Joseph McBride's Frankly Unmasking Frank Capra

I have found as a writer of film books that it is less important how many books I sell than who reads them.
So if we ask what purpose biographies of film directors serve, that is the answer.  Like any biography worth writing, they fulfill the need to know the truth for people who care deeply enough to want it.
--Joseph McBride, Frankly  Unmasking Frank Capra (Hightower Press, 2019).

This book is a detailed narrative of how McBride was able to finish his biography of Frank Capra and get it published after a long struggle with publishers, agents, lawyers and archivists.  I suggest that one should read Frank Capra:  The Catastrophe of Success in order to better understand the current book.  I never understood the feel-good Christmas movie that It's a Wonderful Life has become -- since I grew up in a small town I understood the dark and suicidal tendencies of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) -- but I did appreciate the skillful and intelligent direction of such earlier Capra films as American Madness (1932) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).  In his biography McBride starts with Capra's arrival in the U.S. as a child and follows Capra's career from his silent films through his later informing during the Cold War years and his artistic self-destruction.

In Frankly McBride narrates the story of  his original contract signing with Random House and his struggles with editor Gottlieb and archivist Jenine Basinger, who controls the Capra archive at Wesleyan and originally gave McBride access, at least until she began to suspect that McBride was not going along with her view and Capra's own view (in his fabricated book The Name Above the Title) of his life and films. The book is effectively McBride's point of view and he marshals considerable evidence, circumstantial and direct, that Gottlieb, subsequent editors (after Gottlieb left for The New Yorker) at Random House, and Basinger wanted to sanitize Capra's life, playing both chess and chicken with McBride.  McBride's struggle with Random House and its lawyers -- while he struggles to make ends meet with full-time writing financed with relatively small advances and considerable borrowing -- takes on aspects of Capra's films about grappling with the powerful, aspects that come more from screenwriters Robert Riskin, Sidney Buchman and Michael Wilson than from Capra himself, as McBride demonstrates in his biography.

Be careful with your choices of lawyers and agents if you are a writer.  Also, writing is a lonely business and McBride gives much credit to his companion Ruth O'Hara, who helped and advised him much of the way.  I met Joseph McBride once, in Los Angeles, in 1981 when I was grandly  thinking of writing a biography of Howard Hawks, who went briefly to the same prep school I attended and whose films I admired, and McBride generously spent an evening with me, giving me advice and encouragement.  McBride also considerably influenced my own thinking about film, with his excellent book on John Ford he wrote with Michael Wilmington and published in 1975.  McBride writes intelligently in Frankly of what the film industry has become and how research has narrowed in an era when fewer and fewer people have even heard of Frank Capra, or even John Ford and D. W. Griffith.