Joseph McBride

We've been under military rule since 1963 as what's known as a limited police state. We may soon be a full police state.

There was a bullet in the right temple that was removed during the autopsy or pre-autopsy. There was also a bullet hole in the top right of Kennedy's forehead at the hairline.

https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-top-secret-plans-if-coronavirus-cripples-government-1492878?fbclid=IwAR21wyuj02Nwny_xlkxTW88-5gsfQNuET5YFQcHimFuuJI0fdHbwsrl8IQA Those who did not know about or believe in the existence of COG, or know it was implemented on 9/11 and extended by each administration annually, might have second thoughts on reading this, even though the article understates the severity of the problem, since it does not indicate that COG has been in effect since 9/11 or that we underwent a military takeover on Nov. 22, 1963, or that this is the inevitable result of that coup. This article mentions recent steps to prepare for full-on martial law and suggests that there are changes in the line of succession -- which Peter Dale Scott alerted us to years ago (I have read some recent articles by gullible media people citing Democrats who think Pelosi might become president). Some facts are too sensitive to be shared with the public by the MSM, evidently, although polls have consistently shown that 70% of Americans have not believed the official fantasy of the Warren Reort. FROM THE ARTICLE: "We're in new territory," says one senior officer, the entire post-9/11 paradigm of emergency planning thrown out the window. The officer jokes, in the kind of morbid humor characteristic of this slow-moving disaster, that America had better learn who Gen. Terrence J. O'Shaughnessy is [your new leader pictured below].He is the "combatant commander" for the United States and would in theory be in charge if Washington were eviscerated. That is, until a new civilian leader could be installed. . . . All of these plans are the responsibility of U.S. Northern Command (or NORTHCOM), the homeland defense military authority created after 9/11. Air Force General O'Shaughnessy is NORTHCOM's Colorado Springs-based commander.On February 1, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signed orders directing NORTHCOM to execute nationwide pandemic plans. Secretly, he signed Warning Orders (the WARNORD as it's called) alerting NORTHCOM and a host of east coast units to "prepare to deploy" in support of potential extraordinary missions.Seven secret plans – some highly compartmented – exist to prepare for these extraordinary missions. . . . upon reading this.

It's hard to believe Finck would confuse an Army man with a Navy man or not recognize someone's rank.

Saying the OSS was riddled with spies is like saying the Vatican is riddled with cardinals.

This was the silly premise of Don DeLillo's novel LIBRA.

Dan Rather knows how they blew it. He was well-prepared for the assassination, convincing CBS to have five full camera crews in Dallas with Kennedy, including the only live hookup. NBC and ABC each had only one crew.

Uncomfortable echoes of RFK in LA 1968 last night in LA as protesters stormed the platform when Joe Biden was talking. His wife, Jill, fiercely defended him, but he (like Sanders et al) needs more protection. A House committee is now discussing this.

I agree with Larry that while much of the "so-called evidence" (as Oswald called) it is phony, that does not mean that all evidence in the case can be automatically discounted, only that every single piece of evidence offered by any agency or person must be scrutinized skeptically (a good epistemological exercise in life generally). The pistol may have been planted on Oswald by the DPD at the theater. Armstrong proved Oswald did not own the pistol that was entered into evidence (and proved he did not own the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle). The evidence presented by the DPD, FBI, and Warren Commission in the Tippit shooting fails to link Oswald to that shooting.

De Antonio said in an interview that most of the fear he encountered from people in Dallas centered around the Tippit shooting. I once interviewed de Antonio, whom I greatly respected, on Los Angeles TV about his film on the Weather Underground; he asked for me to do that interview because of my coverage in Daily Variety of the film and the controversy surrounding it. To my surprise, he told me Variety always gave him what he considered the fairest coverage of his films, because he noted that we reviewed films factually and carefully described their contents, unlike other publications. We at Variety felt at that time (before Peter Bart ruined the paper) that we were writing factual reviews for the benefit of the industry and exhibitors and telling what was in the films as well as expressing our opinions about them, grounded in facts. Nevertheless, the old newsman Sam Fuller in the seventies described Variety to me as "that f-cking rag you love so much."

Ruby matches the description of the Tippit gunman given by Acquilla Clemmons: "He was kinda chunky, he was kinda heavy, he wasn't a very big man. He was [a] kinda short guy." As we know, she said that man had an accomplice, tall and thin. Numerous candidates have been mentioned as the Tippit gunman or gunmen, and I explore some of those in INTO THE NIGHTMARE. I explore what Harry Olsen was doing in Oak Cliff, how late that night he egged on (ordered?) Ruby to shoot Oswald, and how he was fired by Chief Curry and left Dallas. I greatly admire Mrs. Clemmons for her bravery and honesty. After doing the filmed interview with Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio, she was never seen again, unfortunately. She had been threatened by the police if she kept talking. She gave some press interviews before that as well.

