'George Cukor', Author, Joseph McBride

0:09Jawad MirWelcome back everyone to another episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast. I'm your host, Joe Wadhwa. Today my guest is a return guest, author Joseph McBride, who I had the pleasure of speaking in the early days of this podcast, probably episode seven or eight…

0:23Jawad Mir... Where he talked about his book with Steven Spielberg. And today I have him on for his upcoming book, which comes out this week. It's called George Cukor's People, a famous director from the 1930s, '40s, films like A Star is Born, and who was also in con… running to direct Gone With the Wind. And we talked about his legacy, his stories. Also Joseph McBride and how his involvement in the entertainment industry over the last, you know, six, five, six decades. I had a great time chatting with him. So without further ado, here is my conversation with author Joseph McBride. But…

0:57Joseph McBrideI like the way you have your set up with a bunch of books. That's very appealing, you know.

1:03Jawad MirOh, cool.

1:03Joseph McBrideAnd your film posters in the background. That's nice. Yeah.

1:06Jawad MirYes. I'm always trying to do something a little different, not too much over the top, but these are the books that I've, you know, some of the books that I've gone through over the years that I've…

1:17Joseph McBridehuh

1:17Jawad Mir... Read the making of, including the one that we're gonna talk about today.

1:20Joseph McBrideRight.

1:21Jawad MirI received…

1:22Joseph McBrideYeah

1:22Jawad Mir... A copy and

1:23Joseph McBrideOh, good

1:23Jawad Mir... I haven't finished reading it, but I did go through it, and, really enjoyed what I have read, and which is why we're here to talk about,.. How do you pronounce his last name? Is it Cukor?

1:33Joseph McBrideCu… Cukor, like cue ball…

1:35Jawad MirCukor

1:35Joseph McBride... You know. Yeah.

1:36Jawad MirGeorge Cukor's people.

1:38Joseph McBrideYeah

1:38Jawad Mir... You know, just to kinda give people some context, he was, going to direct, one of the directors attached to Gone With the Wind. It didn't work out, and then he was also, he also directed A Star is Born, the 1937 version I think it was.

1:54Jawad MirRomeo and Juliet. So he's, he's got a quite a strong filmography and I'm so glad that, you know, people like this who've been, you know, around, who had been done doing stuff s… since around this time last century, their books, their stories are still being told because it's very important to preserve history in any subject. But for me personally, very important is film because I'm in that, in that world. So it's really good to see that, and I appreciate you working on this book and doing it. And I've…

2:24Joseph McBrideYeah

2:24Jawad Mir... Enjoyed so much what I've read, so thank you so much.

2:27Joseph McBrideThank you. Well, I feel he's a great director who, is under appreciated in a, in an odd way because, I mean, most cinephiles have several favorite Cukor films, you know. He made so many classics, Camille, Philadelphia Story, Adam's Ribs…

2:47Jawad MirYeah

2:47Joseph McBride... A Star is Born, you know, and, but he's, undervalued I guess I would say because he's, he was a, s… somewhat self-effacing director. He didn't parade his style even though he was a very stylish, elegant director with a very good use of the camera. But he worked through his actors primarily, and he was renowned as a great actor's director. And, so I took the, emphasis to write about him through portraits of performances of his work. About 65 people, you know, stars and character actors alike who, worked with him and gave memorable performances and how did they work together and how did they express Cukor's personal vision. He did have a personal vision, but he was not a publicity seeking director either. He was partly because he was a closeted queer filmmaker in the golden age of Hollywood.

3:50Joseph McBrideEverybody in Hollywood knew that he was gay, but, in those days you didn't talk about that in public. And, so he was somewhat reticent about getting publicity. He was also a kind of a modest man, which is appealing. But, he didn't kind of parade his personal life and that made him less known. He's not really a household name, you know. Usually when I talk about him, I mention him to people and I have to explain, you know, what films he did, and then they recognize, "Oh yeah, I've seen those films and those are terrific, but I didn't know who made them," you know, that kind of thing.

