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Picture
Lillian Ross worked atÌý The New YorkerÌý for more than half a century, and might be described not only as an outstanding practitioner of modern long-form journalism but also as one of its inventors.Ìý Picture , originally published in 1952, is her most celebrated piece of reportage, a closely observed and completely absorbing story of how studio politics and misguided commercialism turn a promising movie into an all-around disaster. The charismatic and hard-bitten director and actor John Huston is at the center of the book, determined to make Stephen Crane’sÌý The Red Badge of Courage —one of the great and defining works of American literature, the first modern war novel, a book whose vivid imagistic style invites the description of cinematic—into a movie that is worthy of it. At first all goes well, as Huston shoots and puts together a two-hour film that is, he feels, the best he’s ever made. Then the studio bosses step in and the audience previews begin, conferences are held, and the movie is taken out of Huston’s hands, cut down by a third, and finally released—with results that please no one and certainly not the It was an expensive flop. InÌý Picture , which Charlie Chaplin aptly described as “brilliant and sagacious,â€� Ross is a gadfly on the wall taking note of the operations of a system designed to crank out mediocrity.
272 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 1951
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About the author
Lillian Ross
36Ìýbooks22ÌýfollowersLillian Ross was an American journalist and author, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1945 until she retired.
Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ database with this name.
Librarians note: There is more than one author in the Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 109 reviews
September 16, 2019
This is one of filmdom's best "Making Of" books. An unabashed fan of works like THE MAKING OF THE WIZARD OF OZ, I really don't know how I missed Lillian Ross's PICTURE for so long. In this moderate-sized book -- which began as five long articles for the NEW YORKER magazine -- Ms. Ross follows famed director John Huston in 1950 as he writes, readies and films an adaptation of Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE. Huston already had a reputation as a perceptive director with a flair for seeing the drama within the ordinary, but this film posed challenges both in its making and in the clash of studio politics nearing its peak back at MGM headquarters. Outdoor temperatures when climactic battle scenes were filmed topped 105 degrees and in Culver City, Huston and others had to struggle with the mixed messages the company was sending about the film. And intra-office politics inside the studio was just as searing as the climate outside:
departing Louis B. Mayer, still officially head of the studio, would not green-light the movie, but the rising Dore Schary as "head of production" did.
Film buffs can glean insights into how such a movie was filmed, but a major theme of corporate intrigue and corporate narcissism also arises from the power struggle between Dore Schary and Louis B. Mayer, and the curiously self-justifying logic that set in when people were confronted with -- yet refused to fully face -- that this MGM movie was not going to be a classic. Even when director Huston's responsibilities were done and he headed to Africa to start on a new movie (an independent, far from MGM's control), the argle-bargle continued. Late in the book Mayer let his contract lapse and Schary took full control of the studio, now in the hands of MGM executives who, terrified by negative remarks at several previews, started tinkering with Huston's movie. Ms. Ross's investigative technique was simple but brilliant: she took meticulous notes and quotes the principal players at length, essentially letting them impeach themselves. Since PICTURE reads as excitingly as a novel, I consider it somewhat akin to Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" IN COLD BLOOD (1966) or John Berendt's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL (1997), though in this case I doubt any fictive discursions were necessary on Ross's part. Suffice it to say that PICTURE always ranks at or near the top of cinema-journalism surveys, and rightly so.
NOTE: A lot of inaccurate bibliographic information is floating around the Internet about this book. When I checked recently, Amazon, Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and Barnes & Noble were all claiming pub. dates between the late Eighties and the early 2000's. It's great to have the book available, but it was first published in 1951 (and IMO should never have been allowed to go out of print).
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departing Louis B. Mayer, still officially head of the studio, would not green-light the movie, but the rising Dore Schary as "head of production" did.
Film buffs can glean insights into how such a movie was filmed, but a major theme of corporate intrigue and corporate narcissism also arises from the power struggle between Dore Schary and Louis B. Mayer, and the curiously self-justifying logic that set in when people were confronted with -- yet refused to fully face -- that this MGM movie was not going to be a classic. Even when director Huston's responsibilities were done and he headed to Africa to start on a new movie (an independent, far from MGM's control), the argle-bargle continued. Late in the book Mayer let his contract lapse and Schary took full control of the studio, now in the hands of MGM executives who, terrified by negative remarks at several previews, started tinkering with Huston's movie. Ms. Ross's investigative technique was simple but brilliant: she took meticulous notes and quotes the principal players at length, essentially letting them impeach themselves. Since PICTURE reads as excitingly as a novel, I consider it somewhat akin to Truman Capote's "nonfiction novel" IN COLD BLOOD (1966) or John Berendt's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL (1997), though in this case I doubt any fictive discursions were necessary on Ross's part. Suffice it to say that PICTURE always ranks at or near the top of cinema-journalism surveys, and rightly so.
"I have a washbasin but no shower in my office. Dore has a shower but no bathtub. L.B. has a shower AND a bathtub." -- Unnamed studio exec.The above quote gives us some insight into a culture in turmoil (at over half a century's remove, many would say "decay"), one that substitutes status symbols and trappings for more substantial indicators of achievement. Although Ms. Ross does not inject overt humor into PICTURE, the post-production and publicity people at MGM do it for her, spouting off defensive optimism whose tenor changes from day to day depending on whose philosophy they were emulating. At book's end Ross visited the annual MGM stockholder's meeting in New York and met MGM corporation head Nick Schenck, to whom Mayer and Schary were both subordinate and who was quite unconcerned about the size of his office suite or even that his salary was less than L.B. Mayer's. Therefore, in PICTURE, Lillian Ross has given us a fascinating document that still rests among the best of books on film and will provide some uncomfortable clues about why so many pictures from the Hollywood system seem to be ham-handedly edited, perhaps with the goal of appealing more to critics than the mass audience. Oh, and that picture John Huston "escaped" to Africa to film? It became The African Queen, a top-ranked movie without the ministrations of MGM or any other major studio here or abroad.
NOTE: A lot of inaccurate bibliographic information is floating around the Internet about this book. When I checked recently, Amazon, Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and Barnes & Noble were all claiming pub. dates between the late Eighties and the early 2000's. It's great to have the book available, but it was first published in 1951 (and IMO should never have been allowed to go out of print).
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July 29, 2024
This is a great non-fiction work of art, and for anyone who loves films and filmmaking. Journalist Lillian Ross follows the great director John Huston's quest to film Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" in 1951- only to have legendary film titans of the era- from MGM studios- Louis B. Mayer, Dore Schary, and Gottfried Reinhardt destroy and truncate Huston's vision of what his film should be due to poor test audiences of the day.
A fantastic piece of reportage, and reads like a suspense novel, this is a great essay and reminder that the filmmaking is indeed a political and economical process.
A fantastic piece of reportage, and reads like a suspense novel, this is a great essay and reminder that the filmmaking is indeed a political and economical process.
August 4, 2024
Lillian Ross was a reporter I enjoyed long ago for this now legendary account of the making of the film The Red Badge of Courage. Directed by John Huston, the movie starred Audie Murphy, the highly decorated American World War Two hero cum Hollywood cowboy star.
