Wellesnet

 By RAY KELLY

Among the many scholars who have explored Orson Welles’ legacy, Joseph McBride stands out for the depth and continuity of his engagement. His first major study, Orson Welles (1972), was followed by Orson Welles: Actor and Director (1977) and the indispensable What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006, revised 2022). McBride’s cinematic scholarship extends well beyond Welles to encompass examinations of the careers of directors Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. His 26th and latest book, I Loved Movies, But…, is a memoir co-written with interviewer Danny Peary.

The 78-year-old McBride, a Professor Emeritus of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University, has generously assisted many film scholars and authors over the years and been a faithful supporter of Wellesnet.  McBride kindly made time to talk with Wellesnet about his writing career and I Loved Movies, But…

During your career, you have been a screenwriter, author, and college professor. But you started out as a newspaper reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal in the late 1960s. Your parents, Raymond and Marian McBride, were newspaper reporters. How did that foundation as a print journalist shape you?

My father didn’t want me to go into journalism and later didn’t want me to go into movies, but I had to be rebellious to survive. My mother, on the other hand, actively encouraged my writing and helped me get my first professional article published in a magazine for forty dollars in 1960, when I was twelve. The literate atmosphere at home, surrounded by newspapers, magazines, and books, as well as the shop talk about newspapers and politics at the dinner table, naturally influenced me to become a writer. I also wrote to make sense out of my dysfunctional upbringing; as Hemingway remarked, the best training for a writer is “an unhappy childhood.” But when I would visit my father after school in the city room of the Milwaukee Journal, I found that atmosphere terribly romantic in a Front Page kind of way.

I was always writing and editing family and school newspapers and magazines, and when I went to Madison in 1965 to attend the University of Wisconsin, I began writing for The Daily Cardinal and the two local papers. I eventually found my first fulltime job in 1969 as a general assignment reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal. By then I already had written my first book, a study of baseball slang, as well as publishing a collection of film criticism for the Wisconsin Film Society and was far along in writing my first book on Orson Welles.

Why did you decide to write I Loved Movies, But… in a Q&A format?

That makes this Q&A commentary on the interview book quite a meta endeavor! Paul Cronin, who publishes the innovative, freshly formed Sticking Place Books, asked me to do a book in his lively series of interview books with film critics and historians. Paul started the series by publishing a translation of the late Michel Ciment’s book with N. T. Binh, A Shared Cinema, and has since recruited a number of other important figures in the field.

Paul suggested that we ask a friend and colleague to do the interviewing, and I felt comfortable with my old friend from what we called the “Madison film mafia,” Danny Peary, a prolific film historian and baseball biographer who had interviewed me a couple of times in recent years. It’s an honor to be included in this series and fitting because the film book I’ve learned the most from is François Truffaut’s interview book with Hitchcock, which I read when I was nineteen in 1966. And I’ve devoted myself over the years to interviewing many filmmakers I admire.

You first went to Hollywood 55 years ago to interview John Ford. During that same week, you also met Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and a young Peter Bogdanovich. Looking back, how would things played out differently for your Hollywood career had you not made those connections?

Certainly things would have been radically different if I hadn’t had the great good fortune to be suggested by Peter to Orson for the movie he was about to film, The Other Side of the Wind, the start of my five years acting as the film critic and historian Mister Pister. That experience (along with Daily Variety, which I joined as a reporter-reviewer in 1974) became my film school. I was also fortunate to interview Ford on what turned out to be the last day of his career for the critical study I was writing with Michael Wilmington, and it’s mind-boggling that I went to see Renoir later that same day. So I met my three favorite directors in my first week in Hollywood. I thought every week in Hollywood would be like that, but that was the pinnacle. I was lucky, but I also believe in Branch Rickey’s observation that “Luck is the residue of design.”

If I hadn’t made that trip to interview Ford, arriving at the right place at the right time, I still would have gone to Hollywood eventually and managed to meet legendary filmmakers, but my path would have been less serendipitous. That first week, I also barely missed seeing Alfred Hitchcock, who answered my request by sending a message to my hotel inviting me to come to his office, but they didn’t give it to me in time. Nevertheless, I later was able to spend three days on the set and location filming of Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, while working for Daily Variety.