Ruby tried to tell Earl Warren that he was part of the conspiracy to kill JFK, but Warren wouldn't listen. Carl Oglesby has a brilliant analysis of that fascinatingly cryptic jail testimony in his book THE YANKEE AND COWBOY WAR. Ruby wanted to come clean but couldn't speak freely in the jail because he sensibly feared for his life. He pleaded with Warren to take him to DC to testify, but Warren of course didn't want to hear the truth. Ruby suggested in his filmed interview during the trial that LBJ was involved in the JFK hit. I believe it is possible Ruby was at the Tippit killing scene (close to his own apartment) on 11/22/63 and that he helped orchestrate it, including lining up some of the witnesses in advance, as I discuss in INTO THE NIGHTMARE (a theory first advanced by Jerry Rose in 1985). Then Ruby went to Parkland, where Seth Kantor encountered him. Possibly Ruby planted the stretcher bullet there.

I disagree about THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. I believe it's a masterpiece, one of Ford's greatest films, and a somber elegy for the men left behind in our nation's worst defeat up until that time. The theme is the sacrifice required by war; it's an unusally honest and grim World War II movie from that period and highly poetic in its approach. The man the Robert Montgomery character is based on, Rear Admiral (later Vice Admiral) John Bulkeley, who won the Medal of Honor for rescuing General MacArthur from the Philippines and for his other exploits as PT boat commander, told me for my biography SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD about the futile campaign in the Philippines, "I was very bitter about the thing. We went over there with 111 men and only 9 men came back alive. [The War Department] put eighty thousand soldiers over there, and that was a political decision on the part of the president and [Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson that were going to going to show the Asiatic race that we supported them, that we did not back off from the Japanese. But the war plan was totally, utterly hopeless. You could not send a battle fleet out there and defeat the Japs and bring aid and so forth to the Philippines. We were not only too far away, we weren't ready. To try to defend the Philippines was stupid, we couldn't do it. But we had to put up a fight." Montgomery was assigned to Bulkeley as a lieutenant commander on his PT boat after the Normandy Invasion (Ford, who had filmed the D-Day landings, also spent time on that boat in that period to study Bulkeley, and Bulkeley suspected Ford also arranged for Montgomery to serve on his boat to study him). Bulkeley said, "If you look at that movie carefully and me when I was much younger, Montgomery and I look alike. Furthermore, our habits and the way we work, the way we lead, we're very close together. Ford got someone who could copy my mannerisms and my speech. Good performance by Montgomery." When I told Bulkeley that I thought EXPENDABLE, while beautifully photographed with expressionistic lighting by Joseph H. August, also looks like a documentary, Bulkeley said, "A documentary, yes, but with good actors." Montgomery directed two weeks of the film at Ford's request after Ford broke his leg during filming. One of the men under Bulkeley's PT boat command in the Pacific was Lt. (jg) John F. Kennedy. Bulkeley revealed to me that he recruited JFK into the PT boat service at the personal request of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, who, Bulkeley recalled, "wanted Jack to get into PT boats for the publicity and so forth, to get the veterans' vote after the war." The hagiographic New Yorker article by John Hersey Joe commissioned on JFK's war service was reprinted by the Kennedy 1946 congressional campaign and became a staple of all his later campaigns as well. My job as a JFK volunteer in the 1960 Wisconsin presidential campaign was to distribute copies of those articles door-to-door, doing my bit to further the myth before I knew the facts about those events better.

It's not known who stole Bond's body. He made many enemies. Ford's daughter Barbara revealed this episode.

In my 1999 BOOK OF MOVIE LISTS, I have a list of "The Ultimate Movie Collectible: 4 Actors Whose Bodies Were Stolen": John Barrymore, Charles Chaplin, Eva Duarte Peron, and George Tobias; and I could have added Bond.