4:28Jawad MirYeah. I mean, the b… the very few directors that are known from that era for mainstream is Orson Welles, right? You know, with Citizen Kane and, a… a… and…

4:38Joseph McBrideHitchcock and John Ford and…

4:39Jawad MirYeah, Hitchcock, John Ford

4:41Joseph McBride... Frank Capra…

4:42Jawad MirAnd

4:42Joseph McBride... To some extent, you know.

4:45Jawad MirAnd it's interesting you're talking about that because yesterday I was doing an episode on a completely different project. It was, about a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr., Abdus Salam. He was the first doctor to win, first Muslim direct… person to win a Nobel Peace Prize. This was in 1979. And I was talking to the director and producer yesterday and, you know, we… he had even met Oppenheimer and, you know, very big figure.

5:11Joseph McBrideYeah.

5:11Jawad MirBut the, we were talking about the, how there are certain people in history who, you know, who start to ca… pave the way for people like, let's say Bill Gates or Steve Job or Elon Musk to come and then take it to the next level, and people think that they're the ones who started everything.

5:28Jawad MirBut there's always, you know, that stretch of one person or two people behind that nobody knows about. And I felt it was similar with this, with this guy, like how he's… ... Probably, you know, one of the directors who's done all these things, but not many people know about him. But the people know Alfred Hitchcock and, you know, Orson Welles, and…

5:46Jawad Mir... Obviously Spielberg and everybody else.

5:48Joseph McBrideYeah. Cukor, and are we visual as well as audio in this podcast?

5:55Jawad MirYes.

5:55Joseph McBrideYeah.

5:56Jawad MirYes. Yeah.

5:56Joseph McBrideBut, so I just wanna point out to people that's George Cukor there in 1975, and Talking with him is François Truffaut, the great French director who was an influential critic in the 1950s for Cahiers du Cinema and other French publications, and that's me on the right happily…

6:13Jawad MirAh

6:13Joseph McBride... Happily eavesdropping on them. This was the…

6:16Jawad MirThat's,.. Sorry to interrupt. François is the one who was in Close Encounters of Third Kind, right? Is that

6:20Joseph McBrideYeah.

6:21Jawad MirYeah. Right. Yeah.

6:22Joseph McBrideHe acted in some of his own films, and then Spielberg put him in Close Encounters and he's wonderful in that. And I got to know him. He would come to Hollywood and, he would, you know, for, vacations he would sit next to the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and smoke cigars and read film books. He would go to Larry Edmunds's bookstore and buy film books and, visit with, Hitchcock and Jean Renoir, and I got to know him. And you can't quite see my friend Todd McCarthy, who's, the… in the…

6:54Jawad MirYeah

6:54Joseph McBride... Maroon coat there. He's, he's a well-known film critic, and he and I interviewed Cukor in, the early '80s. We did a long interview with Cukor for Film Comment about his later work, which is kind of, well, it's valued by Cukor admirers, but it didn't get enough attention at the time. Travels With My Aunt, Justine, Rich and Famous, some very, beautiful films that he made, and very daring in some ways. He was somewhat liberated by the sexual revolution in films. He didn't go as far as some people because he believed in subtlety and discretion, but he had, what, Angela Lansbury called a wonderfully gamey, lascivious quality to him. But Truffaut, the point I was gonna make was Truffaut, back in the '50s when he reviewed Cukor films, he wrote that, Cukor's a wonderful director who out of every five films makes one masterpiece, three very good films, and one interesting film.

8:00Joseph McBrideBut he said the problem with Cukor is he's the kind of director you talk about with your friends in the street, or in cafes after you watch the movie more than writing about him. People have always had trouble writing about Cukor, and I include myself. I've been writing about him for, well, 50-plus years and I've felt that I never quite cracked the code of how to write about him until, this book, and that's why I set out to do it. To evolve a vocabulary. You know, part of the problem is that, r… actors' performances in films are not written about as much as they should be, and I think film acting in general is misunderstood by people. The performances that get Oscars and Emmy Awards are usually…

8:53Joseph McBride... Not the best performances. I call them most acting rather than best acting, you know, because they're… ... People who wave their hands and cry and, you know, scream and stuff like that. But, the most subtle film actors like Cary Grant, John Wayne I would include in that, Humphrey Bogart, people like that often are taken for granted and, m… misunderstood. And, so I try to analyze what makes film acting good. And part of, part of it I'll tell, just tell you a little story that…