You were involved in The Other Side of the Wind from the first day of shooting in August 1970 until the final day of ADR work in March 2018. (McBride also served as consultant on its completion.) We have talked at length in the past about the struggle to see the film finished. Emotionally, what was it like for you to see it with an audience at its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, alongside other surviving cast and crew members?

It felt surreal to sit there waiting for the film to come on after forty-eight years of waiting and to look around at the audience bursting with expectation, so when it started I could barely believe it was finally happening. It was such a joyous day. I did not feel the sadness Peter Bogdanovich expressed during our panel discussion after the screening with Frank Marshall; Peter said the premiere just made him feel that things were ending. I felt to the contrary that we members of VISTOW (Volunteers in Service to Orson Welles) had helped vindicate Welles’s passion and dedication in making the most ambitious work of his later career. I think we all felt working for Welles was the best thing we would ever do in filmmaking. VISTOW was a term coined by Frank, who was production manager early on and later became one of the producers of the finished film.

Your relationship with Welles extended beyond the filming The Other Side of the Wind. It included his unsold talk show pilot, The Orson Welles Show; Let Poland Be Poland; the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award tribute to John Huston; and co-hosting the two-month AFI series of panel discussions, Working with Welles. What did you learn from watching him work?

What struck me most was how much fun it was to work with Orson, and how much delight he took in his work. Welles lived for the pleasure of making movies, whether he managed to finish them or not.

That joie de vivre was contrary to the image we get from most of the dramatized portrayals of Welles in movies, which tend to paint him as a dour ogre. The one that’s mostly an exception is Me and Orson Welles, in which Christian McKay captures the mercurial creative spirit of the young Welles, but even it alters history to turn him into a shit when he fires his devoted young protégé. Welles kept his sets lively by telling stories, making jokes, and even singing songs, while guiding us along with his pithy and brilliantly phrased pieces of direction.

I also marveled at Welles’ endless inventiveness and creative adaptability, the way he could come up with fresh solutions to problems on a moment’s notice. He thrived on doing that. And I could see why Charlton Heston described Welles as the most efficient director he had ever worked for, quite a compliment considering Heston’s wide experience. Again, that went against the false image people have of Welles, but he worked with amazing speed and dedication, aided immensely by his young cinematographer Gary Graver and their youthful crew.

You mentioned in the book there was a period in your life that you felt resentful toward Peter Bogdanovich. Can you elaborate on that?

Through an unfortunate set of circumstances in 1974, when I was writing a screenplay about the early days of Hollywood that I intended to offer to Peter, The Authentic Life of Cheyenne Harry (based on a story I wrote with Gerald Peary, Danny’s brother), I was completing it just as I learned that Peter was going to direct a film on the same subject, which became Nickelodeon. That was a shattering experience. Peter was interested in purchasing my script as well, because he said he wasn’t satisfied with the one they had and planned to rewrite it, hopefully incorporating parts of mine, but his producer vetoed the idea. I felt Peter didn’t fight hard enough, and the film he made suffered as a result. But as time went on, the pain of that experience healed, and I focused on how grateful I am to Peter for helping me with my Ford and Welles research and for introducing me to Orson for The Other Side of the Wind.

I later was somewhat put out by Peter and Oja Kodar firing me as a producer on Other Wind as soon as I and Gary Graver made a tentative deal with Showtime, and Peter and Oja mistakenly thought they didn’t need me anymore. I let it go because I didn’t want to cause any more trouble for the film. And in retrospect I am glad I was fired, since I did not envy Filip Jan Rymsza having to spend nine agonizing years persuading Oja to sell her rights.

Peter and I gradually renewed our friendship, and we began treating each other as colleagues. He signed an inscription for his 1997 book of director interviews, Who the Devil Made It: “For Joe — We have heard ‘the chimes at midnight’ — so many good memories when I see you! Good luck — Peter (Bogdanovich).”

I was surprised to read in I Loved Movies, But… of your dislike of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and David Lynch’s Eraserhead, both of which you reviewed for Daily Variety. Are there films you once disliked as a film critic that you now enjoy?

