Picture in Golden Age of Hollywood Book Club

Jul 28, 2018 ALLEN rated it it was amazing

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 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.

"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, Goodreads 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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May 26, 2019 Morgan rated it really liked it

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.

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Sep 20, 2010 David rated it really liked it

The most famous and one of the first insider accounts of the making of a motion picture. Very good capsule profiles of some of the people involved in the making of the film with Dore Schary not coming off so well. The book suffers for having its most interesting character, John Huston, exit the story for most of the last quarter.

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