9:28Jawad MirSure

9:29Joseph McBride... Jack Lemmon made his film debut for Cukor in 1954 in, It Should Happen to You, and he had been in, excuse me, he'd been in a lot of, TV shows and plays, so he was used to, playing to the balconies, you know, big, sort of big performances. And Cukor kept telling him, "Less," you know. And Lemmon was getting frustrated and, at one point Cukor, told him to do it again and he was a very amiable fellow but he said he kind of lost his temper, which was unusual for him, and he said, "Are you gonna tell me less?" And Cukor said, "Yes." And he said, "Are you gonna tell me not to act at all?" And Cukor said, "Oh please, dear boy. Please, don't act at all." He said that was the best, training he got in films that really helped his r… you know, he was a great actor and... But Cukor said w… what actors do in films is to be more than to act. In other words, to be themselves.

10:32Joseph McBrideAnd, what stars do, and people criticize stars sometimes like John Wayne, let's say, for supposedly playing himself, but what they do is create a persona that the public likes and that people wanna go back and see. That's, that's why somebody becomes a star. And, stars within that persona have certain range. Some people have wider range than others, but they can play a variety of, tones within that persona, and John Wayne was a good one, for that. Greta Garbo was one of the greatest. Cukor directed her in Camille. And Irving Thalberg, the head of, head of production at MGM, who died shortly thereafter, he said to Cukor in the, in the rushes, he said, "I've never seen her so unguarded." And Cukor was surprised, but that's kinda what he did. He made people relax.

11:32Joseph McBrideHe was, he created a what you call the climate for his actors to be themselves and to be unselfconscious and relax and explore perhaps parts of themselves that haven't been fully explored in other films.

11:48Jawad MirRight. You know, you mentioned, it was a difficult code to crack and you've been trying to crack it for a while. Two-part question kind of connected is that why was it so difficult, which you kind of touched upon, and then what made you g… what gave you that realization to go at the angle that you did now with this book?

12:12Joseph McBrideI mean, over the years Cukor talked a lot. I mean, he was a very elo… eloquent fellow and he did a good interview book in 1972 with Gavin Lambert, who became a good friend of mine. And, he was very articulate in talking about what makes good acting, and so I paid close attention to that and I got to know him and I liked him very much. And I felt he was a very shrewd analyst of character. I mean, even when I met him in 1975, I interviewed him for the Directors Guild magazine Action, about The Bluebird, which was a disastrous project that he made in Russia and everything went wrong. But he came back and he was resilient and, you know, it was one of the things that was appealing about him. He sustained a long career because he weathered setbacks. I mean, most famously he was fired from Gone With the Wind after a short time. And, I mean, it was a blow to him, but he just, he went on and made, The Women, which is a classic, and Philadelphia Story after that.

13:18Joseph McBrideAnd, so I was interviewing him and, I asked him, w… what does it feel like to be fired from a movie? And I was thinking of actually Desire Me, which was an MGM 1947 film from which he was fired, and they had three other directors and nobody wanted to take credit for that film. It was released without a credit. And, but he leaned over to his publicist and he put his hand on my forearm and said to the publicist, "Notice with what finesse he avoids mentioning the title Gone With the Wind," even though he was not thinking of it. But he turned to me at one point and he said, "You're a deceptively mild-mannered young man, but you are very determined and you get what you want." And he said, "Keep that." I thought that was a very shrewd piece of analysis. Most people didn't see through me like that, but he did what right away. There was a kind of a level beneath my facade that he could see through.

14:23Joseph McBrideAnd, that made, you know, it made me, feel friendly with him and we got along great. And he was, he had a great sense of humor and he was very bawdy. Gavin Lambert criticized Todd and me for, not censoring Cukor in our interview. We quoted all the raunchy, bawdy things that he said, and Gavin said, "Well, you know, I mean, I know he talked that way in private, but I, you know, I cut that stuff out of my book." And I said, "Well, we wanna, you know, present him as he was." And that was one of the things that I thought was interesting about him is that he made these consummately elegant films and, you know, discretion was a key word that he used a lot, and yet he could plumb the depths of people's, addictions and sexual kinks. And he's, he was very ahead of his time in terms of, dealing with what we now call gender fluidity.