Otto Preminger (EXODUS) and Kirk Douglas (SPARTACUS) both deserve credit for breaking the blacklist. Preminger made the first open move to hire Dalton Trumbo, and Douglas followed, though SPARTACUS beat EXODUS to the screen. JFK conspicuously attended a public screening of SPARTACUS during the 1960 campaign to show his support. The blacklist started crumbling in 1956 when Trumbo won an Oscar through a nonexistent front that just about everyone knew about, and blacklist ringleader Ward Bond complained in the late fifties that it was weakening overall, but it did not end overnight in 1960. Some blacklistees took years to get back their names onscreen, e.g., the great Abraham Polonsky, who had been writing through fronts, finally got his name back on the script of MADIGAN in 1968 and as writer-director of TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE in 1969. Some blacklistees never went back to work; some had killed themselves, died for other reasons, or left the business. (Bond, by the way, flew his flag at half-mast at his home when Khrushchev visited Twentieth Century-Fox in September 1959 and died three days before Kennedy was elected, while sitting on the toilet in a hotel in Dallas. He was there to attend the Cotton Bowl in the company of his rich Texas rightwing friends; a person of interest in our case, Clint Murchison, was one of them. One of Bond's fanatical cronies attributed his heart attack to the stress of his anti-Communist crusade, but he was overweight and drank and smoked too much while partying once he became a TV star. While his body was in the John Ford Chapel at the Motion Picture Home waiting for his funeral, it was stolen but then returned. Those are some political connections for ya. Henry Brandon, the actor who played Chief Scar in Ford's THE SEARCHERS, which features a splendid performance by Bond as the Capt. Rev. Sam Clayton, said to me, "Bond was a horror. He and Hedda [Hopper] ran the blacklist. They put dozens of actors and directors out of work. Well, if you do that to a cowboy -- if you take his horse -- you'd get hung." But Brandon added, "Bond was good in those parts, you can't take it away. Ward was a sh-t AND he was a good actor.")

Andrew Bergman wrote the original screenplay that became BLAZING SADDLES. His was called TEX X and was about a contemporary black hipster who finds himself a sheriff in the Old West. Brooks bought it and transformed it with his team, who included Bergman, Richard Pryor, and others. Brooks wanted Pryor to play the sheriff, but Warner Bros. said no. I went to a discussion with Brooks shortly after the film came out, and someone asked him how it was writing with Pryor, and Brooks said, "He's great as long as you give him some white stuff to stick up his nose once in a while." Some people booed. I was also at the first public preview in Westwood, with Brooks and Anne Bancroft present, and the audience sat in stunned silence until I broke it with a laugh, and thirty seconds later the whole place erupted and kept laughing until the end.

Also, the WGA guidelines state that who wrote the dialogue should not be the main consideration in arbitration, since structure is considered more important. William Goldman wrote, "SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE." But in practice that rule is often disregarded in WGA arbitrations, which I have found twice in my experience to be corrupt.

Michael Wilson's widow, Zelma, who lost her job as an architect when he was blacklisted from the film industry, asked me to print her husband's speech with my article in the WGA magazine. His words were prophetic as well as eloquent. Michael Wilson accepted his WGA lifetime achievement award in 1976 with a cautionary look toward to the future. Exactly 20 years ago Allied Artists was preparing for release a film called Friendly Persuasion. I had written a screenplay of Friendly Persuasion nine years earlier, in 1947. But by the time the picture was produced in 1956, I had already been blacklisted for five years. Unhappily, the Board of our Guild had earlier capitulated to one aspect of the blacklist by agreeing to an unprecedented clause in the Minimum Basic Agreement. In effect this clause stipulated that if any screenwriter who had been a hostile witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities should by some fluke receive credit on a picture yet to be released, the producing company had the right to remove his name from the credits. William Wyler, the producer-director of Friendly Persuasion, chose to list as coauthors of the screenplay his brother Robert and Jessamyn West, the author of the short stories on which my screenplay had been based. I appealed to the Guild for an arbitration and was later informed that a panel of my peers had ruled unanimously that I was the sole author of the shooting script. When Allied Artists was also so informed, a company spokesman reminded the Guild that I did not have to be given credit because I had been a naughty boy. Very well, said the Guild spokesman, but you can't give credit to another writer. And so for the first and perhaps only time a Hollywood picture was released that wasn't written by anyone. In this instance, the blacklist had a serendipitous effect because Friendly Persuasion went on to win the Writers Guild Award the following spring and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, so my noncredit on the film gained me more recognition than I would have received had my name been on it. I do not tell you this anecdote to pick at old wounds or to rehash ancient wrongs. The truth is that I was one of the fortunate few who managed to continue practicing our craft through much of this period, and tonight I think of other blacklisted writers who might be here in my place had they had my luck. No, I don't want to dwell on the past, but for a few moments to speak of the future, and I address my remaining remarks primarily to you younger men and women who had perhaps not yet established yourselves in this industry at the time of the Great Witch Hunt. I fear that unless you remember this dark epoch and understand it, you may be doomed to replay it, not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues. But I foresee a day coming in your lifetime, if not in mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this republic; when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty; when chilling decisions affecting our culture will be made in the board rooms of conglomerates and networks; when the powers of the programmers and the censors will be expanded; and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time, whatever they may be. If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks and protect their right to work. The Guild will have need of rebels and heretics if it is to survive as a union of free writers. The nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society.

