Joseph McBride - Writing in Pictures (Vintage Original)

Acclaim for Joseph McBrides

WRITING in PICTURES
Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

An impressively readable, unpretentious, and remarkably useful handbook on how to, and how not to, write a screenplay. Based on a lifetime of experience and observation, as well as conversations with some of the greats (like Orson Welles, John Ford, and Howard Hawks), Joe McBrides comprehensive yet very succinct work should become a standard text.

Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter, director, film historian

I must confess that I had never read a how-to book straight through for the sheer pleasure of it, and I never expected tountil I got my hands on the splendid Writing in Pictures. Of course, Joe McBride has spent the bulk of his distinguished career working alongside, talking to, and writing about great American filmmakers, so it should come as no surprise that his war stories are as irresistibly entertaining as his professional wisdom is sound.

A word of warning to would-be screenwriters: in this book you will not find the Six Keys to Compelling Characters, the Seven Secrets of Successful Plotting, or the Eight Jungian Archetypes No Studio Executive Can Resist. There are no magic formulae herebut if you do have a story to tell, this book will give you the solid practical advice you need to tell it, and sell it, in the most effective way. Writing in Pictures is a short course in how to think cinematically. It will change the way you write. It will change the way you watch.

Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming

Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless represents a real contribution to a much-abused genre. Most screenwriting how-to books are either formulaic, craven, or both. They are less intelligent considerations of the craft than nostrums, sold to the hopeful, proffering the best ways to increase ones odds in the lottery.

McBrides book is something else. Its a straightforward, considered and lucid meditation on the arts and crafts of storytelling for the screen, informed by McBrides unsurpassed knowledge of, and deep love for, the movies.

Howard A. Rodman, screenwriter of Joe Goulds Secret, August, and Savage Grace; professor and former chair, Division of Screen and Television Writing, University of Southern California; vice president, Writers Guild of America West

In this unique contribution to the screenplay literature, Joe McBride invites writers to connect themselves to literary tradition, relying less on formulas and more on intelligent uses of classic storytelling technique. Writing in Pictures blends general precepts, concrete examples, hard-won experience, and lively anecdotes into something more than the usual script manual: an invitation to participate in the great human adventure of sharing stories.

David Bordwell, author of Poetics of Cinema

If this isnt the greatest screenwriting book ever, Ill eat my hat! Writing in Pictures is the kind of how-to book Ben Hecht would have written on that subject: a Socratic tour of the profession the novice aspires to enter into, filled with screenwriting lore, for illustration and entertainment. If you want to judge someones work by how personal it is, Writing in Pictures may just turn out to be Joe McBrides masterpiece.

Bill Krohn, author of Hitchcock at Work and Hollywood correspondent for Cahiers du Cinma

If it is possible for only one book to embody the ethos of screenwriting, this is the one, a guide to screenwriting that is more than a guidecraft, history, practical advice, philosophical bedrock, wisdom, witand through it all, as in the very best screenplays, the reassurance of one clarion voice. This is a book for starters and practitioners and scholars of the form.

Patrick McGilligan, film biographer and editor of the Backstory series of interviews with screenwriters

Joe McBride is one of the few film scholars to whose books even the already-wise go to refill their wisdom tanks. In this latest work he provides a first-rate primer for the screenwriters of tomorrow, born of long experience and exceptional insight. Joe McBride offers the kind of friendly but honest advice that will make him the mentor to a new generation of aspiring screenwriters.

Julian Hoxter, screenwriter and author of Write What You Dont Know: An Accessible Manual for Screenwriters

Joseph McBride

WRITING in PICTURES
Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

Joseph McBride is an internationally renowned film historian and biographer and a veteran film and television writer whose decades of experience in the industry have brought him a Writers Guild of America Award, four other WGA nominations, two Emmy Award nominations, and a Canadian Film Awards nomination. McBride was one of the screenwriters of the cult classic punk rock musical Rock n Roll High School and cowrote five American Film Institute Life Achievement Award specials for CBS-TV.

McBride was a film critic, reporter, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood for many years. McBrides books include the acclaimed biographies Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success; Steven Spielberg: A Biography; and Searching for John Ford. The French edition of the Ford biography, A la recherche de John Ford, won the Best Foreign Film Book of the Year award from the French film critics organization in 2008. McBride has also published a celebrated book of interviews with director Howard Hawks, Hawks on Hawks, and three books on Orson Welles, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career. That book is partly a memoir of McBrides experience working as an actor for Welles for six years, playing a film critic in the directors legendary unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, for which McBride cowrote his dialogue with Welles.

McBride is an associate professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching screenwriting and film history since 2002. In 2011, he became the subject of a feature-length documentary, Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History, written and directed by Hart Perez. McBride lives in Berkeley.

Also by Joseph McBride

Steven Spielberg: A Biography

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career

Searching for John Ford

Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

The Book of Movie Lists: An Offbeat, Provocative Collection of the Best and Worst of Everything in Movies

High and Inside: An A-to-Z Guide to the Language of Baseball

Orson Welles

Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute Seminars on Motion Pictures and Television, Volumes I and II (editor)

Hawks on Hawks

Orson Welles: Actor and Director

Kirk Douglas

John Ford (with Michael Wilmington)

Focus on Howard Hawks (editor)

Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism (editor)

A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2012

Copyright 2012 by Joseph McBride

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

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