The hallways of Burk Hall are nearly barren except for a student who’s pacing back and forth in front of an open door.
That door leads to the office of Joseph McBride, an associate cinema professor at San Francisco State University.
His office is cluttered, papers shuffle out of boxes. The walls are bare except for two posters: Blood & Gutsand Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, framed and hung opposite from one another. At the moment, he sits across from a student, discussing the issues she’s having in class.
Like many teachers at San Francisco State, McBride’s office hours are regularly busy. However, it seems that no task is impossible for him despite his hectic schedule.
He is currently promoting the recent release of his book, Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless, all the while lecturing countless students.
McBride’s book, written on a sabbatical, is a new screenwriting textbook for students that offers a better understanding and step-by-step instructions of how to craft a screenplay.
“I looked at textbooks and I didn’t like any of the books, because most of them tell you how to write formulaic stories to get rich,” explains McBride.
The reason many books make such a profitable mistake most likely stems behind the instability of being a screenwriter, suggests McBride, who, at the beginning of his career, wrote seven screenplays before selling one.
“I spent about ten years teaching myself how to write screenplays before I sold one and then I started selling rapidly, but I had to be very persistent and not give up,” He said.
The Milwaukee native was born in 1947, and found himself writing articles at the age of 12. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the sixties, where he hadn’t planned to become a screenwriter until one class introduced him to Citizen Kane, a film masterfully written by Herman Mankiewicz and one of McBride’s favorite directors, Orson Welles, in 1966.
At the time, though, there were very few courses on the subject, and even fewer books. So to suffice his passion for screenwriting, he used all the resources he could get. He soon learned the rules of the game.
“Filmmaking is different from writing plays, or novels. It’s very pictorial, it’s very exterior. In a novel you can get inside somebody’s head, and in a film that’s possible, but it’s harder to do. Film is a very tactile medium,” he said.
McBride moved to Los Angeles in 1973. He contributed writing to many works such as Blood & Gutsand Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. His successful career as a screenwriter bloomed, and he even found himself working side by side with Welles. At age 27, McBride was asked to teach a screenwriting course.
“I felt like I was too young and I didn’t know enough about it. I was still in the middle of trying to build my career. I thought, who am I to teach these people how to screenwrite when I’m only 27?”
He turned it down and in the meantime focused on writing a different sort of medium —books. But his passion to teach bloomed years later, and after moving up to the bay area he quickly found himself in a position to teach again.
“You need to be in the right frame of mind in your life. You need to be in a point where you want to get back to people, instead of just thinking about your own career.”
He began teaching at San Francisco State in 2002. McBride says he enjoys being in the company of people, and appreciates helping students further their ambitions and career goals. But what he enjoys most about teaching at SF State came to him as a pleasant surprise.
“You learn a lot from the students. It’s not just a one-way street; and in some ways you learn more from them than they do from you.”
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at San Francisco chapter.