First published as articles in The New Yorker then released in book form, under Ross’s observant eye John Huston emerges as something of a buffoon, the author’s technique being to accumulate minute observations of his behaviour and that of his cast and crew over an extended period, quoting them, to enable us to form our own opinions. While there is little that was overtly derogatory, the details add up to pompous egotism in Huston’s case and Audie Murphy comes across as a prissy whiner. The key lies in Ross’s selection of detail.
I particularly enjoyed her deadpan mockery; however, I was young then and didn’t care much either way for Huston or Murphy and most of the people on the shoot. Now I am old, and I would like to think I have become more forgiving. In that light it is possible to see the shenanigans for what they are: especially when the MGM executives, in the midst of unprecedented studio turmoil as the L B Mayer era comes to a close and the uncertain future begins (the age of television, de-regulation of the studio's control of distribution, incipient McCarthyism) decide to interfere directly in the film’s production following poor previews, to its detriment.
Huston, being Huston, left as soon as shooting finished and set off for Uganda and the Congo to make The African Queen, perhaps thinking that C S Forester might be a better bet than Steven Crane, and Africa more remote from studio meddling.
First published as articles in The New Yorker then released in book form, under Ross’s observant eye John Huston emerges as something of a buffoon, the author’s technique being to accumulate minute observations of his behaviour and that of his cast and crew over an extended period, quoting them, to enable us to form our own opinions. While there is little that was overtly derogatory, the details add up to pompous egotism in Huston’s case and Audie Murphy comes across as a prissy whiner. The key lies in Ross’s selection of detail.
I particularly enjoyed her deadpan mockery; however, I was young then and didn’t care much either way for Huston or Murphy and most of the people on the shoot. Now I am old, and I would like to think I have become more forgiving. In that light it is possible to see the shenanigans for what they are: especially when the MGM executives, in the midst of unprecedented studio turmoil as the L B Mayer era comes to a close and the uncertain future begins (the age of television, de-regulation of the studio's control of distribution, incipient McCarthyism) decide to interfere directly in the film’s production following poor previews, to its detriment.
Huston, being Huston, left as soon as shooting finished and set off for Uganda and the Congo to make The African Queen, perhaps thinking that C S Forester might be a better bet than Steven Crane, and Africa more remote from studio meddling.
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May 2, 2019The compelling tragedy of 1950's Red Badge of Courage, an ambitious attempt at high art torn down by a foolish public, a crass studio system, and the artists' own personal weaknesses. Ross works with fabulous restraint, chronicling the film from enthusiastic inception to sad failure, leaving the dramatis personae to reveal themselves in asides and casual comments. Being a Hollywood hanger-on myself these days, I probably got a particular kick out of the content, but this is thoroughly enjoyable even if you aren't having your face shoved daily into the fetid bowels of film making. Worth your time.
January 27, 2011
This book, an immediate classic upon its publication in 1952, has long been considered one of the great works of reportage about the inside workings of Hollywood movie-making in the golden age. I'm happy to report that it retains its front-rank status.
In the early 1950s, New Yorker magazine reporter Lillian Ross did something that no one before her had ever done: write a full-length true-life narrative about the making of a Hollywood movie from the first germ of its origin to the aftermath of its release. Picture was the first inside Hollywood narrative not issued by, and filled with the lies of, the Tinseltown PR machine. It captures Hollywood at an interesting moment of its development: catching the town in panic mode with the onset of television, reeling from the divestiture orders of the Paramount decision of 1948 and the fundamental changes to the studio system that resulted, buckling under to greater profitability and cost-cutting pressures, operating during the era of the Red Scare and the Korean War and watching as Tinseltown's greatest studio underwent power plays and a changing of the guard as almighty Louis B. Mayer was forced aside to hand the MGM reigns to Dore Schary.
The book recounts in incredibly vivid detail the tumultuous making of director John Huston's masterful --but ultimately artistically compromised -- 1951 MGM adaptation of Stephen Crane's Civil War novella, The Red Badge of Courage.
These kinds of books have been legion since, but this one set the high-bar standard at the outset and provides an invaluable detailed panorama of the workings of Hollywood at the tail-end of its golden age. The book, in vividly hewn prose filled with ample dialogue, reconstructs the on-set logistics, the back-door meetings, the phony glad-handing and sycophantic ass-kissing of the film community, the incredible tirades (of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, for one), and much more. Ross gained access to every executive of importance at MGM at the time, including studio head Louis B. Mayer, production chief Dore Schary and the elusive Wizard of Oz himself, Nicholas Schenck, the real man on the throne of MGM, operating the business from parent company Loew's Inc, in New York.
Ross deftly and with straight-faced bemusement nails the craziness and kitschiness of the Hollywood world and takes satirical, critical and wry jabs at the players simply by reporting; she has a sly eye for irony, hypocrisy and contradictions -- the narrative is filled with running jokes and patterns pointing out the barely veiled sleaziness of the Hollywood way of life and business. Huston himself, the main lynchpin of the story, comes off not always flatteringly; a bit of a pampered phony, despite his masterly directorial and artistic skills. Perhaps the saddest character of this book is Gottfried Reinhardt, the film's producer, an essentially decent man who finds himself virtually abandoned when things take a turn for the worse and the studio begins to lose faith in its own product. The book is essential fodder for those interested in and debating the dichotomy of art vs. entertainment inherent in the Hollywood business model.
The book is great and it reads like lightning. I've wanted to read it, literally, for decades, and it was worth the wait.
In the early 1950s, New Yorker magazine reporter Lillian Ross did something that no one before her had ever done: write a full-length true-life narrative about the making of a Hollywood movie from the first germ of its origin to the aftermath of its release. Picture was the first inside Hollywood narrative not issued by, and filled with the lies of, the Tinseltown PR machine. It captures Hollywood at an interesting moment of its development: catching the town in panic mode with the onset of television, reeling from the divestiture orders of the Paramount decision of 1948 and the fundamental changes to the studio system that resulted, buckling under to greater profitability and cost-cutting pressures, operating during the era of the Red Scare and the Korean War and watching as Tinseltown's greatest studio underwent power plays and a changing of the guard as almighty Louis B. Mayer was forced aside to hand the MGM reigns to Dore Schary.
The book recounts in incredibly vivid detail the tumultuous making of director John Huston's masterful --but ultimately artistically compromised -- 1951 MGM adaptation of Stephen Crane's Civil War novella, The Red Badge of Courage.
These kinds of books have been legion since, but this one set the high-bar standard at the outset and provides an invaluable detailed panorama of the workings of Hollywood at the tail-end of its golden age. The book, in vividly hewn prose filled with ample dialogue, reconstructs the on-set logistics, the back-door meetings, the phony glad-handing and sycophantic ass-kissing of the film community, the incredible tirades (of MGM's Louis B. Mayer, for one), and much more. Ross gained access to every executive of importance at MGM at the time, including studio head Louis B. Mayer, production chief Dore Schary and the elusive Wizard of Oz himself, Nicholas Schenck, the real man on the throne of MGM, operating the business from parent company Loew's Inc, in New York.
