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Lillian Ross

     "All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it."
                 — Lillian Ross

     "Ross is such a good reporter that at times she even tells us what we don't want to know."
 — Time magazine

About The Player (from the publisher, Random House):

     Before The Player, there was Picture. "They don't want me to make this picture." John Huston told Lillian Ross in the spring of 1950, referring to the studio executives at M-G-M where Huston was under contract, "And I want to make this picture. Come on over, kid, and I'll tell you all about the hassle." While covering the making of The Red Badge of Courage for The New Yorker, Lillian Ross soon found out that the studio's initial resistance to Huston's picture was only the beginning. From Huston's work in writing and directing the film, to its radical transformation at the hands of studio executives, Ross had a front row seat from beginning to end. The result is a book that is as eloquent in its attention to detail as a Huston film and is still the best account of the inner workings of Hollywood. Released in serial form in The New Yorker and as a book in 1952, Picture was praised by the film and book industry alike, not only for the sheer quality of the writing but also for its technical innovation -- the presentation of reporting as a novel. Newsweek proclaimed it "the best book on Hollywood ever published," and Ernest Hemingway thought Picture "much better than most novels." William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker wrote: "On the surface, Miss Ross has written a precise, marvelously detailed account of how one motion-picture, The Red Badge of Courage, was made. Beyond that, exuberant, she has presented everything any sane person should want to know about how a big film studio functions. And beyond that, she has written what must be called, for lack of a more appropriate word, the definitive book on the Hollywood community -- its language, its manners, its preoccupations, its ideas. Last, she has told a dramatic story about some extraordinary people, and , in a triumph of interlineation, has written a treatise on human nature."

Books by Lillian Ross:

Picture
Portrait of Hemingway
Here but Not Here: A Love Story
Takes: Stories from the Talk of the Town
The Little Old Man and His Dreams
Moments With Chaplin
The Player: A Profile of an Art
Reporting
The Stranger in Big Sur

 

Send an e-mail to Lillian Ross at:
 
erikross@pop.prodigy.com

 

Lillian Ross Links:

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