Joseph McBride

Joseph McBride is an American film historian, biographer and screenwriter who was born in Milwaukee and raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and later moved to California. He has written more than 20 books, including biographies of Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, John Ford and Orson Welles. He teaches cinema at San Francisco State University. His screenplays include Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979) and Blood and Guts (1978), and he wrote five CBS specials for the American Film Institute Life Achievement Awards. He won a Writers Guild of America Award in 1984 for a John Huston tribute and received other WGA and Emmy nominations. In Orson Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, made from 1970 to 1976, he plays the critic Mr. Pister and advised on its 2018 completion. He also coproduced the documentaries John Ford Goes to War (2002) and Obsessed with Vertigo (1997).