About this item
Orson Welles called Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) "a giant" whose "talent and originality are stupefying." Jean Renoir said, "He invented the modern Hollywood." Celebrated for his distinct style and credited with inventing the classic genre of the Hollywood romantic comedy and helping to create the musical, Lubitsch won the admiration of his fellow directors, including Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder, whose office featured a sign on the wall asking, "How would Lubitsch do it?" Despite the high esteem in which Lubitsch is held, as well as his unique status as a leading filmmaker in both Germany and the United States, today he seldom receives the critical attention accorded other major directors of his era.How Did Lubitsch Do It? restores Lubitsch to his former stature in the world of cinema.
About the Author
Joseph McBride is an American film historian, biographer, screenwriter, and professor in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. McBride has published eighteen books since 1968, including acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg. His most recent work is The Broken Places: A Memoir (2015) , which deals with his childhood abuse in Catholic schools and an alcoholic family, his breakdown as a teenager, and his triumphant recovery; the book tells the story of his relationship with a troubled young Native American woman who helped teach him to live but could not survive herself. Before that, McBride published Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013) ; both epic and intimately personal, that book is the result of McBride's thirty-one-year investigation of the case. It contains many fresh revelations from McBride's rare interviews with people in Dallas, archival discoveries, and what novelist Thomas Flanagan, in The New York Review of Books, called McBride's "wide knowledge of American social history."
McBride's Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless (2012) draws from his long experience as a screenwriter and as a teacher of screenwriting. Also in 2012, McBride published an updated third edition of his 1997 book Steven Spielberg: A Biography. The American second edition of the Spielberg book was published in 2011 by the University Press of Mississippi, which also reprinted his biographies Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992; 2000) and Searching for John Ford (2001) . McBride's other books include: Orson Welles (1972; 1996) , Hawks on Hawks (1982) , The Book of Movie Lists: An Offbeat, Provocative Collection of the Best and Worst of Everything in Movies (1999) , and What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? : A Portrait of an Independent Career (2006) . He wrote the 1974 critical study John Ford with Michael Wilmington.
McBride's screenwriting credits include the movies Rock 'n' Roll High School and Blood and Guts and five American Film Institute Life Achievement Award specials on CBS-TV dealing with Fred Astaire, Frank Capra, Lillian Gish, John Huston, and James Stewart. He also was cowriter of the United States Information Agency worldwide live TV special Let Poland Be Poland (1982) . McBride plays a film critic, Mister Pister, in the legendary unfinished Orson Welles feature The Other Side of the Wind (1970-76) . McBride is also the coproducer of the documentaries Obsessed with "Vertigo": New Life for Hitchcock's Masterpiece (1997) and John Ford Goes to War (2002) .
McBride received the Writers Guild of America Award for cowriting The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston (1983) . He has also received four other WGA nominations two Emmy nominations, and a Canadian Film Awards nomination. The French edition of
