John Ford (Cinema Two)

Arts & Photography

Joseph McBride

Performing Arts

Secker Warburg

Hawks on Hawks

Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth, this is an examination of the personal concerns which Howard Hawks brought to his films, and which enabled him to stamp his distinctive signature on what once appeared to be a random assortment of genre pieces. Hawks's discussion of his working methods in this frequently irreverent book represents a master class in the practical art of film direction.

Biographies & Memoirs

Faber Paperbacks

Based on extensive interviews with Frank Capra himself, this is a biography of the director of films such as "It Happened One Night", "Mr Deeds Goes to Town" and "It's a Wonderful Life". He achieved fame during Hollywood's golden era, working with some of its major stars, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and James Stewart. However, confronted with the great challenge that ripped Hollywood apart during the post-war era - the blacklist - Capra failed. The book examines the psychological pressures which caused the collapse of the Sicilian-born Capra's creativity at the end of the 1940s, under the onslaught of the McCarthy witch-hunt.

Frank Capra the Catastrophe of Success

Faber Faber Inc

Unlike most how-to books on screen writing, "Writing in Pictures" is highly practical, offering a realistic guide to the screen writing profession, as well as concrete practical guidance in the steps professional writers take to write a screenplay that comes from the heart instead of the pocketbook. The reader is taken through the nitty-gritty process of conceiving, outlining, constructing, and writing a screenplay in the professional format, with clear and concise examples offered for every step in writing a short dramatic film. "Writing in Pictures" offers straight talk, no mumbo-jumbo or gimmicks, just a methodical, step-by-step process that walks the reader through the different stages of writing a screenplay - from idea to outline to character biography to treatment to step outline to finished screenplay. Using well-known films and screenplays, both contemporary and classic, to illustrate its lessons, "Writing in Pictures" also offers comments from famous screenwriters past and present and insightful stories (often colorful and funny) that illuminate aspects of the craft.

Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

Reference

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Faber&Faber

Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of the most successful films ever made: "Jaws", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "E.T." and the "Indiana Jones" series. Yet for many years most critics condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man incapable of dealing maturely with the complexities of life. The deeper levels of meaning in his films were largely ignored. This changed with "Schindler's List", his masterpiece about a gentile businessman who saves eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. For Spielberg, the film was the culmination of a long struggle with his Jewish identity - an identity of which he had long been ashamed, but now triumphantly embraced. Until the first edition of "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. In his astute and perceptive biography, Joseph McBride reconciled Spielberg's seeming contradictions and produced a coherent portrait of the man who found a way to transmute the anxieties of his own childhood into some of the most emotionally powerful and viscerally exciting films ever made. In the second edition, McBride added four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to 2010, a period in which he balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director: "Amistad", "Saving Private Ryan", "A. I. Artificial Intelligence", "Minority Report", "The Terminal and Munich" - films which expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter. This third edition brings Spielberg's career up to date with material on two recent films he directed, "The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse", analyzing what they represent in terms of Spielberg's overall career development as an artist making both lighter and darker works alternately involving fantasy or history. The new sections also deal with the recent upheavals in Spielberg's position as a minimogul, his uneven but prolific work as a producer, and his upcoming projects. The original edition of "Steven Spielberg: A Biography" was praised by the "New York Times Book Review" as 'an exemplary portrait' written with 'impressive detail and sensitivity'; "Time" called it 'easily the finest and fairest of the unauthorized biographies of the director.' Of the second edition, Nigel Morris - author of "The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light" - wrote: 'With this tour de force, McBride remains the godfather of Spielberg studies.'

