Joseph McBride is the author of twenty-two books, including acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg, two other books on Welles, and critical studies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. A former reporter, reviewer, and columnist for Daily Variety in Hollywood, McBride is a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University.
"""As with the invaluable accounts of Dickens written during Dickens' lifetime, McBride has charted a course through the smoke for all future scholarship (and, one prays, film restoration). Twenty-first century Welles research begins here."" -- Jonathan Lethem ""There has been so much written and said about Orson Welles over the years, and quite a bit of it has been fixated on the myth of his self-destruction at the expense of everything else: Welles has become the epitome of fallen genius, our fallen genius. Joseph McBride, who has a clearer understanding of Welles and his films than almost anyone, exposes that idea as the myth it is and always has been."" -- Martin Scorsese"