15:25Joseph McBrideHe was exploring that back in the 1930s and he got a lot of backlash for Sylvia Scarlett is a wonderful film. I'd recommend any listeners who haven't seen that go out and get that film. It is just a real eye-opening film. Katharine Hepburn, who was his, favorite, collaborator, they made 10 films together, including her film debut, Bill of Divorcement. But Sylvia Scarlett, she plays a boy throughout most of the film. She's, she, goes in disguise, cross-dressing, and it's very funny and it's very poignant and it's kind of Shakespearean. It's sort of like As You Like It, you know, which, Hepburn did on the stage. And, then she's a very good-looking young man, and both men and women find her sexy. And then she decides she has a crush on a, on a Bohemian artist played by Brian Aherne and decides to be a girl again and goes into, feminine attire.

16:32Joseph McBrideAnd the humor is that she's awkward as a girl. She's more comfortable as a boy. Like Hepburn herself grew up, she called herself Jimmy. She had this whole persona for herself from childhood. She was what they used to call a tomboy, and she famously wore pants when that was kind of scandalous. One time at RKO somebody complained that Hepburn was wearing pants on the set. You know, it sounds crazy, but so she just stood up and took off her pants and walked around for the rest of the day in her underwear, you know? And that's the kind of person she was, and Cukor got a kick out of her. But the audience, didn't know what to make of this, film that they thought was kind of strange, but it later became a cult classic because Cukor was ahead of his time.

17:22Jawad MirRight. In terms of the book, Joseph, when... I know we spoke maybe a couple of years ago, two years ago when I started this podcast and we spoke about the up… the upgraded or updated, sorry, not upgraded, updated version of the Spielberg biography that you've done. When did, wh… wh… when, in general, how long does it take you to write a book? And maybe use this as an example in terms of research if you've had that over the last 50 years, and what's the process of doing that? Like, how do you sort of go about, you know…

17:55Joseph McBrideYeah

17:55Jawad Mir... Working on a book, if you can talk about that.

17:57Joseph McBrideYeah. I've been writing books since 1963 when I was a teenager. I wrote a book on baseball in my teenage years. So I've been doing it continuously. But, you know, as I mentioned the 50-year thing, I often… Take a long gestation period like that to kind of mull over things. I mean, I get interested in some filmmaker and, I mean, J… John Ford, for example, I wrote two books on. One with Michael Wilmington, who's, died a few years ago, but he and I wrote a book, a critical study on Ford in the '70s, and then I did a biography, and it took about 30 years off… off and on work to get the biography done. It takes a long time, and, with Cukor, the first thing I wrote on him was 1971. I wrote a review of another Cukor book, and I talked about how difficult it is to evoke the texture and the m… minute-by-minute or second-by-second nuances of the acting in his films, and, how do you do that?

19:00Joseph McBrideAnd I mean, one way that it's easier now is you can, use good frame enlargements. I have 91 photographs in this book, George Cukor's People., And I have, you know, pictures of Cukor working with the actors, but I also have carefully chosen frame enlargements of moments that I write about or scenes that I write about. So that helps one describe it, but, you need the language to describe the texture and the cl… you know, the climate that he created. I got a start on this in 1973. I wrote an essay for Film Comment on Lowell Sherman's performance in What Price Hollywood, which is a marvelous 1932 film. It's kind of the rough draft for the Stars Born cycle. It's, this one is about a alcoholic director who, winds up destroying himself, but he's altruistically helping a young actress become a star.

20:00Joseph McBrideAnd Cukor was offered the 1937 Stars Born by David O. Selznick, for whom he made, What Price Hollywood, but he felt he, you know, was too close to it, had already done it. But he wound up directing the 1954 version with Judy Garland and James Mason, which I think is Cukor's best film. But I wrote a piece on Lowell Sherman, who's a kind of forgotten actor, but, he was a good stage and film actor. He, for example, he played the cad who seduces Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's, What, Way Down East in 1920. And, so I started watching some of his films in Madison, where I was going to school. We had the RKO collection, and so I got to see some of the rare films. He directed 13 films, Lowell Sherman, so he's a very... One reason that film is so good is he was a real director, and so it made the film very authentic because unlike most films about filmmaking, Truffaut's Day for Night is another exception, they don't show the process very authentically.

