I Loved Movies, But…

The novelist Jonathan Lethem, in his Foreword to I Loved Movies, But…, calls Joseph McBride “an example to me, of discipline, versatility, and abiding with one’s obsessions against all odds.… What animates my desire to follow Joe to any lengths, on any subject he engages, whether I already agree with him (Welles! Ford! Hawks! Lubitsch!) or am being seduced into a new exploration (Cukor) or have yet to be fully persuaded (Spielberg) or lack the equipment to judge (Officer Tippit), my response is uniform; I need to know what he thinks; I’m addicted to his form of inquiry and electrified by his gentle ferocity in pursuit of undisclosed or falsified truths. Joe McBride is a seeker, and however disarmingly plainspoken his writing may appear to be, his search, and his rage for truth is a force animating every line he writes. This creates a thrilling energy, a pulse or backbeat in his thought and expression.…In this book of conversation, we learn the personal underpinnings of Joe’s voice.”

In I Loved Movies, But…, celebrated historian, critic, screenwriter, and emeritus professor Joseph McBride turns the lens on himself in a candid, wide-ranging conversation with a longtime friend, the film historian and baseball biographer Danny Peary. Across formative childhood traumas, Hollywood adventures, investigative reporting, landmark biographies and critical studies, and decades of teaching, McBride’s life has been bound by a relentless search for truth—about movies, politics and history, and himself. Honest, funny, unsparing, and deeply humane, this book is both a revelatory autobiography and a love letter to the culture of cinephilia, brimming with stories of Orson Welles, John Ford, Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and the obsessive joy of a life spent wrestling with the magic and the seductive illusions of cinema.

Joseph McBride is a film historian, biographer, and screenwriter whose books on directors such as John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg have made him one of the foremost chroniclers of Hollywood cinema. A former journalist and reviewer for Daily Variety and co-writer of Rock ’n’ Roll High School, he is Professor Emeritus of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.

^{I Loved Movies, But… (2025)
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89976-034-1 650pp 5×9.2 inches, with b/w images
Hardback ISBN 979-8-89976-035-8 650pp 5×9.2 inches, with b/w images}