Pat, I appreciate your dedication to learning about screenwriting. But as a longtime member of the Writers Guild of America (now retired), and an historian of Hollywood labor issues and blacklisting, I have to correct you on the credit question. Wilson had won an Oscar for co-writing, with Harry Brown, the 1951 classic A PLACE IN THE SUN, based on the novel AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser and directed by George Stevens. But Wilson could not be credited on LAWRENCE in 1962 because he had been blacklisted in 1951. Producer Sam Spiegel and Lean knew that when they hired him for LAWRENCE. Carl Foreman (who was also blacklisted) and Wilson had written the screenplay for an earlier Spiegel-Lean film, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, working separately. In a bitter joke, that film won an Oscar for Pierre Boulle, the author of the source book, who could not read or write English. Wilson and Foreman were awarded Oscars in 1984 for the KWAI script, but since both had died, their widows had to accept them in 1985 (see the New York Times for March 16, 1985). As often happens, there had been a disagreement between Foreman and Wilson over who deserved more credit for that script. But Wilson was brought onto LAWRENCE by Spiegel and Lean. When disagreements arose with Lean over the story, Bolt (best known as the playwright of A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS, which ironically is about moral choices in political matters) was brought on. Bolt was not blacklisted, and so he could receive screen credit. Wilson, as my article indicates, was not happy about this. The cowardly WGA had shamefully passed a bylaw banning suspected Communists from receiving screenplay credit, which had also resulted in Wilson not getting credit on FRIENDLY PERSUASION; he had been nominated for an Oscar for that script without his name being on it, but that nomination was rescinded. So Wilson was not credited on LAWRENCE by the WGA until 1995; Lean even kept Wilson's name off the 1989 restoration, which was outrageous. You can now see the names of both Bolt and Wilson on the screen in LAWRENCE. Wilson was awarded an Oscar nomination as co-writer and also won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Dramatic Screenplay. And Wilson was given the WGA's screen Laurel Award in 1975 for lifetime achievement. Wilson died in 1978. And it is not true that you have to work as a team to share credit with another writer on a script. I have done a WGA arbitration and had one of my scripts arbitrated; I've also won a WGA award for THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE SALUTE TO JOHN HUSTON (CBS-TV, 1983), with the producer and co-writer, George Stevens Jr., and had four other WGA nominations with Stevens. If you work as part of a team on a screenplay, the names are linked with an ampersand; if the writers work separately, the names are linked with the word "and." The guild allows up to three writers on a screenplay and up to two on a story, as I understand it. It is true that many writers often work on scripts. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas wryly pointed out that it took 33 people to write THE FLINTSTONES but only one man to write WAR AND PEACE.

The draft is not available online.

The blacklisted writer Michael Wilson wrote the first version of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, but David Lean nixed it and brought in Robert Bolt to rewrite it. Only Bolt's name appeared in the credits at the time. But the British writers' guild gave both men awards for writing the film. Eventually the Writers Guild of America restored Wilson's credit, but only after objections by Lean. Wilson thought that the Bolt-Lean version downplayed the complex politics of the story in favor of exploring Lawrence's sexual conflicts. I have always thought the film, impressive as it is visually and in O'Toole's acting, is incoherent and obscure historically. I wrote about this in my profile of Wilson for the WGA magazine Written By. That article, "'A Very Good American': The Undaunted Artistry of Blacklisted Screenwriter Michael Wilson," is on my website josephmcbridefilm.com and in my collection TWO CHEERS FOR HOLLYWOOD: JOSEPH McBRIDE ON MOVIES. I realized after writing my biography FRANK CAPRA: THE CATASTROPHE OF SUCCESS that Wilson is the hero of that book and of Capra's life. Capra informed on Wilson even though he did the final polish on IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and wrote a screenplay of THE FRIENDLY PERSUASION (based on stories by Richard Nixon's Quaker relative Jessamyn West) that Capra dropped because it was a pacifist script, and the Korean War was on, etc. William Wyler made it as FRIENDLY PERSUASION and had his brother rewrite it to make the pacifist a killer and had the film released with no writing credit.

Re John Wayne: You have to learn to separate the man and the artist. If you only like artists who share your political views and behave impeccably, you will like very few artists, and your life will be impoverished.

I saw RIO BRAVO on its first release in 1959, when I was twelve. I told Hawks that "the only reason I went to see it was because Ricky Nelson was in it. At that time I didn't know who you were." He said, "I didn't know you appreciated music so much." I enjoyed the singing of Nelson and Dean Martin (and still do), but what startled me as a kid was the entirely accurate portrayal of alcoholism in the Martin character. My parents were alcoholics, and it was a hellish upbringing. I recognized for the first time in a film a real depiction of life. The scene of Martin pouring the drink back into the bottle made a great impression on me.

On the day JFK died, the back page of the New York Times was taken up with an ad for the upcoming SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, which mentioned a government coup. That film and DR. STRANGELOVE were to have been released in late 1963, but both were delayed into early 1964 because of the assassination. A press preview of STRANGELOVE in New York on the night of the assassination was canceled.