21:12Joseph McBrideBut, Cukor and Sherman worked well together. And, well, I studied the films that Sherman directed, and he was a good director. He directed, Katharine Hepburn to her first Oscar in Morning Glory in 1933, and he directed Mae West in She Done Him Wrong. And he died prematurely of a heart attack while he was filming, Becky Sharp, which was the first three s… three-strip Technicolor film. But, so I analyzed his performance in detail, and then when I began thinking about doing this book, I kind of looked back at that essay and I thought, "This is the way to go." And, over the years, I had learned a lot about acting, I think because most importantly, Orson Welles put me into The Other Side of the Wind, his film about Hollywood. In 1970 through '76, I acted for him for more than five years. And I was not an actor, but I was… He liked working sometimes with non-actors.

22:14Joseph McBrideHe could mold their performances, and I was putty in his hands and just kind of let him guide me, and he was another one of the greatest actors, directors in the cinema. And I also watched him directing all different kinds of people, Oscar winners and, young… younger actors and, John Houston, his peer, you know, wonderful performance. And, I was on the sets of lots of films in those days as a Variety, reporter. I got to watch a lot of directors and stars working together. And, I also reviewed a lot of not only films, but plays. I was a second-string play reviewer on Variety, so, you know, I studied acting a lot through the various media, you know, that I was covering. And, so, I tried again to write about Cukor about 25 years ago, and I didn't quite feel I had it yet, but so I s… I laid out the idea of doing this book for Columbia University Press, for whom I did, books on Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, and John Belton, a excellent, film scholar, film historian, was my editor, and Philip Leventhal, and they were very supportive.

23:34Joseph McBrideAnd I found it, easier to do than I thought. I was a little worried that I wouldn't quite have the vocabulary, but I found that I could describe the performances, clearly. The trick is to do it with real physical details, you know? And…, ... I was a screenwriter too, and I, you know, when I've taught screenwriting, I tell people, "Be very specific, you know? Give physical details." For example, I used to write the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award shows with the producer, George Stevens Jr. And I got to work with all kinds of big stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, you know, and it was really a wonderful experience that a young screenwriter usually wouldn't have. And, I rehearsed with them, but I was a little naive when I started in 1980. I asked George, I said, "How does this work? Do they come in with, speeches or what happens?" He laughed. He said, "Joe, these are actors. They need, they need a speech written for them, you know?

24:36Joseph McBrideThey need writing." You know, actors are kind of panicky without... I remember, I remember I worked with…

24:45Jawad MirDirection

24:46Joseph McBride... Yeah, Eva Marie Saint, Academy Award-winning actress, still with us, terrific actress. On our tribute to Lillian Gish, Eva Marie Saint had acted with her on the stage and on television and, through, it's a long story, but, we didn't get, c… to cast the show until kind of the last minute, and I was scurrying to write speeches for people, and I got a phone call like two days before we were about to do the show. And this man, he didn't identify himself, but I knew immediately that he was Eva Marie Saint's husband, Jeffrey Hayden, who was a director. He said, "Miss Saint is really nervous. She needs a speech. Where's her speech? You gotta write the speech." And I said, "Well, you know, I'm sorry, I've been working on all kinds of speeches." And he said, "She's gotta have this speech, you know?" And so I said, "I'll drop everything and, you know, send it to you in half an hour." So I sat down and I had a notebook of 100 pages, single-spaced, notes of things that people could say that I had collected in my research, and I quickly found a good story for her to tell, and I wrote it up in half an hour and faxed it over.

