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