Ross deftly and with straight-faced bemusement nails the craziness and kitschiness of the Hollywood world and takes satirical, critical and wry jabs at the players simply by reporting; she has a sly eye for irony, hypocrisy and contradictions -- the narrative is filled with running jokes and patterns pointing out the barely veiled sleaziness of the Hollywood way of life and business. Huston himself, the main lynchpin of the story, comes off not always flatteringly; a bit of a pampered phony, despite his masterly directorial and artistic skills. Perhaps the saddest character of this book is Gottfried Reinhardt, the film's producer, an essentially decent man who finds himself virtually abandoned when things take a turn for the worse and the studio begins to lose faith in its own product. The book is essential fodder for those interested in and debating the dichotomy of art vs. entertainment inherent in the Hollywood business model.
The book is great and it reads like lightning. I've wanted to read it, literally, for decades, and it was worth the wait.
May 9, 2021
“I happen to like forthright, up-front crooks and villains, and I gloried in finding some of them in Hollywood."
Lillian Ross, where have you been all my life? This is one of the funnest & funniest books I have read in a very long time. However, this book is not frivolous at all. Really, it is an excellent piece of long-form journalism, astutely observant & gently wry. More than that, it is an examination of the seemingly eternal battle between artistic vision & commercial viability, between the creative process & public consumption.
In 1950 famous director John Huston set out to film the novel The Red Badge of Courage. The battle began by convincing the Money People it was a good idea. Classic novels can be difficult to successfully translate into screenplays & books without plot or romance, like "Red Badge," are very risky. Then there was budget, casting, location, etc. Some of the most banal accounting/production details ( “Six dummy horse carcasses were to be bought at $275 each.� ) really tickled me, but also highlighted the extensive absurdities of turning art into a Big Production. Ross does a great job of showing how many people work very hard, physically hard, to make a director’s artistic vision a reality. She also does a great job of showing how many people work hard to destroy a director’s artistic vision. Profit trumps poetry. Or, perhaps, art thrives under pressure?
Ross used her incredible access to the film sets, meetings, previews, parties & personal documents well. The strained relationships & opportunistic backstabbing were not lost on her, but she did not exploit this--it was just business as usual. Clearly she liked Huston & his intentions with the film. She seemed especially to relish the more outlandish characters & I am so glad she seemed to zero in on who I think is the star of the book: Mocha, the French black poodle belonging to producer Gottfried Reinhardt. I jest, but Ross clearly delighted in the absurd overindulging of Mocha as well as in the behavior of adults who had clearly not been outside of the Hollywood bubble in far too long. A wonderful book, easily read in a day or two.
Lillian Ross, where have you been all my life? This is one of the funnest & funniest books I have read in a very long time. However, this book is not frivolous at all. Really, it is an excellent piece of long-form journalism, astutely observant & gently wry. More than that, it is an examination of the seemingly eternal battle between artistic vision & commercial viability, between the creative process & public consumption.
In 1950 famous director John Huston set out to film the novel The Red Badge of Courage. The battle began by convincing the Money People it was a good idea. Classic novels can be difficult to successfully translate into screenplays & books without plot or romance, like "Red Badge," are very risky. Then there was budget, casting, location, etc. Some of the most banal accounting/production details ( “Six dummy horse carcasses were to be bought at $275 each.� ) really tickled me, but also highlighted the extensive absurdities of turning art into a Big Production. Ross does a great job of showing how many people work very hard, physically hard, to make a director’s artistic vision a reality. She also does a great job of showing how many people work hard to destroy a director’s artistic vision. Profit trumps poetry. Or, perhaps, art thrives under pressure?
Ross used her incredible access to the film sets, meetings, previews, parties & personal documents well. The strained relationships & opportunistic backstabbing were not lost on her, but she did not exploit this--it was just business as usual. Clearly she liked Huston & his intentions with the film. She seemed especially to relish the more outlandish characters & I am so glad she seemed to zero in on who I think is the star of the book: Mocha, the French black poodle belonging to producer Gottfried Reinhardt. I jest, but Ross clearly delighted in the absurd overindulging of Mocha as well as in the behavior of adults who had clearly not been outside of the Hollywood bubble in far too long. A wonderful book, easily read in a day or two.
August 10, 2015
Lillian Ross' book is something of a classic in terms of discussing the film industry. It's creative reporting long before that was an accepted term. It's also deeply cynical, letting the voices of the various people involved speak for themselves, and reveal themselves.
Whether Huston was right to try and make The Red Badge of Courage the way he did is a moot point; whether the various producers were right to chop it to bits and perhaps ruin it is a moot point. Whether it needed a better script, a better story, who knows. It was a commercial failure, and in Hollywood that's pretty much all they're interested in - then and now.
I would have liked more about the actual making of the movie, but I don't think that was Ross's approach: she was interested in the money side of things, because money above all is what Hollywood is interested in. As many artists have found to their great discouragement.
You have to wonder what the Hollywood insiders thought of Ross's book, and her picture of them. Perhaps they thought that like the movie, the book was too much 'high art' and not worth worrying about.
Whether Huston was right to try and make The Red Badge of Courage the way he did is a moot point; whether the various producers were right to chop it to bits and perhaps ruin it is a moot point. Whether it needed a better script, a better story, who knows. It was a commercial failure, and in Hollywood that's pretty much all they're interested in - then and now.
I would have liked more about the actual making of the movie, but I don't think that was Ross's approach: she was interested in the money side of things, because money above all is what Hollywood is interested in. As many artists have found to their great discouragement.
You have to wonder what the Hollywood insiders thought of Ross's book, and her picture of them. Perhaps they thought that like the movie, the book was too much 'high art' and not worth worrying about.
December 29, 2023
wildly entertaining peek into world of Old Hollywood and the studio system. lots of valuable lessons about artmaking and working with other people in this book. huston is an all-time american treasure and the mgm producers hilarious characters as well. hustons films are all gems and i gotta see red badge of courage now. it should be noted that from “picture� i learned that the title of the “red badge of courage� refers to a battlefield wound.
May 21, 2017
I only recently discovered Lillian Ross's journalism, and she's amazing. Her quiet observational style is beyond compare. And this, a collection of her writings about the production of the film "The Red Badge of Courage" is an amazing piece of work. Her access to the director John Huston as well as all the bigwigs at MGM in 1951 makes for a brilliant read, and an incredible insight into Hollywood at that time. This is a real joy.
July 25, 2024
The story of the making of the movie "Ref Badge of Courage" from inception to release. It was a New Yorker profile done by a writer who had friends in Hollywood. Lillian Ross was granted unfettered access to the director, the producers, and even Louis B Mayer himself, who said from the beginning that the movie would lose money, and he was right. John Huston sucks up most of the oxygen in this story. He's a larger than life character, a charmer, a visionary, really a visual artist. The passages describing how he would work with his camera man to set up shots is mesmerizing.
This is New Yorker nonfiction writing at its best and even though it dates back to 1952 it is still fresh. Just a great book. I read it in one sitting.
This is New Yorker nonfiction writing at its best and even though it dates back to 1952 it is still fresh. Just a great book. I read it in one sitting.
August 17, 2015
Lillian Ross knew how to put words together and make them magical. Thank goodness for that, or I would have given up on this book at page 10. As it is, it took me more than two months to get through just over 200 pages, and though I am a slow reader, I'm rarely *that* slow.