25:57Joseph McBrideAnd, M… Mister Hayden called up and said, "She loves the speech. Thank you very much." And he never identified himself, and I just said, you know, "Thank you," you know? I mean, he was…... Watching out for his wife. And so she did a wonderful job on the show. She, you know, it was a really beautiful, rendition…

26:14Jawad MirYeah

26:14Joseph McBride... Of that. But, so that really helped to work with actors and, you know what they needed and how we could bring out the best in them. So when I sat, you know, work on this book on Cukor, I mean, what I did was, watched all the films repeatedly again and a… over and over and over, that's what you do, and took detailed notes and, real specific notes and then tried to figure out what were the most important scenes I wanted to write about. And then also I, Cukor was also distinguished because he, had great respect for the text. He always called it the text. And he would carry around script pages with him when he directed, and by the end of the day they'd be all mangled up, but he was, unlike most directors, then and now, he was very respectful of writers. As a matter of fact, I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America, and we gave him an award late in his life for his respect for writers, which is, a… as far as I know, unique, award.

27:20Joseph McBrideI mean, the idea of the Writers Guild giving a director an award, you know? And he was so happy to do that, but he treated his,.. He would p… he often got the best plays, usually plays to, adapt, and then he would work with, the screenwriters. He had the best screenwriters, Donald Ogden Stewart and Jane Murfin and Anita Loos, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, that Gordon and Kanin wrote original scripts for him. But he wasn't a writer. He didn't try to be a writer, and if he needed, lines, you know, to augment what he was doing, he would call the, g… Gordon and Kanin on the phone in Connecticut and say, "We need a few lines here for Spencer Tracy," and they'd call back half an hour later with the lines, and that was really unusual. And, so, I would study these plays and the scripts and, you know, other materials and find out how he turned these into cinema, which he did so beautifully.

28:24Jawad MirYeah. No, that's so cool. You know, you talked about that you teach screenwriting. You're part of Writers Guild and everything. Do you or have you thought about turning a book of yours into a script and try to get into a film, or is it something that you're not…

28:40Joseph McBrideWell…

28:40Jawad MirYou know, it's…

28:42Joseph McBrideI've had numerous offers to adapt my Frank Capra biography into a film or TV show. One, not long ago I got an offer to do a miniseries of this, based on my book, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, and I've always said no. I'm… fills me with horror, the whole idea of having my work adapted for films…... Because, you know, I'm, I work on these the best I can…

29:11Jawad MirI get it

29:12Joseph McBride... Protect my work, et cetera. But the one that I tried to do was I wrote a book called The Broken Places, which is a memoir of my troubled youth, and this will lead into an interesting story about Cukor. When I was in high school, I was going to a very strict Catholic boys high school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Marquette University High School, which actually was the school that Spencer Tracy had gone to. And I remember when I, in 1964, I found out Tracy had gone to our school, and I told my favorite priest, and he said, "Spencer Tracy, he's shacked up with that Hepburn woman, and he's never given a penny to the school." And I thought we should be more proud of our greatest alumnus. But, I had a nervous breakdown, as they called it in those days, a mental and physical breakdown. I was actually anorexic and was hospitalized for four months, in a mental hospital, and

30:09Jawad MirOh, wow

30:09Joseph McBride... I recovered. It was tough, but I recovered with the help of a wonderful young woman who I fell in love with, who was troubled but brilliant and kind and generous and fascinating young woman. So it was kinda like A Star Is Born or My Fair Lady… That I was being transformed by another person and, you know, changed into a better person during this period. And I saw My Fair Lady five times. It had just come out, and those were the days of the road show engagements when a film would open in big cities first and play for, like, a year, you know, in a big theater. So downtown Milwaukee, I'd go to this big theater, beautiful screen and sound and everything, and, when I'd get these weekend passes from the hospital, I'd see My Fair Lady.

31:01Joseph McBrideAnd I was just enthralled by this movie, and, I recognized I, my identification with the lives of Doolittle and I was being transformed. And I also kind of identified with, Henry Higgins, because I was kind of a pedant, and I was into, etymology was my hobby in high school. I wrote my book on baseball. It's about baseball slang, and I was really into how words are created, et cetera. And so I could relate to both characters and, that kindled my interest in Kubrick. But so I wrote, I wrote a, screenplay about my experiences with, this, falling in love with this young woman and changing my life, and everybody liked the screenplay, but nobody would make the film because the ending was quite tragic. She killed herself, and, I mean, a couple people, producers tried to get me to give it a happy ending, which I refused to do.

