An excerpt adapted from the interview book I Loved Movies, But . . ., by Joseph McBride (Conversations with Danny Peary), available from Sticking Place Books, stickingplacebooks.com, 2025.
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Danny Peary (Suzanne Rafer)
We can now move on from your youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Madison, as you did in the fall of 1965. You’ve mentioned that you developed your own curriculum at the University of Wisconsin after you dropped out. Did that work out for you in the career paths you pursued?
Managing to achieve and sustain a career as a university professor in later life at San Francisco State University even though I was a college dropout became a matter of great satisfaction for me. One of the highlights of my life was delivering the commencement address in May 2012 for the graduating seniors from the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Film & Media and the Department of Rhetoric. My speech was entitled “Chutzpah: Making the World Realize It Needs You,” based on my final class topic each semester for my screenwriting students. Some parents came up afterward and thanked me for telling their kids what they had tried in vain to make them realize, that a film school degree doesn’t guarantee you a job in the film industry, and you need a “day job” while you’re trying to break in.
In one of his most elaborate student films, Joseph McBride directs Michael Wilmington in the 1969 chase comedy Close But No Cigar. Here Michael is desperately looking for his runaway girlfriend at the construction site of Vilas Communication Hall, the future home of the UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts.
The word “chutzpah” (Yiddish for boldness) has a special significance for me, because it was the only piece of advice about the movie business I received before going to Hollywood in 1973. I met a recovering screenwriter who was passing through Wisconsin and asked him for advice. I followed his advice vigorously in my first few years there, going up to people and introducing myself at parties and other events and calling all the directors and others I admired for interviews.
Sitting behind me at the Berkeley graduation ceremony among the faculty members on the stage in a large auditorium was my favorite teacher at the University of Wisconsin, Professor Russell Merritt, wearing his crimson Harvard robes. I remember Russ on the first day of our film class telling us that though most of us would not go on to become filmmakers, the world needs more than just good filmmakers, it needs good audiences.
When I arrived in Madison in September 1965, though, I felt lost among the huge student body and was dismayed to find that the teachers were far inferior to the Jesuit priests and the laymen who educated me at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee. I was not prepared for the fact that as a freshman, I was mostly taught by graduate students, who seemed incompetent. Although I suppose if I had continued and had more full professors teach me, I might have changed my mind.
Shooting The End of a Perfect Day (1973), the last film McBride directed. This romantic drama about a young woman who meets a lonely boy on the UW Memorial Union Terrace was photographed by McBride’s radical friend Kenny Mate. (Tim Davis)
One of those grad students was my teaching assistant in freshman English, Lynne Cheney, the wife of Dick Cheney. They were in Madison so he could keep getting deferred from going to Vietnam. Dick Cheney was also a grad student and was working as an intern for the Republican governor, Warren Knowles; that was the start of Cheney’s vile political career. Lynne later became a right-wing political pundit and wrote a bodice-ripper novel. She was at the UW writing her thesis on Matthew Arnold; I found her horribly ignorant and nasty as a teacher.
Though I consider myself a college dropout, I was expelled from the UW after I became disenchanted with the quality of teaching and fed up with the educational system. My attitude resembled that of George Amberson Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons, who brushes off his semester at Harvard before he was invited to go back home to Indiana as just “a lot of useless guff.”
You were so down on the education offered at UW that I wonder you even wanted to go there, especially after doing so well at Marquette High and even winning a National Merit Scholarship.
The North Division of the Milwaukee County Hospital medical complex, where McBride spent most of four months after his breakdown in 1965. This photo was taken many years later on a return visit as research for his screenplay and memoir The Broken Places. (Timothy McBride)
Initially I was unhappy about going to our flagship state school (the tuition was only $300 a year) because I had wanted to go to an Ivy League school, Harvard or Columbia. But I had a physical and psychological breakdown due to the stress of schoolwork and Catholicism in the middle of my senior year in high school and was hospitalized for four months. I wrote about that experience in my 2015 book, The Broken Places: A Memoir. The breakdown actually happened during my interview for Harvard at the home of an alumnus, the peak of my tension over that process. That was it for Harvard, but I was accepted at Columbia, where I hoped to enter their famous school of journalism. I couldn’t afford to go there, though, after I discovered that the National Merit Scholarship I almost literally had killed myself to win was worth only $100 a year. I had naively assumed it would cover my expenses at a top private school, but the scholarship people told me that token stipend was all I needed, because both my parents worked. They didn’t factor in that my middle-class parents, who were newspaper reporters, struggled to support their family of seven children, let alone send any of us to an expensive college. I was so furious that I never bothered to collect the money, and that prompted my disillusionment with so-called higher education.
The cover of The Broken Places, McBride’s 2015 memoir of his breakdown and hospitalization in high school. (Hightower Press)
I did apply myself for one semester, just to prove to myself that I still could do well in my studies if I wanted to. I had to withdraw during my first semester in 1965 because of my second breakdown; I was unable to concentrate due to the heavy medication I was still under, a case of malpractice. But once I was off the Thorazine I managed a semester of straight B’s in the Spring. I was back to being a grind. My time was consumed by reading a staggering load of Masterpieces of Western Literature, in a comparative literature course. Each week we were assigned a classic to read, most of them in translation – Crime and Punishment, The Trial, Faust, Candide, French plays, Ibsen plays, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, parts of The Canterbury Tales, and so on and on – all wonderful stuff. One whole week I did nothing but eat, sleep, and read Don Quixote. It never occurred to me to skim those books, which some of the other students must have done, and when I became a university teacher in 2002, I couldn’t imagine getting students to read even a fraction of that overwhelming workload. But the teacher was terrific (I only remember her first name, Cynthia), and I learned more from that course than from any other at the UW, so I was mildly miffed to earn only a B.
I also took a philosophy course in logic, which helped my writing enormously, since I tended to be far more emotional than logical in my early days. And my first-semester Italian course (taught by a TA from Texas, so we spoke Italian with a Texan twang; but he was an exception to the rule about TAs) came in unexpectedly handy when I wrote my biography of Frank Capra, an Italian immigrant. I was able to converse with elderly Italians to some extent and do some translating of Italian material with a University of California, Los Angeles, graduate student I hired to help me with that language and French.
But after desultory attendance for the first couple of years and a spotty record in classes, including failing everything by barely attending in Spring 1967, by that fall I was still officially a freshman. The dean of students called me into his office in early June 1968 and told me, with regret, that I was being expelled for missing so many classes. (I see in my transcript that the official date of my expulsion was June 8, a Saturday, which happened to be the day of Robert Kennedy’s funeral.) In fact, I had dropped out on purpose as my way of rebelling against higher education, so that suited me just fine. I’m still barely a sophomore, with thirty-two credits of the 120 required for graduation; only my three AP English credits pushed me beyond freshman status.
Nevertheless, I had the impression when we met at the UW in 1967 that you eventually became happy about being on campus.
On campus, yes, though not in class. I spent eight years in Madison before going to Hollywood. Madison turned out to be the ideal school for me, because of the lively political and cultural environment that surrounded the buildings where classes were being taught. Even after being kicked out, I hung around the campus until 1969, when I was hired for my first full-time job as a newspaper reporter for The Wisconsin State Journal. Despite some mixed feelings I still have about my college days, I like to go back to that beautiful city, which surrounds five lakes and is also the state capital. Life magazine aptly called Madison “the Athens of the Midwest.”
The first of McBride’s three books on Welles, a critical study published in 1972 in the British Film Institute’s Cinema One series
The problem I had with the quality of teaching at the UW was compounded when I became interested in a career in film. We only had three film courses, which were in the Speech Department, and after taking them all, I decided to set up my own curriculum instead. Besides watching films incessantly, that program included teaching myself how to write screenplays and directing my own increasingly ambitious short films. Madison had extraordinary resources in that regard, a voluminous archive at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and many film societies, one of which I ran. And I began writing my first book on Orson Welles in Madison as well as articles for film magazines around the world, such as Film Heritage, Film Quarterly, and Sight and Sound. Before I left Madison, I also wrote the critical study John Ford with Michael Wilmington.
I missed some class subjects I now wish I had taken, such as economics and sociology, which I’ve had to catch up with on my own. I regret not becoming a student of our renowned history professors George Mosse and Harvey Goldberg, the teachers to whom my friend Errol Morris dedicated his documentary film The Fog of War. Errol was a member of our Wisconsin Film Society, and we bonded over our shared fascination with the Wisconsin graverobber, cannibal, and murderer Ed Gein, the model for Norman Bates in Psycho. Ironically, Errol became the one great filmmaker who emerged from what we called our “Madison film mafia” even though I would have thought him the least likely to become a director, since he was a classical intellectual who didn’t fit any of the stereotypes of directors, which is part of his creative originality. I’ve kept in touch with Errol and am thanked in American Dharma, his provocative, important, and unfairly attacked 2018 documentary on Steve Bannon, for which I gave feedback in postproduction.
Another reason Errol stands out is that he studied history and philosophy in Madison and elsewhere rather than being a film major anywhere, although he spent a lot of time watching films at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. You see the profound effects of history and philosophy in his work. So as a teacher, I would hold up Errol to students as an example of how just studying film is not the way to become a great filmmaker. I would also quote what I heard Orson Welles tell students at the University of California in 1971 when he was asked how he would teach film. Welles said he wouldn’t show films, since they’ve already seen enough films for one lifetime. That caused consternation. What then would he teach?, the student asked. Welles spread his arms wide and said, “I would teach the history of the world!”
Autodidact
How do you think not finishing college shaped your future?
My abandoning college as an act of rebellion turned me into an autodidact. That lifelong habit has served me well. The many benefits I received from going to the UW came instead from my extracurricular activities in film and participating in and covering anti-Vietnam War protests. And being an autodidact marked me forever as an iconoclast, following my own idiosyncratic path in my careers as a writer and later as an academic. That made me more original, although it isolated me to some extent from my colleagues in both fields, a price I have found worth paying.
After my initial feeling of disgruntlement about having to go to Madison rather than a prestigious Eastern school, I began changing my mind about the campus environment when I discovered that the UW was a favorite destination for students from New York because of its reputation as a school of radical protest that was welcoming of dissidents. The students from back East and from other countries were fascinating to me, so I gravitated toward them. I admired their brand of sophistication, although some ironically were more provincial than I actually was; I had a different kind of sophistication. Some, but not all, saw me in stereotypical terms as a “hick,” a word Peter Bogdanovich also applied to me after I met him in Los Angeles.
Even though I began my career as a film scholar in Madison, I’ve remained somewhat ambivalent about my years on campus because I was often lonely and angry in those years. I was struggling to liberate myself from my traumatic upbringing (one of my girlfriends described me as “an open wound”) and I often felt socially isolated. I felt ostracized by some of my fellow students because of my poor clothing, clunky haircut, lack of money, and gaucheness. (You can see how I looked in my role as the comically earnest young film scholar Mister Pister in Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, which I began acting in during my first visit to Hollywood in August 1970.) After I dropped out of school, I lived on the edge financially, because my parents cut off my modest allowance. When I told my dad that I was going to study films, he said he would no longer help support me, explaining, “I wouldn’t support you if you were studying nightclubs.” Well, after many years in Hollywood, I realize he wasn’t entirely wrong about that.
Somehow McBride’s Mister Pister wound up in Peter Bogdanovich’s clothes and body by the end of The Other Side of the Wind; it must have been a really wild party! Actually, when McBride saw the semifinal cut, he told them Bogdanovich was in two places at once, so he suggested ILM put someone else’s head on his body in this shot, not realizing it would be him. This is the film’s penultimate moment with Jake Hannaford’s final words unspooling on a tape recorder before the film cuts to the last shot of the empty screen in the drive-in theater. (Royal Road Entertainment/Netflix)
I spent six months working as an orderly for $1.40 an hour at the University Hospitals, a powerful life experience that cured me of feeling sorry for myself, since I was dealing with people in far worse straits. I was a devoted worker as house orderly, handling a wide variety of chores (including taking care of corpses and even assisting in an operation once), but lost that job because I grew a goatee and quit after being ordered to shave it off; a few years later, a court case brought by another bearded employee ruled against the University Hospitals. And for about three years I washed dishes in fraternity and sorority houses, a dormitory, and restaurants to keep myself fed while living in dumpy rooming houses.
What, if anything, did you get out of the film classes you took in Madison?
Although the film curriculum was inadequate, I did find two of the three film courses eye-opening. Taught by Russ Merritt and Richard Byrne, both of whom were smart, charismatic, and witty, those were stimulating courses that jump-started my development as a film scholar. The third course, however, was taught by a fellow who had been a male model and seemed to know little about film. His hiring reflected the neglect of the subject by higher education before “film studies” became an academically sanctioned field.
That teacher was amiable and would call on me in class to help fill him in, and I’m afraid that became somewhat embarrassing. When he taught a film history class and came to the subject of American film – which occupied only one day of the semester – he started by saying he had gone to the university library to bone up on American film and (looking down at his notes) said he had found an article in “Film Culture” written by (checking notes and reading more slowly) “Andrew Sarris” on a director named (checking again for another strange name) “Howard Hawks.” And once when the professor was lecturing on French film and mentioned Jean Cocteau, he turned to me in the first row and asked, “Joe, what’s Cocteau been doing recently?” I had to respond, hunching down in my seat, “He died in 1963,” which caused some titters.
Seeing Welles’s 1941 classic Citizen Kane in Professor Richard Byrne’s film class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 22, 1966, changed McBride’s life. (RKO Radio Pictures)
I went to Madison expecting to make a career as a journalist and novelist; Ernest Hemingway was my favorite writer as well as a role model. But instead I discovered Orson Welles and through him my ambitions to make films and write about them. That epiphany came on September 22, 1966, when Professor Byrne showed Citizen Kane in his introductory film class. Byrne had an exciting, eloquent, and humorous style that blended erudition with jokes that kept the class entertaining without lowering its level. As luck would have it – the kind of luck I always seem to have when I become interested in a filmmaker – the Memorial Union was having a Welles series that fall. They were showing six of his films in 16mm in the Stiftskeller, a beer hall. I borrowed the prints ahead of time and first saw The Magnificent Ambersons and Touch of Evil projected on a wall in a little room at the Union. I found those two films astounding in a way that expanded what I thought a movie could be. I realized that Welles had made other films that are as good as if not better than Kane.
Russ Merritt, who became a lifelong friend, also taught film history and was another positive influence on my budding cinephilia. Russ was just a few years older than us and was our enthusiastic advocate with the university. He made us feel that our voices were being heard by the university hierarchy about the importance of film, at least symbolically. He encouraged our appreciation of the then-avant-garde subject of the American cinema. He also made film scholarship fun, and he punctured our ignorance straightforwardly, such as when he asked whether film was a verbal art form or a visual art form. Under the trendy spell of McLuhanism, I answered “Visual,” and Russ replied, “Haven’t movies been talking for a long time now?” That was an epiphany about the medium and a warning against glibness.
Russ was already a leading expert on D. W. Griffith and, as you remember, Danny, put on a spectacular showing of The Birth of a Nation in the campus theater, using an original 35mm tinted print from the Museum of Modern Art along with a fifty-piece orchestra, a choir, and sound effects, including simulated gunshots. That somewhat ingenuous presentation caused an uproar with a Black students’ organization protesting. Birth’s blatant racism demands that it be shown with a vigorous discussion to frame the still-incendiary issues surrounding it, and even that is difficult now, as I found while teaching excerpts from it with a colleague at San Francisco State. I covered Russ’s extravaganza for the State Journal, juxtaposing head shots of Griffith and the Black protest leader on the front page. Russ’s similarly flamboyant 35mm screening of an original print of Intolerance was not controversial but was equally instructive in showing how films were exhibited in the early days of the medium.
“The Madison Film Mafia”
How did it change your life, as it did mine, to become part of our “Madison film mafia”?
My sense of alienation in Madison was relieved to some extent when I found my niche among our group of cinephiles. About two dozen of us went into the professional film world as filmmakers or scholars or both. A good gang of young men and women indeed, full of intellectual conversation, film lore, and an enthusiastic welcoming spirit that cut through all boundaries. That camaraderie enabled me to make some close and enduring friends and start dating regularly while enjoying the rich Madison film milieu. Still, a major reason I began devoting myself to writing film articles and books was to stand out from even that group. It was my conscious way of creating an identity that would compel respect from my peers, whether they all liked me or not. Out of the need to solve such problems in life comes our choice of an identity. In those years, film became my substitute for religion. When I eventually lost my faith in the world of filmmaking, it was another shattering blow until I gradually recovered from that as well.
I was fortunate to find among the Madison film mafia a wise and sympathetic mentor who recognized my talents and saw through my idiosyncrasies to something deeper. Bill Donnelly was a bearded, erudite, avuncular, slyly humorous graduate student in English literature, about thirty-five years old at the time, who took an interest in me when we were involved in running the Wisconsin Film Society, the oldest film society on campus. Bill made me the head of that group, which had about seven hundred members. He shrewdly recognized that I cultivated my apparent lack of sophistication, my image as a hayseed from Wisconsin, as a facade to fool people. I did so out of mischief and self-protection. That attitude masked my disdain toward those who snubbed me. But my approach was too subtle, so I doubt it was effective. It took me a long time to learn to speak out against derision rather than internalizing the rejection.
The “Nude Peter Pan”
Our Wisconsin Film Society was also the official campus film society until the university stripped us of that status for allowing Stuart Gordon, the future film director and prodigiously talented theater director, to stage his renegade production of the “Nude Peter Pan” on October 1, 1968, in the auditorium where we had booked a program of Buster Keaton films. The university, under pressure from the local district attorney, had padlocked the Memorial Union Play Circle after the preview of Stuart’s controversial production, so I suggested he could move it to our auditorium.
Stuart turned James M. Barrie’s play into an allegory of the police riot at that summer’s Chicago Democratic Convention. The production featured nude female dancers in a simulated acid trip – two of the original seven from the previous night’s preview bravely performed at our event – and it made the national news. The next day the campus police chief, Ralph Hanson, called Mike Wilmington (who had played John, fully clothed) and me and asked us to reveal the names of the two dancers. We refused. Stuart was charged with putting on a lewd and indecent show, but the charge were later dropped when the only accuser the local district attorney was able to find turned out to be a convicted child molester.
About twenty-five years after the Nude Peter Pan episode, I ran into Stuart again at a party in Los Angeles. I expected a cordial reunion. He immediately confronted me heatedly with, “You almost got me put in jail!” I was stunned to realize that he actually blamed me for supposedly making him put on the play. He said he was thinking of directing a film about that incident, and it was clear to me that I would be portrayed as one of the villains. (He didn’t get around to making that film before his death in 2020.) Stuart’s perspective on my role in that creative escapade reminded me of the story about William Randolph Hearst being told that so-and-so hated him. Hearst said, “I don’t remember ever doing him a favor.”
Orson Welles rehearses McBride and Peter Bogdanovich on the first day of shooting The Other Side of the Wind at the director’s rented home in Los Angeles, August 23, 1970. McBride would spend more than five years playing the gauche film critic and historian Mister Pister, a spoof of his earnest young self. (Felipe Herba)
Madison was an extraordinary place to see films in those days, wasn’t it?
The campus was one of the best places in the country to watch films during that formative period of film studies. We had an astonishing total of thirty-five campus film societies showing 16mm prints of a wide range of films, classic and recent. As long as I turned a profit for the Wisconsin Film Society by showing Fellini or Bergman films to lure people into buying their semester passes, I could use the extra cash to rent films of lesser audience appeal that I needed to see, such as John Ford’s Wagon Master and Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. That was a free double bill I paired mischievously – one of the most optimistic and one of the most pessimistic films ever made in America, shown together.
This still-current journal was launched in Madison by editor Russell Campbell with the help of McBride and other members of the “Madison film mafia.” McBride and Wilmington’s work-in-progress, John Ford, was excerpted in the second issue.
I showed a lot of mainstream classics ranging widely through film history but also ran some films with shock value, such as a program of Freaks with The Blood of the Beasts, the Georges Franju short that contrasts fancy Parisian restaurants with graphic scenes inside slaughterhouses. One of the maxims I lived by in my early rebellious days was Picasso’s “Good taste is the enemy of creativity.” At the Memorial Union, we had a theater called the Play Circle that showed films on weekends in 35mm; we were on the committee that chose the films in impassioned, often angry debates. At the State Historical Society on the library mall, we were fortunate to have collections of the pre-1948 Warner Bros. and RKO 16mm prints as well as paper documents – story and script files, contracts, publicity materials, etc. – in the United Artists collection, and that led to our founding The Velvet Light Trap, edited by Russell Campbell. The Historical Society also has many collections of filmmakers’ papers, notably blacklistees and other luminaries including Kirk Douglas, whom I wrote a short book about in 1976. I gave my papers to the Historical Society when I left Madison in 1973 and have been adding to them ever since. (It’s now called the Wisconsin Historical Society.)
The university also generously let me watch the 16mm prints of films ordered for courses in every department. I would go to the basement of the Bureau of Audio-Visual Instruction at 9 a.m. to watch films all day. Sometimes I would bring along friends, such as my radical friend Ken Mate when he was hiding out from the police; Kenny was also a Ford fan and later served as cinematographer on the last film I directed. After watching films all day, I would grab dinner and watch another film – screenings were announced on posters on walls and telephone poles – before going home to work on my Welles book or a screenplay. I remember going back to the rooming house where I lived and excitedly telling my roommates, “I’ve just seen two of the greatest films ever made!” They thought I was goofy, but it was true, for one day I saw Intolerance and Battleship Potemkin for the first time. On another day, I saw Duck Soup followed by The Grapes of Wrath.
McBride and Wilmington’s critical study of Ford, written in Madison from 1969 to 1971, was published in 1974 in the British Film Institute’s Cinema Two series.
Sid Chatterjee, a friend who ran another film society run by an eating co-op called the Green Lantern, gave me a key to let me watch films in the early morning hours when I worked at the State Journal. Sometimes the neighbors called the cops on me until I turned down the soundtracks. The campus screenings helped me see films I needed for Orson Welles (which I mostly wrote from 1966 to 1970; it was published in 1972 by the British Film Institute’s Cinema One series) and John Ford, which Wilmington and I wrote between 1969 and 1971 (it took until 1974 before it was published by the BFI Cinema Two series).
“The Annual Searchers Riot”
As we both remember, the passion surrounding the Union Film Committee over which films to book in the Play Circle could result in debates that were quite heated.
Yes, that for me is a microcosm of the passions surrounding films in those days. I remember walking past your brother Gerry Peary as he exited a Film Committee meeting grinning despite having coffee dripping down his body after it was thrown all over him in some kind of argument, and I remember Mike Wilmington’s omnipresent mother, Edna, following Gerry and shouting at him for some reason. We all took that task of choosing films to show in the Union Play Circle with great earnestness. There was a schism in the membership between what were called “Politicos” vs. “Aesthetes.” Broadly speaking, those were the hardcore radical Jean-Luc Godard vs. the classical Ford-John Wayne factions. I was in the latter group (I wasn’t radicalized until after I went to Hollywood and was operating within the heart of what I realized was a criminal enterprise). Being in the throes of disassociating myself from Catholicism in my college days made me antipathetic to any kind of doctrinaire ideology, and it did not help that Godard had become anathema to me after my attempt to interview him when he came to Madison was met with hostility.
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: John Ford during McBride’s interview in his Beverly Hills office on the last day of his career, August 19, 1970, when the director announced his retirement while realizing his project to make an Italian Western had fallen through. The interview appeared in Sight and Sound and McBride and Wilmington’s critical study, John Ford. (McBride)
Other than learning that someone bashed him over the head with a hammer, two of my many memories of Michael Wilmington, the future critic of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, were how upset he was that I didn’t love The Rules of the Game; and when he brought a record player into the Play Circle so he could play Gene Pitney’s great hit single “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” before and after screenings of the movie, because it wasn’t on the soundtrack.
I remember the memorable meeting of the Film Committee when Wilmington gave a fifteen-minute speech extolling Howard Hawks’s autumnal Western El Dorado and wound up in tears. Mike’s fervent oration stunned the members so much that they voted to bring that John Wayne movie to campus, including even the Politicos. And after vigorous arguing, we also managed to get The Searchers accepted by the Film Committee, despite Russell Merritt inaccurately quipping, “Is that the movie where Natalie Wood plays an Indian?” Unfortunately, the first time we showed the stunning original 35mm print of The Searchers at the Play Circle, President Nixon announced his illegal invasion of Cambodia, the students rioted, the National Guard occupied the campus and ringed the Union with rifles and bayonets, and hardly anyone could get in to see the movie. So we managed to schedule The Searchers again exactly a year later, but we hadn’t factored in that the students would hold another riot to commemorate the previous year’s riot, with the National Guard again ringing the Union. I called it “the annual Searchers riot” and half-seriously developed the theory that somehow that incendiary film had caused the riots.
I was a full-time student but in at least one year I saw 500 movies, on campus and in our many local theaters. What about you?
Not quite that many! And as I did with books, I kept lists of the movies I watched. In 1967, for example, I saw 379 movies. My totals for other years in Madison are comparable but incomplete. Andrew Sarris’s 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 became our bible. We used that paperback as our dog-eared guide for what films to seek out and underlined the titles we had seen.
My tastes in movies, like my youthful tastes in literature, were omnivorous, including silents, foreign films, and Hollywood classics of the sound era, as well as new films at downtown theaters. If I liked a movie, I would watch it repeatedly, with Citizen Kane popping up over and over (I had a 16mm print and saw it sixty times before I met Welles, who asked, “How could you see any movie sixty times?”). I saw Bonnie and Clyde in a theater twice a day on two different days in October 1967, and three times more times in November. Although some of our cinephiles talked the managers of the downtown theaters into giving them passes, even though I was barely scraping by I had the absurd conviction that I should pay for the films I was watching in theaters, to help encourage Hollywood to make good ones. Even today when I see Bonnie and Clyde and other films from that era, I find I have them virtually memorized down to the smallest movements of performance, action, and editing.
My eclectic viewing that November ranged from the silent Variety and Storm Over Asia and several Keaton films to films I saw twice, Footlight Parade, Sergeant York, and Jules et Jim. Others that month included two W. C. Fields films, Une Femme est une Femme, Gone With the Wind, Accident, Winchester ’73, L’Eclisse, Yankee Doodle Dandy . . . you get the picture! I tended to seek out films made by directors I most admired, so my list for the first half of 1968 shows that I watched 23 by Welles, 17 Hitchcocks, 15 Fords, and 13 each by Truffaut and Bergman.
In later years I found that I have gaps with certain popular films with major stars but whose directors I viewed as mediocre, so I’ve been filling in those gaps on the Criterion Channel and elsewhere. But Madison in those days before cable TV and streaming was a cinephile’s paradise, and my autodidactic education in film history was insatiable.
How did you get started reviewing films in Madison?
Introducing films to our Wisconsin Film Society audience of several hundred people in B-10 Commerce was my earliest training for a teaching career. At the suggestion of Bill Donnelly, I began writing the “film notes” we traditionally mimeographed to hand out to our members when they came to see such movies as King Kong and The Passion of Joan of Arc. That got me started as a film critic in 1966, my second year in Madison. It was my first taste of critical controversy too, especially when I shortsightedly panned Kong as “camp junk,” which provoked outrage from some of our members. That taught me not to be flippant in my comments on movies and prompted me to take another look at Kong, which I recognized is a great achievement in special effects and fantasy storytelling, despite its hokey dramaturgy.
I also reviewed films and plays and wrote other articles for the principal campus newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, after quickly realizing I wasn’t going to realize my ambition of editing that cliquish student paper. The first film I reviewed for the Cardinal was some French movie in which the main character falls asleep and wakes up at the end, when it’s revealed that the whole story has been a dream. I innocently mentioned the ending in my review and received an irate phone call from some young women in a dorm. That made me understand you shouldn’t give away the ending in a review. Unless it’s a historical incident, as in the 1989 film Glory, the great movie about Black soldiers in the Civil War that I reviewed for Daily Variety. I now find that the obsession with not revealing “spoilers” – even in supposedly serious film magazines and books! – is having a damaging effect on film reviewing and film study. But I can see the point of not doing so in newspaper reviews, since, as the Broadway theater critic Walter Kerr once observed, a review is written for a reader who hasn’t seen the work in question, but a critical analysis is written for a reader who has seen it. That distinction is usually lost in practice, since reviewers like to inflate their importance by calling themselves critics.
In the summer of 1966, I was the second-string film reviewer for the Cardinal behind Larry Cohen when much of the staff had gone on vacation. Larry went on to write screenplays, specializing in Stephen King adaptations, including Brian De Palma’s hit film version of Carrie as well as the disastrous Broadway musical version. (To differentiate himself from the B-movie director Larry Cohen, Larry billed himself professionally as Lawrence D. Cohen.) Larry kicked me out of my job, though, when his friends on the paper returned to campus that fall, which he hadn’t warned me about and I found infuriating.
One of my longest and most enthusiastic reviews in the Cardinal was of Woody Allen’s first full-fledged comedy feature as a writer-director-star, Take the Money and Run, in 1969. Since I had first seen him acting in his screenplay What’s New Pussycat, directed by Clive Donner, Allen was already one of my favorite comedians and modern filmmakers. Like many others of my generation, I identified with his wry and angst-ridden attitude toward life. Although most of my writing seemed serious, a writer for the Daily Cardinal who did a feature on me, Elaine Cohen, described my prose with shrewd insight as “quietly merry.”
Jeanne German plays the lead in McBride’s 1973 film, The End of a Perfect Day. Her strained reading of a heavy-duty text on the UW Memorial Union Terrace is about to be interrupted. (Tim Davis)
The Rise of Cinephilia and Film Studies
How did you see yourself fitting in with the growing interest in cinephilia around the country in that period before film studies became “respectable” and codified in academia?
In those days, our young “film generation” of scholars and critics, under the influence of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics and Sarris of The Village Voice, were fighting to legitimize the importance of classical Hollywood studio filmmaking. Our early generation of film scholars in the late 1960s and early ’70s laid the foundation for film studies before it became an accepted academic field in the 1970s, when it courted respectability by miring itself in theory and was mostly a hidebound branch of linguistics heavily indebted to French semiologists and Marxists. Our pioneering generation of film scholars, however, tended to be auteurists in the Sarris camp, and we could be faulted in those days for paying insufficient attention to a director’s collaborators.
We also were convinced that popular filmmaking had as much artistic value as the foreign films that were then in vogue during the American art-house movement. We had to overcome the deep-rooted American prejudice against popular culture that permeated academia and journalism until we helped to found the field of film studies in the late 1960s. We argued that the traditional cultural distinctions between “high” and “low” art were meaningless, even foolish, particularly in regard to classic Hollywood studio filmmaking, which offered such a rich vein of artistry. We succeeded in our mission beyond our wildest dreams, although in retrospect, we may have been too successful in exalting popular filmmaking and auteurism in particular. Most of the groundbreaking film books published in the late ’60s and early ’70s, including mine, focused on directors. They were necessary but not sufficient. Our myopic tendency to downplay the contributions of screenwriters and others was a flaw that became increasingly evident to me after I entered the industry myself and understood more about the realities of the filmmaking process.
After the brief flowering of the “New Hollywood” of personal screenwriting and directing in the 1970s before the blockbuster phenomenon took hold, the American film industry soon degenerated into making mostly trash for the adolescent male audience, as is the case now. Filmmaking with more adult subject matter and films that feature people talking and having relationships migrated from theaters to cable TV and streaming sites, while the theatrical audience contracted drastically. And already by the late ’60s, the film industry picked up on Sarris’s “auteur theory” as a handy marketing tool to promote directors as if they are the sole authors of their films. That furthered the narrow-minded neglect of the director’s collaborators by reviewers and academicians.
As our generation of critics and film historians matured, however, we came to offer correctives to auteurism and qualifications of Sarris’s debatable categorizations of directors. We found in his “Far Side of Paradise” and “Less Than Meets the Eye” categories such splendid directors as Frank Capra, George Cukor, Samuel Fuller, Leo McCarey, Douglas Sirk, George Stevens, Preston Sturges, King Vidor, Raoul Walsh, John Huston, Elia Kazan, David Lean, William Wellman, and Billy Wilder. Sarris himself became more accepting of those directors later, when, as Wilder told me about Sarris and other critics, “When I was very successful, they beat me over the head, now maybe some of them are a little gentler because they take pity on me. They commiserate with me. Maybe they are human, at that. They just don’t feel like kicking an elderly man in the ass anymore.” I’ve written books about three of those directors Sarris underrated and American Film Institute Life Achievement Award TV specials about two of them. Sarris’s book more accurately can be seen now as a jumping-off point for argumentation rather than a bible.
McBride spent more than a year interviewing Frank Capra in a sometimes contentious, sometimes cordial process for his 1992 biography, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. Here they chat at one of Capra’s last public events, a January 1985 luncheon tribute from Columbia Pictures at Chasen’s restaurant in West Hollywood. (Columbia)
We post-Sarrisites also have championed the work of screenwriters, actors, cinematographers, and other contributors to the filmmaking process. But the damage was already done. And as Jonathan Rosenbaum writes in his 2000/2002 book Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films You See (which was originally published with the more accurate and provocative subtitle How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See), most American reviewers regrettably have gone along with commercial imperatives by focusing their attention on the big-budget, highly promoted studio productions at the expense of championing smaller independent films. We used to proclaim that “film is the art form of the twentieth century,” and as true as that was and is, we are now living in the twenty-first century.
Our film generation’s taste in movies was strongly stimulated by the artistry and creative freedom of foreign films brought to the U.S. in the 1950s and ’60s, but in more recent years, the market for foreign films in the U.S. has shrunk to near invisibility. Multiplexes have crowded out smaller theaters, many of which have closed, and film advertising has become prohibitively expensive for all but major distributors. In my opinion, television advertising costs and the trend toward saturation distribution of blockbusters that compounds those costs are a major culprit in the dumbing-down of American films, just as TV ad costs are in the coarsening of American politics. In both cases, promotion, whether of movies or candidates, has been reduced to short slogans and brief video displays.
Streaming services have taken up some of the slack, but cinephilia has suffered accordingly in this country, even though Rosenbaum argues somewhat quixotically that cinephilia is alive and well, if mutated into something more esoteric than it was in our youth; Rosenbaum is special because he travels the world to search out films that are hard to see in this country. Not only do fewer Americans watch foreign films today than we did in the 1960s and ’70s, but the passion for classic films tends to exist more among older people now. My own work as a critic and film historian over the years has largely been centered on classical Hollywood films and filmmakers but also includes such modern filmmakers as Steven Spielberg and the Coen Bros. And my work from the mid-1970s onward, especially my two books on Frank Capra, serves as something of a deliberate corrective to the excesses of auteurism and the over-adulation of what André Bazin called the “genius of the system.”
Getting Published
When I met you in Madison in 1967, you were already writing your first book on Welles and articles for film magazines. Nobody else I knew at the time was doing that until you influenced others to follow in your footsteps. How did your career path evolve?
I sold my first magazine article when I was twelve in 1960 and growing up in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. It was a feature about my Little League baseball teammate Greg Spahn and his father, the great Milwaukee Braves pitcher Warren Spahn. My mother helped me sell the article to a national school magazine, The Young Catholic Messenger. I earned forty dollars for it and persisted in writing articles on baseball for the next few years even though I didn’t sell any. It wasn’t until 1967, when I discovered that I could write articles for film magazines, that I began getting published regularly. That was a fortuitous time to begin, because the rise of cinephilia was leading to a boom in film magazines and publishing lines of film books, so the market was wide open for young beginners. I started publishing articles and interviews for film magazines in the U.S. and England, which established me as a well-known film scholar even before I finished writing what in effect was my scholarly debut, my book Orson Welles.
My first article published in a film magazine was a profile of three leading reviewers – Pauline Kael, Dwight Macdonald, and Stanley Kauffmann – for the Summer 1967 issue of Film Heritage. F. A. (Tony) Macklin, the editor of Film Heritage, kindly gave me that break and ten dollars, and published other articles I wrote. My initial piece was sort of a rumination on what I thought film reviewing should be, nothing profound but an opening salvo, eclectic to a fault, perhaps. My debut piece surprisingly prompted an angry letter to me from Andrew Sarris demanding to know why I hadn’t included him, even though I’d written that he deserved a separate article of his own. That perhaps shows the influence of literary criticism on my work as a film critic, since I included Macdonald and Kauffmann while slighting Sarris, who was more purely a cinephile and in retrospect should have taken Kauffmann’s place in the trio I studied. That article was an early sign of how I often seem to provoke controversy with my writing even when I don’t set out to do so.
As a result, I unfortunately never became close to Sarris, especially after our Ford book preceded his long-delayed book The John Ford Movie Mystery in publication by the BFI; I wrote him about it, and he sent back a hostile response, saying he didn’t believe in corresponding with rival authors. But I had a brief and pleasant meeting with Sarris in California many years later, and he gave an enthusiastic blurb for my 1992 Capra biography and wrote a gratifying letter of support for me when I was advancing to tenure at San Francisco State.
At the beginning of my career as a film scholar, I wasn’t yet making more than a pittance from writing articles for publication, but it didn’t discourage me, since I knew enough to understand that I needed to establish myself first. I quickly did. I was asked to contribute articles by Ernest Callenbach, the editor of Film Quarterly at UC Berkeley, which was then the leading American film magazine. I wrote film and book reviews for Film Quarterly as well as an ambitious 1970 career profile of a subject of one of my later books, Billy Wilder (a piece for which I enlisted Mike Wilmington as co-writer). I also became a regular contributor to Sight and Sound in England and New York’s Film Comment. I was shrewd enough to know that if I planted chapters of my book-in-progress on Welles in film magazines, it would make it easier to sell the book to the BFI’s Cinema One series.
So when I finished the manuscript, I wrote Penelope Houston, my editor at Sight and Sound, who also edited the book series, and asked her if she was interested in seeing it. She replied that she was familiar enough with my work that she could almost accept the book sight unseen. In short order, it was sold to that pioneering series.
While at Wisconsin I read a lot of film books, and the authors, past and present, automatically became my idols and inspiration. You were just a couple of years older than I, yet were not only churning out film articles but getting film books published! I was more than impressed. Did you think it was just a common thing for someone to be so prolific and to be published so young?
High & Inside was the first book McBride wrote, from 1963 through 1966, although it took seventeen years to get published by Warner Books.
I thought it was natural, since I had been a professional writer since childhood and had already been well into writing a book about baseball slang by the time I went to Madison. I began writing that book in 1963 and finished it in 1966, but it was not published until 1980, as High & Inside: The Complete Guide to Baseball Slang; I updated it a second time for another edition in 1997, more modestly titled High and Inside: An A-to-Z Guide to the Language of Baseball. But I started taking films more seriously when I saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal at the Play Circle – I remember thinking, “Oh, yes, film is an art form.” And when I saw Citizen Kane in Professor Byrne’s class, it changed my life. Rather than wanting to be a novelist and journalist, I wanted to write and direct films and write about them. I even set myself the unrealistic goal of making my first film by the age of twenty-five, as Welles had with Kane.
So I went to the university library to find a book on Welles to learn more about him. All I could find then were the rather tabloidish 1956 biography by Peter Noble, The Fabulous Orson Welles, and the 1965 critical study by Peter Cowie, The Cinema of Orson Welles. I was disappointed in Cowie’s bland and superficial analysis of Welles’s work, so I thought, “I’d better write my own book.” It was the same impulse I had with my baseball book, writing it because I couldn’t find one to read on the subject, at least a good one. My horizons on Welles kept expanding the more I saw of his work. In March 1967, I took a Greyhound bus to see Chimes at Midnight three times in one night at a theater in Chicago before it turned into a softcore porno house the next day, and I considered that Welles’s masterpiece, as I still do.
Persistence of Vision, from the Wisconsin Film Society Press, was McBride’s first published book (1968).
How did you even begin to write all those books while also doing all your other jobs?
I worked on my critical studies of Welles and then Ford steadily after finishing my baseball book in the summer of 1966. I’ve always been disciplined as a writer, a self-starter who makes my own deadlines, and at that time I had an extra charge of youthful energy. I also did a lot of partying with my pals in a rooming house near campus as well as endless film-watching until I got my first full-time job as a newspaper reporter in 1969 at the State Journal.
With the baseball book buried in a box for the time being, the first book I published was Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, which our Wisconsin Film Society Press self-published in 1968. It was the fourth book our society published. Bill Donnelly suggested I edit the new collection; the title was suggested by his wife Kelley. It’s a lively collection of articles and interviews by members of our society, including Mike Wilmington and your brother, Gerry. I contributed some pieces on Welles, including my long essay on The Magnificent Ambersons. That was the first attempt by anyone to “reconstruct” that butchered film in print, comparing the RKO release version with the shooting script, provided to me by the future film restoration specialist Robert Gitt. I also had the benefit of talking with Welles after he read what I wrote in Persistence of Vision about some of the changes between the script and the film he shot, but I was lacking the studio cutting continuity of Welles’s original version (i.e., a transcription by a studio secretary of the shots, action, and dialogue before the film was drastically altered by RKO). I wish I had pursued a more thorough conversation with Welles about Ambersons, my favorite film. I later reprinted the essay in Orson Welles and revised it for the 1996 edition of that book, incorporating information from the previously unavailable cutting continuity.
Our film society earned enough through film ticket sales to print copies of Persistence of Vision, but after I made a futile attempt to place it in bookstores, I became so discouraged that I gave up on it. Today, self-published books are accepted in some stores and can be made easily available through Amazon, as I’ve done with five of my own that would be hard to place with commercial publishers, but back then it was impossible to persuade bookstores to stock such books. I’m embarrassed to recall that after Film Quarterly gave the book a good review, we received dozens of orders from university libraries that I disregarded. I left boxes of copies of Persistence of Vision in the basement of the university’s Bureau of Audio-Visual Instruction and never retrieved them. I have only myself to blame for it being my rarest book. Someday I may bring it back into print.
I wrote my critical study of Welles at a fairly leisurely pace over a four-year period, finishing it in 1970, although ironically, my anthology Focus on Howard Hawks, which I had to put together quickly after finishing John Ford in 1971, arrived before the Welles book, also in 1972.
John Ford
What led you and Wilmington to write your critical study of John Ford? Was it actually because his reputation was in eclipse in the late 1960s?
With my Welles book mostly completed, I wanted to tackle Ford, whose work I had become passionate about since I watched Fort Apache for the first time in December 1967. Mike and I decided to write the Ford book after we watched She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in a UW classroom one afternoon in 1969. Russell Merritt was showing that 1949 John Wayne cavalry Western – bravely, I would say as a fellow teacher, for any glimpse of Wayne on campus during the Vietnam War era provoked kneejerk hostility. To make matters worse, the only 16mm print Russell was able to rent of that spectacular Technicolor film, which won an Oscar for cinematographer Winton C. Hoch, was in black-and-white, which seemed grotesque, a pale echo of its true majesty.
The screening was tense throughout. Mike and I became upset when some of the students, including a prominent campus actor who should have known better (I won’t mention his name, because I don’t want to give him any credit), hooted at the moving scene of the troopers presenting Wayne’s Captain Brittles with a silver watch upon his retirement. So after that screening, Mike and I told each other that we would write a critical study of Ford: “We’ll show them what a great director he is.”
Both times I wrote books on Ford, he was out of fashion with the American public. The same thing was happening before I wrote my biography Searching for John Ford, which I began researching in Madison after I finished the critical study in 1971. My heart would sink when I would mention his name and get a dreaded blank stare from the average listener. My indignation over the way this great American artist was unknown to so many people was the engine that drove my work on those books. I wrote the biography because I believed we needed a book that would explain how these beautiful, sensitive films emanated from a man who presented himself as something akin to an uncouth old cowhand. I already realized that was a protective self-disguise, but I wanted to understand him better. I agreed with Sarris that the source of his artistry was “the John Ford movie mystery.” To try to solve that mystery, I researched the biography off and on over the years, finishing it in an intense two-year sprint in 2001. Now because of my and Mike’s efforts and those of other scholars, Ford has his rightful place as one of the greatest directors in film history. After Mike’s death in 2022, I revised and expanded our John Ford critical study for a new edition published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2023.
How did your collaboration with Wilmington work on the Ford book, which seems seamless?
Making it read that way took me a lot of work. Writing the book with Mike soured me on collaborating on a book until I decided to work with you. I knew that since you’ve published many books of your own, you are reliable, unlike Mike. He and I worked well enough together writing articles for film magazines. But writing a book together was quite another matter. It became a prolonged struggle and burden, though the book doesn’t show the stress that went into its writing.
Mike and I had actual physical brawls twice over the writing of our book. The proximate causes were a bit absurd, but they reflected outbursts of my deep frustration over Mike’s endless inability to complete his contributions to the book. I had asked him to work with me on the Ford project because I didn’t think I had the ability at that stage of my career to tackle such a vast subject without having a collaborator. I also thought it would make the writing go faster. We had many long talks about Ford for a year and a half, often daily, and the book benefited greatly from having two complementary points of view. I assigned different sections of the book to each of us; we worked together on the Introduction. But after that period, with Mike continually having trouble doing his share of the writing, I finally had to fire him from the project and finish it on my own, including combining and rewriting all his erratic drafts, which took another exhausting six months.
But I especially learned a lot about acting from Mike, who was a brilliant actor of feral intensity. His understanding of acting was profound and greatly influenced our work on Ford as well as my other writing, including my 2024 book, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director. I directed Mike at the UW in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story (twice, with two different actors playing Peter to Mike’s Jerry) as well as in a 1969 film called Close But No Cigar, a romantic chase comedy.
Michael Wilmington’s harrowing death scene as the disturbed Jerry in McBride’s two productions of Edward Albee’s one-act play The Zoo Story was so convincing the director sometimes thought Wilmington had actually been stabbed. This is the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union production.
The Nascent Field of Film Studies
You were among the vanguard of young scholars in the foundational days of the field of film studies, yet you opted not to make a career in academia until many years later.
The two British Film Institute series, which published many of the earliest critical studies of major directors, offered good launching pads outside the United States for new young writers in what was still the nascent field of film studies. The opportunities to publish film books were more open in the late 1960s than they are now, when the film book sections in bookstores, even when bookstores remain open, have kept shrinking. I was in on the ground floor of the new film studies movement when I began publishing film articles in 1967 and books in 1968, influenced by such figures as François Truffaut, Sarris, and Robin Wood. But I did not go on to become part of the academic field of film studies when it became more organized in the 1970s. That was the period when film studies morphed into an academic discipline devoted to rigidly doctrinaire orthodoxy, a mostly theoretical discourse blending semiology and Marxism more than the study of actual films. The field of film studies as it was constituted in making itself acceptable to universities in the ’70s was more an outgrowth of linguistics than about film, and the academics tended to be slavishly governed by the dominant Marxist ideology.
Although I kept publishing articles and interviews in Daily Variety and film magazines as well as writing film books during those years – my books were less frequent, since I was largely focused on screenwriting until I began writing books full-time in 1984 with my Capra biography – I was glad to miss that academic development altogether. Richard Corliss, the editor of Film Comment, told me when film studies was becoming respectable in academia, “The auteurists have all gone into journalism.” He was right, although I never left the field of film studies. I needed a “day job” to pay the bills while I wrote my mostly unremunerative film criticism and labored in the Hollywood trenches as a trade press reporter and screenwriter.
Front cover of I Loved Movies, But . . . (Sticking Place Books)
Much of what passed for film studies in those days was hardly about film at all; it was about semiology, symbols and codes and all that, and books and articles were usually written in almost impenetrable jargon. Some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen continues to be in academic film scholarship, which suffers from a snobbish desire to keep outsiders from understanding its lingo and narrow-minded viewpoints. It’s the kind of nonsensical writing Sam Fuller, to borrow one of his pungent neologisms, would call “gibblegabble.”
Operating under the slavish influence of French semiologists and roping in the academics who otherwise would have gone into other disciplines such as history, philosophy, or literature, film theory became dominant largely at the expense of studying individual films. I studied film theory in my last film course at the UW and over the years read more work on the subject with little interest. When I was hired by San Francisco State University in 2002 as an assistant professor in its film department, I bought a bunch of the leading books on film theory to study for my classes. One of them I stopped reading after thirty pages when I realized that the author had not yet mentioned a single film; she explained in her introduction that she was too busy studying film theory to see many films.
Screenwriting and Making Movies in Madison
In your 2012 book Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless, you discuss how you taught yourself how to write screenplays when you were living in Madison.
I had to do so because I couldn’t find a manual to teach me the craft, and our school had no course on screenwriting. I used the script of Citizen Kane by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles, which I found at the State Historical Society, as my bible. Typing a copy of it was good discipline, and I learned how to write a professional-quality script by imitating its format and studying its style.
McBride teaching his basic screenwriting course at San Francisco State University, which he enjoyed each semester for twenty-two years from 2002 until his retirement. His teaching methods led to his 2012 book, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless. This is from his 2013 faculty profile by videographer Silvia Turchin. (San Francisco State Cinema Department/Documentary Film Institute/Sleeping Tree Pictures; frame enlargement)
In my Madison days, I wrote about sixty-five short scripts while also learning to write feature-length screenplays; I finished five long-form scripts before leaving for California and had another in the works. I began my self-education as a screenwriter in the summer of 1966 by writing an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir of his life as a young writer in Paris, A Moveable Feast. I didn’t realize until too late that Hemingway’s account of supposedly being poor but happy while working part-time as a journalist and writing fiction romantically falsifies his actual financial situation. I didn’t factor in the actual cost of the lavish meals and vacations Hemingway chronicles in that book until I went to Paris, followed his path, and realized how expensive it must have been. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, had a trust fund, and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whom he starts dallying with late in A Moveable Feast, had a wealthy uncle, Gus Pfeiffer, who contributed to their support. So I naively thought I could do something like that myself. But poverty was a hindrance. Later if I had looked around in Hollywood more carefully, I would have seen that many of the young people I knew were supported by their families as well, including with trust funds. But by the time I realized how hard it actually is to make a living as a writer, I was too far down that road to go back. My Moveable Feast script is not much good but has a few imaginative cinematic ideas.
When I finished, I brashly sent a telegram to Mary Hemingway in Ketchum, Idaho, announcing I had adapted the book. She wired back that I should call her, and when I did, she reamed me out, lecturing me on how I did not have the right to do so. That taught me a harsh but necessary lesson about screenwriting based on other people’s material, although I forgot it, to my chagrin, many years later in Hollywood. Oddly, that book still has never been made into a film, although Woody Allen’s charming 2011 comedy Midnight in Paris is partly a spoof, a follow-up on his New Yorker satire of A Moveable Feast with its running refrain about how Hemingway socked him.
Coming to my senses, I next tackled a short script based on a public-domain short story, Jack London’s harrowing and suspenseful classic “To Build a Fire,” about a man slowly freezing to death in the Yukon. I mistakenly thought a shooting script should be a shot list, so I wrote one in January 1967 that I planned to use in filming the story in Super 8. I decided against it because it would have been too arduous in the Madison winter. I was sensible in starting with adaptations as exercises while teaching myself how to write screenplays, however, since I knew enough to recognize that before taking the challenge of coming up with original ideas, I would first have to master the craft of this demanding form of writing by learning the professional format. When I came to teach screenwriting at San Francisco State, I used that early experience with adaptation as my method of teaching beginners in the field and as the basis of Writing in Pictures, which walks the reader through the process of adapting “To Build a Fire” into a script.
I directed seven increasingly elaborate Super 8 films in Madison, predominantly comedic, although the last one was more dramatic. In those days it cost about $400 to buy enough film to make a twenty-minute short, and it would take me about six months to save up that kind of money (the equivalent of about $3,500 today).
Oddly enough, despite our atmosphere of intense cinephilia at the UW, we had no cinema department, so aside from you and one or two other students in Madison, people weren’t actually making films there in those days.
Back then while learning how to make movies, I not only wrote and directed my short films but photographed the first six of them as well. I also spent a year in Madison getting practical experience working part-time as a TV cameraman at WHA-TV for the state educational network on such programs as grade-school arithmetic and cooking shows. We still had those big old-fashioned cameras on wheeled platforms that had to be pushed around, and it was hard going on location with them on the rare occasions when we had to do so. But I learned the basics of visual composition as well as the rigorous tension to get it right the first time – the only time – on live television.
The final film I directed, in 1973 before leaving town, The End of a Perfect Day, was based on an encounter my girlfriend Jeanne German had one day when she went frolicking around town with a lonely little boy. I took a looser approach and asked my friend Ken Mate to photograph it so I could have more time to spend with the actors. We made much of the film on the Union terrace where Jeanne and Eric Morse had actually met before they took off for their trip on a double-seater bicycle. I found a book on glamour photography and studied it to learn how Ken and I could photograph Jeanne to her best advantage. The result was a film with more warmth and spontaneity than my previous efforts as well as some moments of lyricism.
After moving to Los Angeles, I tried showing some of the films I directed to some friends but learned that no one there took silent Super 8 films seriously or even wanted to look at anything that smacked of amateur filmmaking. Since then, the films I made have lived in a box in my closet, along with the box containing my Writers Guild of America award and my certificates of WGA and Emmy nominations. But the experience of making those films and writing many short and feature screenplays helped me greatly in pursuing what I came to consider my principal occupation, writing critical studies and biographies of filmmakers.
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All images provided by the author and used with permission.