Picture is about the making, from idea to release, of The Red Badge of Courage, starring Audie Murphy as the young soldier terrified at his first battle. The film was not a success, and some of the inside information provided here may explain why.
The problem I had was that this story is so "inside baseball" that I just couldn't bring myself to care enough to slog a little further. Perhaps if I'd adored the film it was about, I might have been more interested. Even if it had been Gone with the Wind (my favorite film) my eyes might have glazed over a bit at the minute discussion of scoring every frame of film and the endless cutting and re-cutting of the same scenes.
I found it fairly interesting that once John Huston finished directing the film and had handed it off to the editors and musicians and publicity department, he pretty much checked out and moved on to his next project. Only dogged determination kept me from doing the same.
If you are a filmmaker, or you are deciding which branch of filmmaking to go into, and would like a detailed look at how a film got from page to screen during the last gasp of the Studio Era, this is going to be invaluable to you. For those of us who just want to sit in the dark, have a little popcorn, and enjoy the show, it might just be a bit much.
Picture is about the making, from idea to release, of The Red Badge of Courage, starring Audie Murphy as the young soldier terrified at his first battle. The film was not a success, and some of the inside information provided here may explain why.
The problem I had was that this story is so "inside baseball" that I just couldn't bring myself to care enough to slog a little further. Perhaps if I'd adored the film it was about, I might have been more interested. Even if it had been Gone with the Wind (my favorite film) my eyes might have glazed over a bit at the minute discussion of scoring every frame of film and the endless cutting and re-cutting of the same scenes.
I found it fairly interesting that once John Huston finished directing the film and had handed it off to the editors and musicians and publicity department, he pretty much checked out and moved on to his next project. Only dogged determination kept me from doing the same.
If you are a filmmaker, or you are deciding which branch of filmmaking to go into, and would like a detailed look at how a film got from page to screen during the last gasp of the Studio Era, this is going to be invaluable to you. For those of us who just want to sit in the dark, have a little popcorn, and enjoy the show, it might just be a bit much.
August 3, 2019
I found this book difficult to put down, thanks in part to Ross’s obsessively detailed observations, but also to the colorful cast of Director John Huston, producer Gottfried Reinhardt, studio execs, writers, actors, and all the myriad of other workers it takes to make a movie. ‘The Red Badge of Courage� was a flop—“flop d’estime,� as Si Seadler, studio advertising exec called it—but the process of trying to draw it back from commercial failure is ultimately the fascinating part of the story. In Ross’s hands, ‘Red Badge� becomes a fascinating case study of the tension between art and commerce in Hollywood. The happy part for me was how intensely everyone cares about their little role in trying to make a film a success. And John Huston was a mensch. This is a book I’ll think about whenever I watch a movie.
May 26, 2019
An in-depth look at the making of John Huston’s now celebrated movie “The Red Badge of Courage� starring WWII hero Audie Murphy.
A revealing look at the 1950’s Hollywood studio system when studio bosses were still king.
A revealing look at the 1950’s Hollywood studio system when studio bosses were still king.
October 28, 2015
Lillian Ross� 1952 book Picture is widely considered to be one of the best books written about Hollywood filmmaking. Ross followed the production of John Huston’s 1951 film The Red Badge of Courage from beginning to end, and gained access to everyone involved in the film. Ross even met with Louis B. Mayer, the vice-president of MGM.
Huston was a good friend of Ross, and he encouraged her to observe the production of his latest movie. Ross was, and still is, a contributor to The New Yorker, and she’s the only writer to contribute to the magazine under all of five of its editors. Ross has a new anthology of her writing coming out this week, Reporting Always: Writings from the New Yorker. Ross was one of the first writers to write long-form non-fiction using some of the same techniques that fiction writers used, and her influence can be felt on writers like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and other practitioners of New Journalism. Ross wrote a famous profile of Ernest Hemingway for The New Yorker in 1950, and Huston is certainly a man cut from the same cloth as Hemingway.
Although The Red Badge of Courage was Huston’s movie, as he both adapted Stephen Crane’s classic novel and directed it, the main character that we follow in Picture is producer Gottfried Reinhardt. Reinhardt is smart, honest, and quite funny. The book needs a character like him to be the person that we follow all the way through production and post-production. As the film is being made, Reinhardt is always saying, “This must be a great picture.� (p.41) My favorite quote from Reinhardt in the book is his tart assessment of Hollywood: “Everybody in Hollywood wants to be something he is not. Albert is not satisfied to be your assistant. He wants to be an actor. The writers want to be directors. The producers want to be writers. The actors want to be producers. The wives want to be painters. Nobody is satisfied. Everybody is frustrated. Nobody is happy.� (p.30)
Filming of The Red Badge of Courage went fairly smoothly, although the picture did go four days over schedule, but it was in post-production that everything seemed to go wrong. Louis B. Mayer had always been against making the movie, and it was only because of the support of Dore Schary, vice-president in charge of production at MGM, that the movie was greenlit. Mayer expressed his frustration about the movie to Ross, saying, “A million and a half. Maybe more. What for? There’s no story.� (p.20) After a preview screening goes poorly, Reinhardt and Huston start having serious second thoughts, and the movie starts changing drastically. Huston left for Africa just after the preview screening to start filming The African Queen, a movie that would be much better received than The Red Badge of Courage. Eventually Dore Schary ended up making the final edits to the movie, and although it garnered some good reviews from critics, the movie flopped at the box office, and lost MGM more than a million dollars.
One of the most astute comments on The Red Badge of Courage was from the film critic for The New York Post, who wrote, “The picture does not become a fully realized experience, nor is it deeply moving. It is as if, somewhere between shooting and final version, the light of inspiration had died, Huston got tired of it, or became discouraged, or decided that it wasn’t going to come off.� (p.197) I think that criticism was correct, I think Huston did essentially give up on the movie. Once he left for Africa, he was focused on The African Queen, and didn’t participate in the post-production battles over the film. Who knows if the film would have turned out differently if Huston had been more involved, but it’s certainly possible his vision would have been preserved on the screen. But I would also argue that Huston didn’t have a clear vision of the movie. I don’t know if Huston stopped trusting his own judgment, but I thought a key moment was when, after the first preview, Reinhardt convinced Huston to add voiceover narration from Crane’s novel, and a prologue that explained to the audience what a classic novel The Red Badge of Courage is. If you’re adding a voiceover and narration to your movie at the 11th hour, you don’t have a clear vision for your movie.
Picture is a great book that illustrates the ongoing battle between art and commerce. Unfortunately, in Huston’s version of The Red Badge of Courage, neither art nor commerce won. Watching The Red Badge of Courage, I couldn’t help but feel that it’s a perfect example of a great book that simply doesn’t translate to the screen very well. I would agree with Mayer, there isn’t any story, which is fine for a novel, but doesn’t always work well in a movie. The narration that was added is super cheesy, and totally unnecessary. Huston took a gamble by casting many actors who were not professional actors, like the World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who created the famous World War II soldiers Willie and Joe, and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning at the age of 23. Huston cast another World War II vet, Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, in the lead role of Henry Fleming. I thought Murphy did a good job, and he reminded me a little of Henry Fonda. But I think Mauldin and some of the other amateur actors just weren’t that good. Everyone’s accents seemed very fake to me. Movie buffs should look for Andy Devine in a small cameo as “the cheery soldier.� Andy Devine will always hold a fond spot in my heart because he’s the voice of Friar Tuck in Disney’s classic 1973 animated Robin Hood, which was one of my favorite movies as a child. (And as an adult.)