32:03Jawad MirYeah, of course.

32:04Joseph McBrideAnd, but a lot of people said great, you know, people who were moved by the script. One young woman story editor said she was shaking for 15 minutes after she read the script, and Amy Irving wanted to do it. Actually, when I was writing it, I put a picture of Amy Irving over my desk…

32:25Joseph McBride... Because I thought she'd be right for the part. And, Truffaut, I gave the script to Truffaut. Kind of, it was kinda silly to think that Truffaut could direct, you know, my autobiographical script, but my favorite personal film is The 400 Blows, which was his version of his troubled youth, you know. And Truffaut said, he admired the simplicity of the script, which I thought was a nice compliment. But he said he c… he, it was so American, he couldn't, he wouldn't know how to direct it. He always turned down, English language projects because he didn't feel comfortable in English even though Story of Adele H., about half of it is in English actually. But anyway, but he was having dinner with Spielberg and Amy Irving when Spielberg was married to her and

33:19Jawad MirYeah

33:19Joseph McBride... She was saying, "There aren't any good scripts for women right now, you know?" And he said, "Well, I found one you should do," and he described the part that I'd written. And she called my agent the next day and said, "Send over the script," and the following day she called back and said, "Don't do it without me," and she let us use her name to try to sell it. Unfortunately, she was not a big enough name to sell this kind of dicey project and…

33:48Joseph McBride... But I was grateful for her approval. But so what I did eventually was turn this into a memoir, which is what it should've been all along, and turned it into a book, which I published a few years ago. And, the irony is several people who read the book, wrote that, "Gee, this would make a great movie," you know? And it kind of, kind of drove me crazy hearing this because I tried really hard to get this made as a movie, and, I'm content to leave it as a book. That, I think that's the form it deserves to have.

34:22Jawad MirRight. Well, people always say stuff, right? Like, "Oh, this should be a movie," but then okay…

34:28Joseph McBrideWhere's the money? Where's the money to make the movie?

34:29Jawad MirYeah, exactly. Are you gonna back it up? No. Okay, then…

34:33Joseph McBrideYeah

34:33Jawad Mir... It's just not a movie. You know, yeah, a… absolutely. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing such, something personal.

34:40Joseph McBrideSure

34:40Jawad Mir... You know, what's, what's, what's up next for you? Are you working on something that you're able to talk about, or you're taking a break, or what's going on?

34:47Joseph McBrideYeah, I'm, I, actually, I'm just retiring as a teacher. I've been teaching, at San Francisco State University for 22-plus years now. Am a professor in the School of Cinema. I've been teaching screenwriting every semester and film history courses, and I just finished teaching, two courses on how to write about f… films, and one focused on John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and we, you know, read the source story by Dorothy Johnson and…

35:19Joseph McBride... I, helped the students write essays on that great film. And the other course was on Dr. Strangelove, the great Kubrick, film. And, but I'm retiring, and, you know, I've enjoyed teaching, but it's time to move on. And, I am doing a book that is very fitting. Paul Cronin h… has formed a, company called Sticking Place Books, and he's… he published a wonderful interview book with the great critic Michel Ciment who was the editor of Positif and had died a couple years ago, and, Anne T. Byrne, who's been with Positif for a long time, interviewed Michel. And so Paul, h… has commissioned similar books from a number of critics and historians, including me and a few other people I know, and some people I don't know. So I'm doing an interview book about my career with…

36:16Joseph McBrideAnd he says, you know, "Pick an interviewer you're comfortable with." And so I asked my friend Danny Peary who's a college buddy of mine, and we've known each other all these years, and he's, he's a terrific film writer, and he also writes wonderful books on baseball. And as I mentioned, my first book was on baseball, so we're very simpatico. And we started doing this book, last summer and, This has been a very busy fall, so I'm gonna get back onto this book in the coming year. And, I've had an unusual career. I've had four different incarnations, kind of. I was film critic and report… newspaper reporter. I was actually a reporter for regular papers as well as Variety. And then I have my career as a book writer, and then I have my career as a screenwriter, which I did for 18 years, and then my career as a teacher. So I'm... All these four different things, kind of cross-fertilized each other. And you know, the irony is, in Hollywood sometimes I was accused of being too academic, and in academia…...

