John Bloom

John Bloom wrote for Texas Monthly, as both a staff writer and a contributor, from 1978 to 2006. He is a successful investigative journalist, actor, and author who was born in Dallas and raised in Little Rock, and he attended Vanderbilt University on a sportswriting scholarship. His nine books include the true-crime classic Evidence of Love (1984), Profoundly Disturbing: The Shocking Movies That Changed History (2003), and Eccentric Orbits: The Iridium Story (2016). He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award three times and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by United Press International for his eyewitness coverage of 9/11. Bloom is best known as his alter ego, Joe Bob Briggs, a nationally syndicated “drive-in movie critic” whose wisecracking take on B movies was featured on two long-running late-night television shows, first on the Movie Channel and then on TNT. That tradition continues with his latest series, The Last Drive-In, currently featured on AMC’s Shudder streaming platform. During the course of his hosting career, Briggs has executive produced 20,000 hours of television and has become the leading authority on exploitation and genre films. In 2022, two true-crime articles he cowrote for Texas Monthly were adapted into the HBO series Love and Death.