Patrick McGilligan’s ‘Lost World’

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Photo courtesy of Patrick McGilligan

Patrick McGilligan

Patrick McGilligan (2025)

Patrick McGilligan is among America’s leading film historians, and his histories largely take the form of biographies. McGilligan has authored life stories of Orson Welles, Mel Brooks and Alfred Hitchcock among many others. With his latest book, The Good Life, he turns attention to himself in an autobiography of childhood and adolescence in Madison, where he grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The book’s subtitle, Growing Up in a Lost World, defines the focus. Raised in a mid-size heartland city during the early years of the baby boom, McGilligan attended Catholic schools and lived in a two-parent home with a single black and white television. The lone screen was never watched without parental supervision.

Although during World War II, his mother served as a Woman’s Army Corps liaison with Hollywood actors visiting West Coast military hospitals, movies were not part of his upbringing. McGilligan was nine before setting foot in a cinema. His first big screen movie was approved by the Catholic Legion of Decency, the biblical epic Ben-Hur.

However, the McGilligan family had a chance encounter with pop culture celebrities when a segment of Walt Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club” was shot near Madison. “Our excitement knew no bounds when Annett Funicello’s mother rang our doorbell one day to ask directions to a farm outside of Madison,” McGilligan recalls. “In gratitude she brought Annette and a few Mickey Mouse Club stars over for a backyard barbecue and water skiing.”

Film Crazy

McGilligan’s cinephilia began beyond the margins of his memoir, later in the ‘60s, as a UW-Madison student. 

“In college,” he says, “I fell in with ‘film crazy’ upper classmen and coeds and graduate students who were sophisticated about film and politics … Many were from the East Coast, New Yorkers, many Jewish, very literate and sophisticated about the world and world cinema, compared to moi. Long story short: I fell into their clutches. I ended up co-running a campus film society, interviewing many film personalities passing through town, and writing about films. I learned from this older group; they infected me with their brand of film-craziness and they helped drive my politics to the left.”  

The Good Life has been a back burner project, simmering for many years in between McGilligan’s prolific authorship of film books. “I had the faint impulse years ago and began by recording interviews with my parents.,” he says. “I saw my mother and father as an integral part of any memoir about growing up and, also, because that is one of the things I do professionally—interviews and oral history—I decided that preserving their memories was my family obligation.” 

McGilligan tracked down friends from his old neighborhood (long since demolished for “urban renewal”) and checked dates in newspaper archives. “Sometimes (as I say in the book’s afterword) I just dropped into the text, wholesale, the language used by my friends and family to describe bygone times, on the principle that some of the story is a ‘collective memory,’” he says. With The Good Life, McGilligan describes a safe and constricted world, but one with many possibilities.