Joseph McBride

Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of the most successful films of all time: Jaws, CloseEncounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and the Indiana Jones series. Yet for many years most critics condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man incapable of dealing maturely with the complexities of life. The deeper levels of meaning in his films were largely ignored. This changed with Schindlers List, his masterpiece about a gentile businessman who saves eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. For Spielberg, the film was the culmination of a long struggle with his Jewish identity - an identity of which he had long been ashamed, but now triumphantly embraced. Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielbergs personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. In his astute and perceptive biography, Joseph McBride reconciled Spielbergs seeming contradictions and produced a coherent portrait of the man who found a way to transmute the anxieties of his own childhood into some of the most emotionally powerful and viscerally exciting films ever made. In the second edition, McBride added four chapters to Spielbergs life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to 2010, a period in which he balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--films which expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter. This third edition brings Spielbergs career up-to-date with material on The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. The original edition was praised by the New York Times Book Review as an exemplary portrait written with impressive detail and sensitivity; Time called it easily the finest and fairest of the unauthorized biographies of the director. Of the second edition, Nigel Morris - author of The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light - said: With this tour de force, McBride remains the godfather of Spielberg studies.

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

Esta es la primera biografía crítica exhaustiva que ofrece un complejo y fascinante retrato de un hombre y un artista inquieto y conflictivo...McBride relaciona con elegancia y convicción la vida personal de Ford con su carrera...McBride ha escrito una excelente y largamente esperada biografía de un artista americano fundamental.

John Ford, autor de más de cien películas a lo largo de su vida, es uno de los pioneros y, probablemente, uno de los cineastas más importantes de la historia del cine. La sencillez y la sensibilidad aplicada a sus films fueron sin duda los elementos base de sus historias, narradas sobre las grandes gestas, sobre la leyenda o, simplemente, sobre el ser humano.Joseph McBride y Michael Wilmington, dos de los mas importantes criticos del mundo anglosajon, han compuesto este libro a traves de algunas peliculas de Ford que tocaban los temas mas esenciales de su filmografia. El libro esta unanimemente considerado como el mejor trabajo sobre Ford que se haya escrito hasta la fecha

In this critical study Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder s work stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer director

In this critical study Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder s work stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer director

Hollywood no ha dado un director más grande que John Ford. Entre 1917 y 1970, Ford dirigió y/o produjo más de 226 películas, desde discretos cortometrajes hasta ambiciosas epopeyas e intensos documentales de combate. Sus principales trabajos, -tales como "La Diligencia" ("Stagecoach"), "Las Uvas de la Ira" ("The Grapes of Wrath"), "Que verde era mi valle" ("How Green Was My Valley"), "They Were Expendable", "El Hombre Tranquilo" ("The Quiet Man"), "Centauros del Desierto" ("The Searchers") y "El Hombre que Mato a Liberty Valance" ("The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance")- son clasicos del cine. Las peliculas de Ford sobre la historia americana son investigaciones profundas del caracter nacional. A lo largo de su larga y prolifica carrera, Ford se popularizo por redefinir el genero Western, enmarcando historias de vidas pionera frente al eterno telon de Monument Valley. Las peliculas de Ford consiguieron admiracion en el mundo entero. Sin embargo, Ford fue un hombre atormentado y deliberadamente enigmatico. Oculto su verdadera personalidad al publico, presentandose mas como un escritorzuelo analfabeto que como el artista sensible que sus peliculas mostraban que era. Guio sagazmente las carreras de algunas de las mas grandes estrellas de Hollywood, como John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Maureen O''Hara y Katharine Hepburn, aunque su trato hacia los actores pudiera ser abusivo e incluso sadico. Al comienzo de su vida estuvo impregnado por politicas progresistas e independentistas irlandesas, para terminar convertido en un estricto republicano y contralmirante de la Marina estadounidense; recibio el reconocimiento de Richard Nixon por la creacion de peliculas que ensalzaban los "viejos valores" del heroismo, del deber y del patriotismo. Sobre Ford se ha escrito enrevesadamente con el fin de reconciliar la desalentadora paradoja entre

La magnífica biografía de Joseph McBride, publicada en Norteamérica después de una gestación de treinta años, ofrece el mejor análisis hasta la fecha de un hombre cuya fachada de brusco, tirano sádico y alcoholico ocultaba un interior sensible y sentimental. En sus casi de ochocientas pa ginas, el autor pinta un fascinante y documentado retrato de un artista profundamente contradictorio que solo era feliz cuando dirigia. A traves de mas de un centenar de entrevistas con familiares, amigos y con el propio protagonista, McBride teje elegantemente detalles de la muy automitificada vida personal de Ford un matrimonio discolo, filiaciones politicas y un posible affaire con Katharine Hepburn con iluminadoras evaluaciones de sus peliculas.El libro de Joseph Mc Bride tiene la extension, la pasion, la complejidad y la tragica grandeza de una pelicula de John Ford. Minuciosamente detallado y documentado, el li bro de McBride llena todos los vacios y nos brinda al personaje al completo: se ntimental pero cruel, brillante aunque fingiendo ser siempre un inculto, po li ticamente liberal en un momento dado y conservador al siguiente. En ultima instancia, McBride nos demuestra que este artista que se resistia a escuchar la palabra arte solo podia expresarse por completo y con honestidad a traves de sus peliculas.Para todos los que crecimos con esas peliculas, es te li bro es un tesoro y una gratisima sorpresa. Los jovenes que desconocen la obra del cineasta, que aun no han podido apreciar la imperecedera belleza de sus grandes peliculas, deberian leer Tras la pista de John Ford de forma compul siva.MARTIN SCORSESE

Orson Welles was once asked which directors he most admired He replied The old masters By which I mean John Ford John Ford and John Ford A legend in his own time John Ford 1894 1973 received a record four Academy Awards for best director and two of his World War II documentaries won Oscars for the US Navy He directed 136 films in a career that lasted from the early silent era through the late 1960s Ford is celebrated throughout the world as the cinema s foremost chronicler of American history the leading poet of the Western genre and a wide ranging filmmaker of profound emotional impact His classic films including Stagecoach 1939 The Grapes of Wrath 1940 How Green Was My Valley 1941 The Quiet Man 1952 The Searchers 1956 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962 remain widely popular and he has been acknowledged as a major influence on filmmakers such as Jean Renoir Ingmar Bergman Akira Kurosawa Howard Hawks Frank Capra Samuel Fuller Elia Kazan Sidney Lumet Martin Scorsese Steven Spielberg and George Lucas In this groundbreaking critical study Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington provide an overview of Ford s career as well as in depth analyses of key Ford films Analyzing recurring Fordian themes and relating each fi