Picture shows us Hollywood in transition, as television is starting to become more of a threat, and the big studios are being forced to divest themselves of their theater chains. During the writing of Picture, Louis B. Mayer resigned from MGM, a moment that marked the end of an era.
Ross� writing is sharp, and her ear for dialogue is superb. (I wonder if she had �98% total recall� of conversations, a talent that Truman Capote claimed to have.) Ross never inserts herself into the action gratuitously, and by simply observing all the action around her, she came up with a masterpiece about Hollywood.
Huston was a good friend of Ross, and he encouraged her to observe the production of his latest movie. Ross was, and still is, a contributor to The New Yorker, and she’s the only writer to contribute to the magazine under all of five of its editors. Ross has a new anthology of her writing coming out this week, Reporting Always: Writings from the New Yorker. Ross was one of the first writers to write long-form non-fiction using some of the same techniques that fiction writers used, and her influence can be felt on writers like Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and other practitioners of New Journalism. Ross wrote a famous profile of Ernest Hemingway for The New Yorker in 1950, and Huston is certainly a man cut from the same cloth as Hemingway.
Although The Red Badge of Courage was Huston’s movie, as he both adapted Stephen Crane’s classic novel and directed it, the main character that we follow in Picture is producer Gottfried Reinhardt. Reinhardt is smart, honest, and quite funny. The book needs a character like him to be the person that we follow all the way through production and post-production. As the film is being made, Reinhardt is always saying, “This must be a great picture.� (p.41) My favorite quote from Reinhardt in the book is his tart assessment of Hollywood: “Everybody in Hollywood wants to be something he is not. Albert is not satisfied to be your assistant. He wants to be an actor. The writers want to be directors. The producers want to be writers. The actors want to be producers. The wives want to be painters. Nobody is satisfied. Everybody is frustrated. Nobody is happy.� (p.30)
Filming of The Red Badge of Courage went fairly smoothly, although the picture did go four days over schedule, but it was in post-production that everything seemed to go wrong. Louis B. Mayer had always been against making the movie, and it was only because of the support of Dore Schary, vice-president in charge of production at MGM, that the movie was greenlit. Mayer expressed his frustration about the movie to Ross, saying, “A million and a half. Maybe more. What for? There’s no story.� (p.20) After a preview screening goes poorly, Reinhardt and Huston start having serious second thoughts, and the movie starts changing drastically. Huston left for Africa just after the preview screening to start filming The African Queen, a movie that would be much better received than The Red Badge of Courage. Eventually Dore Schary ended up making the final edits to the movie, and although it garnered some good reviews from critics, the movie flopped at the box office, and lost MGM more than a million dollars.
One of the most astute comments on The Red Badge of Courage was from the film critic for The New York Post, who wrote, “The picture does not become a fully realized experience, nor is it deeply moving. It is as if, somewhere between shooting and final version, the light of inspiration had died, Huston got tired of it, or became discouraged, or decided that it wasn’t going to come off.� (p.197) I think that criticism was correct, I think Huston did essentially give up on the movie. Once he left for Africa, he was focused on The African Queen, and didn’t participate in the post-production battles over the film. Who knows if the film would have turned out differently if Huston had been more involved, but it’s certainly possible his vision would have been preserved on the screen. But I would also argue that Huston didn’t have a clear vision of the movie. I don’t know if Huston stopped trusting his own judgment, but I thought a key moment was when, after the first preview, Reinhardt convinced Huston to add voiceover narration from Crane’s novel, and a prologue that explained to the audience what a classic novel The Red Badge of Courage is. If you’re adding a voiceover and narration to your movie at the 11th hour, you don’t have a clear vision for your movie.
Picture is a great book that illustrates the ongoing battle between art and commerce. Unfortunately, in Huston’s version of The Red Badge of Courage, neither art nor commerce won. Watching The Red Badge of Courage, I couldn’t help but feel that it’s a perfect example of a great book that simply doesn’t translate to the screen very well. I would agree with Mayer, there isn’t any story, which is fine for a novel, but doesn’t always work well in a movie. The narration that was added is super cheesy, and totally unnecessary. Huston took a gamble by casting many actors who were not professional actors, like the World War II cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who created the famous World War II soldiers Willie and Joe, and won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning at the age of 23. Huston cast another World War II vet, Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, in the lead role of Henry Fleming. I thought Murphy did a good job, and he reminded me a little of Henry Fonda. But I think Mauldin and some of the other amateur actors just weren’t that good. Everyone’s accents seemed very fake to me. Movie buffs should look for Andy Devine in a small cameo as “the cheery soldier.� Andy Devine will always hold a fond spot in my heart because he’s the voice of Friar Tuck in Disney’s classic 1973 animated Robin Hood, which was one of my favorite movies as a child. (And as an adult.)
Picture shows us Hollywood in transition, as television is starting to become more of a threat, and the big studios are being forced to divest themselves of their theater chains. During the writing of Picture, Louis B. Mayer resigned from MGM, a moment that marked the end of an era.
Ross� writing is sharp, and her ear for dialogue is superb. (I wonder if she had �98% total recall� of conversations, a talent that Truman Capote claimed to have.) Ross never inserts herself into the action gratuitously, and by simply observing all the action around her, she came up with a masterpiece about Hollywood.
January 27, 2019
I picked this up to learn a thing or two about the movies, but I did not realize it is a monumental work of journalism. Ross becomes a fly on the wall during an incredible year of the movie business. There is zero editorializing. The reader is given the facts as they are, and can draw any number of conclusions.
Personally I learned less about the movies and more about the time and place of 1950s Hollywood. Much has changed, but so much has stayed the same. The specter of television, as one example, looming down the road, reads very interesting in 2019.
A new edition with a foreword by Anjelica Huston will be coming out this spring. Excited to read her thoughts on her father’s portrayal.
Personally I learned less about the movies and more about the time and place of 1950s Hollywood. Much has changed, but so much has stayed the same. The specter of television, as one example, looming down the road, reads very interesting in 2019.
A new edition with a foreword by Anjelica Huston will be coming out this spring. Excited to read her thoughts on her father’s portrayal.
August 8, 2022
" 'It's almost as though greatness is a matter of quality rather than ability... It's like a great horse. You go past his stall and you can feel the vibration in there. You can feel it. So I'm going to make the picture, kid. I'm going to direct it on horseback. I've always wanted to direct a picture on horseback.' "
January 4, 2023
3.75
It was interesting how much of Lillian Ross� presence I felt in this narrative. Interesting how little has changed in the way executives view movie making and movies as art vs vehicles for profit.
It was interesting how much of Lillian Ross� presence I felt in this narrative. Interesting how little has changed in the way executives view movie making and movies as art vs vehicles for profit.