Steven Spielberg: A Biography (Third Edition)

Arts & Literature

Faber and Faber

Describes Capra's immigrant origins, his rise to fame during Hollywood's golden era, his working relationships with screen legends, and his role during the postwar blacklist period

Frank Capra: Castastrophe of Success

Simon&Schuster

Release date: June 15, 2013 "AMERICA'S NEED TO WALK INTO THE NIGHTMARE . . ." . . . was how Norman Mailer predicted the tumultuous period that led to President John F. Kennedy's 1963 murder on a public street and the fifty years of controversy that have followed that turning point in our nation's history. Journalist and historian Joseph McBride, a volunteer in JFK's 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, began studying the assassination minutes after it happened. In 1982, McBride launched his own investigation. Both epic and intimately personal, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit incorporates rare interviews with key people in Dallas, archival discoveries, and what novelist Thomas Flanagan, in The New York Review of Books, called McBride's "wide knowledge of American social history." McBride chronicles his evolving skepticism about the official story and shines a fresh, often surprising spotlight on Kennedy's murder and on one of the murkiest, most crucial aspects of the case, its "Rosetta Stone," the Tippit killing. Joseph McBride has been a journalist since 1960, writing for such publications as Life, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and, on this subject, The Nation. An internationally renowned film biographer and historian, he has written acclaimed biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. McBride lives in Berkeley and is a professor at San Francisco State University.

Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit

History

Americas

Hightower Press

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed in a coup d’état. Ever since then, it has been virtually taboo in the American mainstream media to report this basic truth. Instead, print and television ''news" reporters and historians spread the government's lies and attack people they label conspiracy theorists rather than investigating the case themselves. Joseph McBride, author of "Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit," offers a deep analysis of this dereliction of journalistic duty. "Political Truth" assimilates a wealth of media disinformation and contrastingly accurate investigations by independent researchers, reporters, and filmmakers. McBride's provocative study traces how the false reporting of the assassination has led to today's poisonous political divide over the meaning of historical reality.\nJoseph McBride has been a journalist since 1960, writing for such publications as the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, Life, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and, on this subject, for The Nation. He is the author of many other books on films and other subjects, including acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. He is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy

In The Broken Places, Joseph McBride, an internationally acclaimed American cultural historian, recalls his troubled youth in the Midwest during the 1960s. Searingly immediate and yet reflective, this is the author's memoir of his breakdown as a teenager and triumphant recovery. It gives an unsparing look at physical and psychological abuse, family dysfunction and addiction, sexual repression, and Catholic guilt. And at its heart, this is a haunting, often joyous love story.  The Broken Places offers an unforgettable portrait of Kathy Wolf, a brilliant, vibrant, shattered young Native American woman who taught Joe how to live even though she could not save herself. Kathy's life exemplifies what Ernest Hemingway wrote, "The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially." This extraordinary love story will move you and disturb you.  Joseph McBride was born in Milwaukee and educated at Marquette University High School and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is a professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. McBride is the author of seventeen previous books, including biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg; three books on Orson Welles; and Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit.

The Broken Places by Joseph McBride (2015-11-01)

Hightower Press, Berkeley, California

Joseph McBride has been writing about films for fifty years. His career as a critic and historian has included acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford, and three books about Orson Welles. McBride's extensive journalistic work, the best of which is collected in Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies, includes interviews with directors; profiles of screenwriters; features on stars and craftspeople; accounts of visiting sets; and essays on some of his favorite films. Among the filmmakers he covers in Two Cheers for Hollywood are Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, John Huston, George Stevens, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Lester, Joe Dante, Hal Ashby, Elia Kazan, Robert Riskin, Abraham Polonsky, Michael Wilson, Marguerite Roberts, John Wayne, James Stewart, Peter O'Toole, and Katharine Hepburn. Two Cheers for Hollywood is a rich, insightful, often amusing chronicle of McBride's decades of covering the American film industry and observing its decline from the challenging films of the 1960s to the juvenilia of today. This provocative collection brings together sixty-four pieces with commentaries on them, including a new monograph on the Coen Bros. and several other essays written for this book. Two Cheers for Hollywood demonstrates why McBride has helped set the standard for the field of film scholarship. As the late novelist Thomas Flanagan wrote in The New York Review of Books, McBride "deploys his wide knowledge of American social and film history with tact, wit, and imagination." McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He spent several years as a film critic, reporter, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood. His screenwriting credits include Rock 'n' Roll High School and five American Film Institute Life Achievement Award specials on CBS-TV.

Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

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Books by Joseph McBride