Offhand none comes to mind, although I find in revisiting some films I reviewed for Daily Variety that I perhaps was overly enthusiastic. Films seem to change as we get older, but it’s actually us who change. I was so thrilled, for example, to be able to review an Ingmar Bergman film, Face to Face, that I didn’t realize how minor and unsatisfactory it is among his body of work (I also hadn’t realized it is a cut-down version of a TV miniseries). And when I reviewed Sally Field playing a woman with multiple personalities in the two-part TV movie Sybil, I absurdly wrote that she gave the greatest performance in the history of television. It’s generally wise to practice restraint in using superlatives as a reviewer.

As for Raging Bull, I did write that it has the best boxing sequences ever filmed, which I think is actually true, but I found it dramatically thin and enervating, especially when Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci keep calling each other a “dumb fuck” (Pauline Kael aptly wrote, “I think, What am I doing here watching these two dumb f—ks?”). I used to consider Eraserhead the worst film I’d ever seen, but it has since been surpassed in that distinction by Pearl Harbor. As a reviewer, I always tried to judge a film on its own terms and hoped it would work, but I had to review a lot of stinkers amidst the occasional good ones, and so when I met John Wayne’s secretary, she said, “Oh, you’re that mean critic!”

How do you feel about David Lynch’s films in general?

I gave a rave review to The Elephant Man, was a fan of the various iterations of Twin Peaks, and have enjoyed some of his other movies, such as The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive, but was turned off by the ugly worldview of Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart. I think my favorite Lynch contribution to cinema is his wonderful performance as John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. I can vouch for the authenticity of that portrayal, since my experience with Ford was quite similar to that of the teenaged Spielberg, a mostly gruff encounter with the crusty old master but with a sentimental finale, though Ford gave me an hour rather than only a couple of minutes. My time with him was invaluable as a future biographer, more so to observe his behavior rather than for what he said.

A bit of a “desert island disc” kind of question: Which three movies do you never tire of seeing – and why?

The Magnificent Ambersons, Ford’s Wagon Master, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise. Ambersons is my favorite film, one that moves me to my core and inspires the protective sense I feel toward a film maudit. Wagon Master and Trouble in Paradise are among the few perfect films I have seen.  Wagon Master is my model of what a film should be — a small, unpretentious, heartfelt adventure in a remote, ruggedly beautiful landscape, an outing with a bunch of good friends.  Trouble in Paradise is about jewel thieves, and what a gem it is; no wittier or more polished film exists, and its portrayal of a romantic triangle leaves you with a poignant sense that you wish all three of those charming people could remain together. Sometimes an “unhappy” ending is most satisfying, because it’s truest to life, and Lubitsch manages a happy unhappy ending with his romantic comedy masterpiece.

Professionally, which of your works are you most proud of and why?

I think my biography Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992; revised edition, 2000) represents my best work. I had a major scoop on my hands that enabled me to invent the wheel of Capra studies by revealing the truth behind Capra’s mythic image. I managed to cross every “t” and dot every “i” in my research and had seven years to make the text as good as it could be. Partly that was due to having to spend four of those years waging the legal battle to get it published, the subject of my 2019 book Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra. Winning that battle against great odds was deeply satisfying.

Of my scriptwriting, The American Film Institute Salute to Fred Astaire (1981) has everything going for it in terms of dazzling film clips and drolly affectionate speeches and offers a fittingly rich display of a peerless film talent, but I also have a soft spot for The American Film Institute Salute to Lillian Gish (1984). I had to write almost all of that TV special in only two days and still managed to pull off a worthy tribute to a great actress and silent cinema on network TV in the face of imminent disaster. I Loved Movies, But… explains my mixed experiences working on five AFI Life Achievement Award shows.

You have been referred to as one of the preeminent film historians of our time. Where do you see cinema today?

We used to say that “Film is the art form of the twentieth century,” which was true, but now it’s the twenty-first century. What a shame that the American film industry that used to give us so many splendid films is now mostly cranking out mindless special-effects extravaganzas for the adolescent male audience. I title the final section in I Loved Movies, But… “The decline of cinephilia.” It’s a sad denouement, one I feel deeply as a form of betrayal.

