As a boy growing boy up in Rochester, NY, I loved movies, especially Westerns and most especially John Ford's The Searchers. Everything about it thrilled and frightened me---most especially John Wayne's towering performance. I grew up to become a journalist and a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, and when I came back to the United States in 2006 I wanted to write a book about America. And what could be more American than The Searchers? The book did surprisingly well, and I found myself working in my own little sub-genre: books that combine the making of a classic film with a momentous era in American history. Next up was the making of High Noon and its connection to the Hollywood blacklist, a time of vicious rhetoric and false allegations not unlike our own troubled decade. Shooting Midnight Cowboy is my third: I’d always loved the movie---the only X-rated film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture---and felt a personal connection: it was filmed largely in New York City in 1968, when I was a freshman at Columbia University. I feel very fortunate that after a wonderful career as a journalist and professor at Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, I’m now finding an exciting new world to explore as an author.