiles and Academics Just Get Along?" by David Bordwell
San Francisco
State University
http://cinema.sfsu.edu/node/67
Syllabi for Spring 2012:
355 SYLLABUS SPRING 2012.pdf
407 SYLLABUS SPRING 2012 REV.pdf
373 SYLLABUS SPRING 2012.pdf
FIRST REVIEW OF BEHIND THE CURTAIN
It's great to have such a wonderful first review for our film BEHIND THE CURTAIN: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON WRITING FILM HISTORY. It comes from Peter Tonguette, the young critic
whom I regard as the leading Welles critic of his generation. Peter did a fine book called ORSON WELLES REMEMBERED: INTERVIEWS WITH HIS ACTORS, EDITORS, CINEMATOGRAPHERS AND MAGICIANS, a collection of his interviews with Welles collaborators. Peter has a new book on the late director James Bridges, THE FILMS OF JAMES BRIDGES, coming out soon.
To read Peter's review of BEHIND THE CURTAIN, see his blog, petertonguette.com.
Thanks much, Peter.
January 23, 2011
Ironically (and gratifyingly), our government now honors LET THERE BE LIGHT . . .
. . . the great John Huston documentary the U.S. Army released in 1980 after a 35-year ban when Ron Haver showed it at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (its first public screening ever) and I mounted a campaign in Daily Variety to free it through the Freedom of Information Act, with the help of Jack Valenti and Ray Stark. VP Walter Mondale intervened with Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, who finally gave the order to release it.
It's ironic, and quite an honor, for the film now to be chosen by the Librarian of Congress as part of the National Film Registry of important films to be preserved and cherished for future generations. This film showing actual American soldiers suffering from what we would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of the most deeply moving portraits of the human condition ever put on the screen.
December 28, 2010
Welcome to the personal blog of film historian Joseph McBride, in which I discuss film and politics. I welcome any comments on current and historical issues pertaining to either films or politics.
STEVEN SPIELBERG: A BIOGRAPHY
(newly updated edition, February 2011)
Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it and his films had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, the worlds most popular filmmaker, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been.
This long-awaited new edition adds four fascinating chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film company DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work -- including Amistad , Saving Private Ryan , A.I. Artificial Intelligence , Minority Report , The Terminal , and Munich -- has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial subject matter
Steven Spielberg: A Biography , which the Los Angeles Times Book Review praised for its prodigious amount of research and the New York Times Book Review called an exemplary portrait of the artist, brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. Spielberg has long been one of the most successful directors in movie history, responsible for many boxoffice blockbusters and film classics, including Jaws , E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial , Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and Jurassic Park . Yet throughout much of Spielberg's career, his work was undervalued by critics who questioned his emotional maturity and intellectual seriousness. It was not until he made Schindler's List in 1993 that he was widely recognized as a serious filmmaker.
This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which, in his sixties, he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful film company while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.
NIGEL MORRIS, author of T he Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light , writes:
