Joseph McBride is a film historian whose twenty-six books also include biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford; two other books on Orson Welles; and critical studies of Ford (with Michael Wilmington), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, the Coen Bros., and George Cukor. He recently published the interview book I Loved Movies, But . . ., Conversations with Danny Peary, with Sticking Place Books. McBride acted for Welles in The Other Side of the Wind during its five-plus years of production (1970–76), playing the film critic and historian Mister Pister; he was a consultant on its completion and release by Netflix in 2018. McBride won a Writers Guild of America Award for co-writing (with producer George Stevens Jr.) The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (CBS-TV, 1983). McBride is an emeritus professor of San Francisco State University; he retired in 2024 after teaching for twenty-two years in its School of Cinema. 
Hollywood · Music & Musicals · Pre-Code
An essay excerpted from the new edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, 2026. Originally published in 1968 by the Wisconsin Film Society[…]
Directors · Film Culture · Film History · Film Studies · Memoir · Writers & Critics
Joseph McBride, filmed in 1970, is taking notes on his wrist, a habit he picked up while reviewing films, in his role as the critic and historian Mister Pister in[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Drama
“A true artist” Cukor called Judy Holliday. “She could interpret a text with the subtlest detail.” Their creative relationship brought out the qualities that made her a new kind of[…]
Absurdism · Comedy · Directors
Ethan and Joel Coen have shared writing, directing, and producing credits on their collaborations until their recent hiatus from working together. Here they are on location for their 2004 comedy[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Actors & Personalities · Commentary · Silents
Those who affect a superior attitude toward a great artist such as Lillian Gish are not only ignorant of our cultural heritage but stubbornly unaware that art usually comes from[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · War
Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted[…]
Orson Welles’s Too Much Johnson is a youthful tribute to low comedy and reflects of his obsession with bygone times, cultural mores & means of expression.
Interviews · Writers & Critics
“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books, 2009. Hardcover. $24.95. 304pp. ISBN 978-1565125995. Orson Welles, as Walter Kerr wrote[…]
On Cukor, by Gavin Lambert, edited by Robert Trachtenberg. Rizzoli, 208 pp., $50.00. One day in the early 1980s, George Cukor, the octogenarian director of such celebrated Hollywood films as Dinner at[…]