March 20, 2020
Its like she just wrote down whatever she saw
July 30, 2019
I have seen John Huston’s 1951 film adaptation of Stephen Crane’s Classic Civil War Novel THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE but a single time, probably around twenty-five years ago. I am fairly certain that I saw it broadcast on television, a weirdly truncated film as it came to be, for a multitude of reasons elaborated upon in Lillian Ross’s embedded work of long-form journalism first published as a proper book in 1952, running a scant 69 minutes. Probably thirteen or fourteen years of age, I had of course not yet obtained the master’s degree in film studies I would later acquire. I loved movies, I was interested in them, and I prided myself on having taste superior to that of my peers. But I weren’t no kind of expert. I remember being extremely impressed by the film almost entirely on account of its visual style. I was uncommonly aware of a certain acuity of camera position and camera movement. Again, I didn’t know a whole heaping lot about film history back then, but I do remember thinking that this John Huston guy was like a Kubric before Kubric, and that THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE had to have been a major influence on PATHS OF GLORY, a movie I really loved at the time. Over the course of the ensuing twenty-five-or-so years I have gone on to see most of Huston’s films, and I revere him, not only because it is customary, as an uncommon visionary working both with and against the Classical Hollywood factory system, especially remarkable on account of his having adapted so singularly to changing mores and practices during the New Hollywood renaissance of the late 60s and early 70s, making many of his very greatest films as senior citizen. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of Hollywood lore will also be aware that Huston was an extremely gregarious, larger-than-life figure, a born showman. He also had a deeply sinister side. He was a noted drinker and womanizer, to be sure, but matters, alas, extend beyond merely that. He was friends with Los Angeles doctor (and Venereal Disease Czar) George Hodel, a man who would go on to marry his (Huston’s) first wife Dorothy, and later be credibly implicated by his own ex-homicide-detective son Steve Hodel in the extremely famous murder of Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) as well as a flabbergasting array of other homicides. George Hodel’s daughter Tamar would not only accuse her father of engaging in an incestuous sexual relationship with her, accusations backed up by first-hand witnesses, but would also accuse John Huston of heinous improprieties. Consider, in light of this, the fact that Roman Polanski (!) would cast Huston as an utterly prurient plutocrat who has an abusive incestuous relationship with his own daughter in 1974’s CHINATOWN. If one does the cursory digging, one will come upon other incriminating stories. Susan Tyrrell, for example, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in Huston’s 1972 masterpiece FAT CITY, would later accuse the director of repeatedly sexually assaulting her during pre-production for that film. Something of the sinister/toxic dimension of Huston’s whole persona, as well as a curious self-awareness as regards these matters, is evident in his performance in Orson Welles� riveting, epochal THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, filmed over much of the first half of the 1970s but not edited into any kind of final shape until the second decade of the 21st century, Netflix having overseen the whole project and brought it to audiences last year. One is aware when watching the film that Welles and Huston are to a large extent taking a very dark, critical look not only at themselves but of a whole generation of Great Men of the Arts (Huston is himself rarely discussed without comparisons to Hemingway entering the picture) whose embattled sense of self is predicated on aberrant power games and various forms of malefic predation. I think of these men as self-hypnotized (or simply brainwashed) megalomaniacs convinced of their own status as Nietzschean übermenschen, blithely engaged in the transvaluation of values, too often believing themselves entitled to cause harm on account of their essential superiority to their fellows (men, certainly, but women most especially). Yes, so this is, as specified, the sinister dimension. John Huston was also famously extremely charming, sometimes outright ingratiating, and he was widely loved by those who knew him well or met him in passing. This is a man who in Lillian Ross’s account is prone to burst out regularly with a hearty “Ho, ho, ho!,� a veritable showbiz Santa Claus. In her foreword to the New York Review Books edition of PICTURE, Angelica Huston begins by brushing quickly past the myths surrounding her father, asserting that the reason her parents were so fond of Lillian Ross, indeed became lifelong friends with her, was because Ross was so completely averse to any engagement whatsoever with salacious gossip or rumour-mongering. In her own introduction, written fifty years after the book’s original publication, Ross herself writes that just because somebody tells you something or you discover it yourself does not mean that you should include it in the final piece. It was always her belief that you owed your subject circumspection and restraint on account of the generosity the subject has shown in granting you proximity, even intimacy. It is no surprise that Huston loved her. She treated him squarely, for one thing, but it seems likely also that the remarkable work of journalism she produced, first published in the NEW YORKER in five installments over five weeks, was extremely useful for him to read, providing a general clarity that might have otherwise been missing as regards what might well have seemed a somewhat murky state of affairs. Ross is a remarkably observant writer, exhaustive when it comes to details, supernaturally gifted at inveigling herself into all the right places at all the right times. I imagine her as an extremely easy woman to open your door to. She doesn't have to plead or cajole, knowing you will be inclined to invite her. She covers all the angles. Her writing is sharp, crisp, and sometimes extremely wry, delivering lovely little moments of deadpan flair. The piercingly smart humility of the writing is nothing like Tom Wolfe and what would come to be known as New Journalism. She was a trailblazer herself, profoundly influential in her multiple decades at the NEW YORKER, but Ross's writing often makes me think of Sinclair Lewis (who died in 1951!) if we were to imagine Sinclair Lewis as Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson going above and beyond in HIS GIRL FRIDAY. She gets Huston, certainly. She nails the larger-than-life showman and the man who may have darker secrets. The cursory: “Huston, at forty-three, was one of the most admired, rebellious, and shadowy figures in the world of motion pictures.� Then, immediately, the deeper read: “His eyes looked watchful, and yet strangely empty of all feeling, in weird contrast to the heartiness of his manner.� Over the course of PICTURE, others will have their say in kind. Gottfried Reinhardt, Huston’s friend and producer of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE: “John is a charmer, you know, but he is really very forlorn, a very lonely man. He is out of touch with human emotions.� Humphrey Bogart on Huston: “Offbeat kind of mind. Off centre. He’s brilliant and unpredictable. Never dull.� Huston is only part of the story, however, one of its four principle chess pieces. In her foreword, Ross makes it clear that this story about the tug of war between art and commerce at the heart of the American Motion Picture Industry has four main characters: the aforementioned Gottfried Reinhardt and John Huston, mostly (if uneasily) on the side of art, MGM’s Head of Production Dore Schary and Studio Chief Louis B. Mayer on the side (more or less) of commerce. If we think this art/commerce business is a matter of cleanly delineated dialectical opposition, however, we will come to find that sundry nuances on the ground will make mincemeat of any such simplified formulation. Huston and Reinhardt brought BADGE to Schary, who thought it a great idea for an important motion picture. Mayer thought it was a garbage idea, that the movie would turn off general audiences and would bomb unceremoniously. “No getting away from it, John,� says a certain Arthur Fellows in the early going, “Biggest box-office draws are pictures catering to the intelligence of the twelve-year-old.� A sentiment that we will come to find exceedingly prominent (it still is to this day!), and sadly also clearly fairly goddamn sensible. Alas. Huston loves the Hollywood jungle. Mayer “guards the jungle like a lion.� Nick Schenck, president of Lowe’s, Inc., “the ruler of rulers, stays here in New York and smiles, watching from afar, from behind the scenes; but he’s the real power, watching the pack closing in on one or another of the lesser rulers, closing in, ready to pounce.� Schenck doesn’t get his pictures in the papers, avoids the parties and whatnot, but is the real “king of the pack.� The sordid power dynamics. Huston get off a little on this stuff. The industrial art (ahem) of Motion Pictures presents the director opportunity to be Artist as General, the whole thing positively martial, no doubt all the more so should the Picture in question be a War Picture. Huston clearly relishes leading his cavalry at least in part in a charge against the Bosses financing the whole escapade. He says he is excited to finally direct on horseback. Yes, on horesback, and primarily on his own San Fernando Valley ranch to boot (with brief preliminary location work in Chico). Huston is not the only larger than life character, either. They all are. These men are Characters Writ Large. Mayer in his few appearances in the book is a delightful and nearly dementedly colourful figure, whether bragging about how he used to chase turkeys on the farm, apparently performing some kind of berserkoid version of KING LEAR in his office, or remonstrating that he’d “rather be loved than get ten million dollars.