37:24Joseph McBrideI've been accused of being too Hollywood, which is kind of a…

37:27Jawad MirYeah. Of course

37:28Joseph McBride... You know, very ironic. But I mean, I really think that, for example, being, having been a screenwriter and, covering the industry for Variety really helped me greatly in writing biographies of people like Capra and Spielberg and Ford. Because when I was growing up and going to school in Wisconsin, I had kind of a dim idea of how movies were really made, but then I came to Hollywood. And, you know, you watch movies being made and you interview all kinds of people, and you really get into it.

37:58Jawad MirYeah.

37:58Joseph McBrideAnd so it really helped me enormously to have been in the arena to write these books. And, you know, I got to watch Cukor, for example, shooting Rich and Famous, his last film. Todd McCarthy and I went on the set for a day, and, it was a little frustrating because he was so discreet that, you know, I, he would talk to his stars, Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen, very quietly, you know. He wasn't a bellowing director or anything like that. And so I couldn't hear most of what he said except r… often before the cameras rolled, he would say at a, at a brisk, clip, "Ladies, let's, let's get on with it," you know. He liked a fast pace. And, but one time he gave a very profound direction. Candice Bergen, in... It's, the penultimate scene in the film where she's having a party for her friends on New Year's Eve and, she's thinking about her good friend Jacqueline Bisset, who's at home.

39:00Joseph McBrideAnd she slips out of her party and goes to see her friend, and there's a very poignant scene where they're kissing at the end of the film where Cukor is kind of teasingly almost coming out of the closet at the end of his career. A very touching scene. But, Bergen was standing there, and it's a beautiful shot. She's wearing this beautiful dress, and she's kinda looking at her party guests, and she didn't know what to look at. She said, she said to Cukor, "What am I supposed to be looking at here?" You know, it was a good question. And he said, "Look inside yourself." I remember that direction. That was a great d… great piece of direction, and she did that, and it helps account for why that's maybe the, one of the best shots in the film.

39:43Jawad MirThat's awesome. That's a great piece of direction, look inside yourself.

39:45Joseph McBrideYeah.

39:46Jawad Mir'Cause the answer lies within yourself all the time, whether it's film, whether it's life, everything.

39:51Joseph McBrideYeah

39:52Jawad Mir... Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's awesome. You know, I'm, I'm really excited about a story, a book on your life and your interview because that would be something interesting to read.

40:02Joseph McBrideThank you

40:02Jawad Mir... You know, the auth… the author's biography, essentially.

40:04Joseph McBrideYeah.

40:05Jawad MirAnd

40:06Joseph McBrideYes

40:06Jawad Mir... So look, really looking forward to that. This book is already available, right, I'm, I'm assuming?

40:11Joseph McBrideYeah, it came out November 30th as an e-book first, and then, it's coming out... Well, it's available now as a hardcover. The official publication date is January 7th, but it's available now…

40:24Jawad MirHopefully I order

40:24Joseph McBride... In hard… hardcover. And, people are just getting the book and just starting to read it now, and I'm really happy with the early response.

40:31Jawad MirAmazing. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, Joseph, for your time, for taking the time to chat. Like I said, I've gone through the book, maybe like quarter of it, and I've really enjoyed it. I'm gonna definitely finish it over the holidays. And thank you for writing such amazing stories because, you know, it's one thing to write the making of the book, which you can see that I have a lot of them.

40:53Jawad MirBut it's another thing to sort of document someone's story, which we, a lot of us, you know, we're alluded to that, completely. So thank you so much for doing all this stuff. It's really meaningful now…

41:05Joseph McBrideWell…

41:05Jawad Mir... And in due time.

41:07Joseph McBrideThank you for having me again, Gerard, and have a good, 2025 yourself.

41:11Jawad MirYou too. Happy holidays and happy New Year. Take care.

41:13Joseph McBrideYou too. Take care.

41:14Jawad MirBye-bye. Bye-bye.

41:15Joseph McBrideSee ya. Bye.