Over the course of my teaching career of twenty-two years at San Francisco State University, I could see a steady decline of interest in cinema among young people, not only in classic films (if they are shown them, they tend to like them, yet they don’t seek them out) but even in contemporary films. Few of our Cinema majors actually seemed to watch movies anymore; that made me wonder why they are in that field of study. It’s a complex problem I discuss at length in I Loved Movies, But…, and I point out, “The students’ malaise about cinematic knowledge and appreciation goes along with their general ignorance of history. It’s far more shocking how little young people know about world and American history; a survey a few years ago showed that a majority of American high school students think we were fighting the Soviets in World War II and that Germany was our ally. Few know anything about what we used to be taught as ‘Civics.’” I tried my best to fill those educational gaps with my students while simultaneously teaching them film studies, but the task became increasingly untenable, so I packed it in.

Cinephilia is not entirely dead around the world if you have the means and ability to travel to festivals and seek out films that aren’t shown here, but I have largely spent my life studying American cinema, and now if you want to find stories in which people talk with each other and have relationships, you mostly have to turn to streaming channels. It’s been a truism for years that no one knows where the art form is heading, since technological change is so rapid, but it’s not a happy picture for those of us who loved what was once the film medium and now is something else.

I Loved Movies, But… also touches on a few of your works that may not be as well known to movie lovers: The Broken Places, a memoir of your mental health struggles as a youth, and two books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. How difficult was it to write The Broken Places?

That labor of love took forty-nine years off and on, first as a memoir, then as a screenplay, then as a novel, and ultimately back to the form it needed to take, the memoir.

It was often excruciating to relive the worst times of my life, but that was a necessary, therapeutic, and somewhat cathartic experience. I wondered if finishing The Broken Places would bring “closure,” but it did not, and anyway I regard “closure” as an illusory concept that people invoke to falsely mollify themselves. You have to learn to live with life’s losses. By writing the book I learned to do so. I also felt a sense of achievement in telling the story of my traumatic but inspiring formative experiences, but mostly what kept me working on The Broken Places all those years was wanting to bring my first girlfriend back to life. I call her Kathy Wolf in that book. She saved me when I had my physical and mental breakdown as a teenager and taught me how to live, but she could not save herself. I wanted to pay her the tribute of commemoration and give her a continuing existence within those pages.

Why are you – and so many of us – still fascinated by JFK and his death 62 years later?

As a volunteer in Senator John F. Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, I had the opportunity to meet him twice, and in 1962, when he was president, we exchanged greetings as he passed backstage at an event before turning down a ramp toward the limousine in which he would be killed the following year. The first time we talked was at an intimate “Kids for Kennedy” campaign event my mother, a Democratic Party official, set up at the Wauwatosa Civic Center two blocks from our house. When I answered a question the senator asked about American history and his book Profiles in Courage, he quipped, “I hope I don’t have to run against you in 1964.” My youthful admiration for President Kennedy has endured, as has my loyalty to my candidate who was murdered. That event changed my life. When it became clear to me by the end of that day that the government and the media did not want to solve the crime, it caused me to lose faith in our political system, give up my ambition to enter politics, and become a writer instead.

I have continued to study his assassination ever since it happened — resulting in my 2013 book, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit — and indeed I had been so concerned about Kennedy’s security that I wrote a short story about his assassination for my freshman English class at Marquette University High School, “The Plot Against a Country,” in October 1961, two years before it happened. President Kennedy’s unsolved murder cost us our democracy and led directly to the lawless chaos in which our country is mired today, as I discuss in my second book on the case, Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy (2021). As Mark Lane put it, the honor of France was restored when it admitted that Dreyfus was innocent, and the honor of the United States will not be restored until we admit that Oswald was innocent. The Kennedy assassination has shaped my life, and investigating it is my true vocation; studying film is my avocation. In his foreword to I Loved Movies, But…, the novelist Jonathan Lethem, another old friend of mine, aptly refers to my “rage for truth.”

Is I Loved Movies, But… the end of your career as an author, or can we expect more books in the future?

All I can tell you, Ray, is that when I retired from my teaching career on December 31, 2024, I took ten days off and then got right back into working on this book. I get antsy when I am not writing a book, which I’ve been doing steadily since May 1963. So I probably will just keep rollin’ along. I have a couple of projects in mind; I usually spend years thinking about a book before going ahead. When I was young, my father called me “a compulsive writer.”

 

(Editor’s note: I Loved Movies, But… by Joseph McBride and Danny Peary is available in hardcover or paperback from Sticking Place Books at https://stickingplacebooks.com/i-loved-movies-but/ and otherbooksellers.)

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