� He is ridiculous but he is feared. Reinhard: “L.B. is a dangerous man. If you’re his enemy, he destroys you. If you’re his friend, he eats you.� Dore Schary is sigificantly younger than Mayer and less zany, but perhaps not all that much less zany (give him time?). His patter is…unusual. It should be noted that some of the arguments on behalf of commerce are fairly strong in their way. Reinhardt: “Hollywood’s technical superiority is one of the things that make American pictures more popular all over the world than European ones. The sound men look at a picture as though they were looking at an automobile engine. Chi-chi does not impress them at all. They are all, somehow, scientists.� Schary: “When it comes to subjecting the artist to pressure, the history of art shows that art flourished under pressure. Titian’s art flourished under pressure. The pressures in our business or in radio or in television only serve to create better programmes. Art in motion pictures improves whenever the heat is on. During the war years, when anything went, pictures were worse. With the heat on us now, better pictures are being made and more individuals are asserting themselves. Pressure is not necessarily a bad thing. It enables us to compete on a much higher level.� Fair enough, I suppose. (For every MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS or RED BADGE OF COURAGE that the studios mutilated, there is a RED RIVER that certain folks will argue they ... improved slightly.) Gottfried Reinhardt breaks down precisely how MGM operates as a medieval monarchy. Dore Scharey says “We’re the same as Detroit,� drawing a parallel between the Hollywood Studio Factories and the Automobile Industry. There is no small amount of comedy inherent to this tug of war between art and commerce. We have John Huston, a man who will nearly swoon remembering the El Greco paintings at the Hispanic museum in New York, counterpointed later with an unidentified gentleman in the MGM commissary recounting a perhaps apocryphal story about Sam Goldwyn showing off his “Toujours� (sic) Lautrec. Sometimes the comedy is delightfully absurd. Gottfried’s wife Silvia (who will later go on to garner screenwriting credits on a couple of the films her husband will subsequently direct!) is forever fussing about her black French poodle named Mocha, at one point asking famed restauranteur Dave Chasen if she can take some lobster home for her beloved pet. This ends up connecting with the career of Huston’s assistant Albert Band: “His name was not engraved on a brass plate on his door; it was typed on a white card placed in a slot, from which it could easily be removed.� Band’s power position at MGM is tenuous. Reinhardt makes a case to Schary on behalf of Band, and after Huston abandons the post-production fiasco around BADGE to go off to Africa in order to make THE AFRICAN QUEEN for he and Sam Spiegel’s independent company, Band is made Reinhardt’s assistance. When Reinhardt’s stock is falling after BADGE fails to play well at Previews, Band balks at taking care of Mocha the poodle. When Reinhardt is back in Dore Schary’s good books, Band takes to dog-sitting with exaggerated gusto. Whether it is the specific nature of his power play or not, everything climaxes with Schary framing his whole commitment to BADGE as an elaborate, benevolent paternal gesture intended to teach Gottfried Reinhardt an important (if slightly costly) lesson about the Motion Picture Industry. Everywhere there is Power you will be sure to find a Comedy of Power. What is the Motion Picture Industry? Well, twice in PICTURE it is described by insiders as croupiers in a crooked gambling house. That sounds about right. What actually goes wrong with THE RED BAGE OF COURAGE is simple, an eternal problem endemic to this popular art form (ahem). Yes. What goes wrong with BADGE is the Previews. Before Audience Previews the film has been shown to select invited friends and accomplices. Everybody seems to love it. Very Great Legendary Hollywood Director William Wyler tells Huston that it is one of the best things he has ever scene. Which sure as shit counts for something! (Huston says that Wyler always manages to find fault with his work.) MGM Executive Film Editor Margaret Booth praises it unconditionally. Hedda Hopper calls it the best war movie she had ever seen. Huston is himself absolutely convinced it is the best thing he has ever made. Even Dore Frickin' Schary seems completely happy with the final product. Then they screen the film to three Preview Audiences over the course of a few fretful months. Who are Preview Audiences? Well, I suppose they are a kind of variation on Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.� It does not go well. At the first Preview there are thirty-two walkouts, and two people cross out “fair,� the lowest possible rating on the Preview Cards, one substituting “lousy� and the other “stinks.� Low ratings abound! People laugh in all the wrong places and behave like uncouth plebs. As a result, everybody close to the project loses their collective mind and starts fucking with the film, Huston being the most sensible of the bunch, having given up in despair and fled to Africa to make another movie (as sort of depicted in Clint Eastwood’s 1990 film WHITE HUNTER BLACK HEART, adapted from a Peter Viertel novel sort of about Huston in Africa). Reinhardt and Schary, their necks on the chopping block, especially start to scramble in wildly unavailing fashion. Schary himself writes a voice-over, something which he previously said was the last thing the film needed. They cut and they cut, taking lots out, moving certain things around. Schary insists on cutting the The Tattered Man’s death scene, the scene that most of the more sophisticated viewers have called the greatest thing in the film. Reinhardt receives this order with heartbroken bafflement. But what can he do? Schary went out on a limb against Mayer. He probably has the most to lose. The salvage operation is basically Schary’s baby. Reinhardt writes a bracingly lovely and extremely long-winded letter to Huston, itself very fine literature. They now appear to have on their hands a film that is much less strong as “art� than it was previously and is almost certainly still going to bomb. And bomb it does, though the critics give it very strong notices. Then Reinhardt goes on to direct his own debut feature. For MGM. Later my favourite punchline in the book: Lillian Ross drops in on the previously mentioned MGM Parent Company Loew’s stockholder meeting and hears a stockholder named Mrs. Wentig exclaim that she very much believes it would be in Loew’s interest to make more really great pictures like THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE that don’t make money! I howled with laughter. I would like to close by remarking on my having read PICTURE at a particularly notable point in time on a personal front. My best friend in the world, a man nearly four decades my senior whom I have known for a decade and who meant more to me than anybody else I have known in my adult life (his having been central to my recovery from alcoholism), died at some point apparently quite early during the period I spent reading this book. His name was Paul. Paul was from the Brox (you got a problem with that? he would always say, with utmost jocularity) and started his career as a theatrical press agent in New York City, two of his first gigs being the debut production of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and the American debut of KRAPP'S LAST TAPE. He went on to Los Angeles and United Artists (as press liaison). Then he was a producer for Merv Griffin and Joan Rivers. He was in Silicon Valley for a bit, and then he was clean and sober and in the desert for over two decades. It was in the desert where the two of us became close pals starting in January of 2010, bonding after a screening of Michael Haneke's THE WHITE RIBBON at the Camelot in Palm Springs. I lived in the desert for a year and a bit. We spent a lot of time together and spoke on the phone constantly after I moved back to Canada. He told me endless wild and intemperate stories about Hollywood and the Motion Picture Industry. Driving around Los Angeles with Pauly was my favourite thing in the world. He was at ground zero during the Dawn of New Hollywood. He was also connected to the counterculture. Paul died in Palm Springs near the same time that Paul Krassner (Merry Prankster, Yippie Cofounder, All-Star Counterculture Satirist, Groucho Marx LSD Trip Guide) died in Desert Hot Springs. My friend Paul had been a pallbearer at Yippie Minister of Mischief Jerry Rubin’s funeral back in �94. I think of all the great stories Paul told me. They cannot help but run into and alongside Lillian Ross’s PICTURE. I also went and saw Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME � IN HOLLYWOOD on its opening night four days ago. For days ago, that is, on account of its currently being just after midnight. Tarantino’s fascinating (disarmingly sweet) alternative Los Angles 1969 is a Dream Factory Terrarium of Myth, one that informs all of our Personal Spirit Latitudes. Paul could theoretically be, kind of needs to be, and KIND OF IS in the film. It is full of a plangent yearning to merge with the Dreamscape of Cinema and Its Gossamer Beyond. There are references aplenty. Naturally. An especially delighted guffaw was provoked from me when Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton playfully backs away from his tough-guy stuntman buddy’s likewise playful feint with an exclamation of “Whoa, Audie Murphy!� Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier to serve in the Second World War and a man who went on to amass fifty screen credits, was hand-picked by John Huston for the starring role in THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, the film that was supposed to be, and maybe in a way ultimately was, dire box office performance notwithstanding, his big breakout.
December 18, 2021
A super fun and deep look into the whole process of film production in 50s Hollywood through the lens (haha) of one of legendary director John Huston's passion projects, The Red Badge of Courage. There's a little something for every film buff in this collection, from statistics to vignettes of big personalities in cinema at the time (Mayer, namesake of MGM, is a particularly boisterous fellow) to the clashing forces that ultimately decide what makes it to the viewing public. Hollywood was and I'm sure still is a hotbed of talent and dreams and it's a great read for anyone interested in how all that creative energy manifests on the silver screen.
March 17, 2014
So at first I was like 'oh it's too dry, too objective, the prose too cold/stodgy' and then it became clear that no embellishment was needed all the drama was there in the facts. I don't know if Huston's original film was any good by modern standards, but I do know that we can never ever see it because it no longer exists, having been rejigged out of existence, and this book is the closest we will get to understanding what it was or might have been. Ross doesn't have to even characterise anyone, they characterise (damn?) themselves through their words and actions. It's a fantastic document about creativity and the process of manifesting a creative vision in the actual real world. The translation is always flawed to some degree, but what happened to Huston's picture is, taken within the general sphere of artistic endeavour, tragic. I mean, if you think of an idea or a creative vision as being born all little, and growing up and being about to attempt to achieve its potential, and then basically being kidnapped and mutilated and, like painted over with an ugly pastiche-of-itself face, and re-presented as the idea itself; then that's this. I don't think this aspect of the studio system has changed one bit, which makes me think it's amazing any good films are ever made by studios. Maybe it would be interesting to look at the 'good' films made by committee (studios) and see how they differ from independently produced 'good' films. PhD anyone? See also Michael Tolkin's 'The Player' which funnily enough everyone including me knows from the film, which is fucking amazing and the best Robert Altman film, in my opinion. Altman and Tolkin worked together pretty closely on it and I guess he had enough power not to have so much interference. Yet there are movies like Donnie Darko in which the studio interference produced a tighter, better and more ambiguous film than the director wanted. I guess the talent of the studio execs is key as well.
Read
June 21, 2024An inside view of the Hollywood machine, by way of John Huston's filming The Red Badge of Courage. Originally a 5-part New Yorker article. Like too many NYer articles, too much detail - about some of the MGM characters that slows the story down - must have been getting paid by the word. Still an interesting read to see how the business part part of the movie biz strangles art. I did enjoy the details about the film-making process, but I would like to have read more.
April 6, 2019
Ross wrote this book for the New Yorker magazine. She followed the development, filming, post-production and marketing of John Huston's 1952 adaption of Stephen Crane's classic, "The Red Badge of Courage". Huston is the dominant figure in the beginning. However, once the film is in the can, he loses interest and goes off to Africa to shoot "The African Queen". The fate of the Red Badge is left in the hands of the producer and especially MGM executives. Ross gets to follow a studio power play in which Dore Schary unseats Louis B. Mayer. She learns that the real power at MGM is in New York with money man Nick Loewe. She attends the numerous test screenings which are used by by the suits to alter a film to meet their own taste. After which it is quietly dumped onto the market before being written off as a tax loss. An hilarious account, all the more so for being written in a straight forward manner.
August 31, 2021
Terrific fly-on-the-wall access to the daily life of the business as it was then. After years of piecing together a sense of these things from scattered anecdotes, suddenly I felt like I was actually in the room, watching it happen. Ross offers a wryly thorough record of clothes, interior decor, jokes that didn't land, distractions and non sequiturs, mannerisms and tics, with the clear conviction that this is all essential to understanding the place, the time, the people. Well, she convinced me. I'm so grateful that she was there taking notes on these things, so that I get to have the image of Louis B. Mayer ranting extravagantly about how nobody wants to make movies with heart anymore, from his cream-colored desk in his cream-colored office. A fascinating and compelling read, and one that has substantially enriched my feeling for what "the movies" really were.
July 26, 2014
The author was a staff writer for the New Yorker and was invited in 1950 to shadow John Huston and his colleagues while they made the movie version of the Red Badge of Courage. Either she had a photographic memory or she made constant notes, since she seems to have heard everything everybody said to each other in person, on the phone, by mail or telegram. We learn how a picture is made and more about the conflict between the movies as a business and as an art. Reading John Huston's comments was especially fun, since I could hear him saying them.
January 4, 2021
Lillian Ross' well, picture of the making and unmaking of John Huston's The Red Badge Of Courage is an endlessly fascinating, funny, maddening, and tragic portrait of the collision of art and capitalism.
June 28, 2007
Ross experiences what it is like to make a movie in the old hollywood system. She laches on to John Huston as he makes the Red Badge of Courage. Originally written, I believe, for the New Yorker.
December 11, 2007
Ross does John Huston, Louis B. Mayer and the "Red Badge of Courage.'' Picture-perfect.
November 8, 2020
How Hollywood functioned in the 1950s. Terrific fly-on-the-wall reporting of how an attempt to make a movie that will be an artistic success and a critical success comes up short on both fronts.
January 11, 2021
Enamored with this witty, restrained, sometimes absolutely hilarious portrait of the tension between art and consumption, ego and selflessness, and so much more. This is such a fun, wild read.
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