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Summary
Summary
When New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross heard that John Huston was planning to make a film of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, she decided she would follow the movie's progress "in order to learn whatever I might learn about the American motion-picture industry." In the spring of 1950, Huston visited New York and called the young writer to say that progress was not smooth: "Come on over, kid, and I'll tell you all about the hassle." "the funniest tragedy that I have ever read." William Shawn, then managing editor of The New Yorker, described Picture for the jacket of the first hardcover edition, writing: "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." Lillian Ross's marvelous description of John Huston's work and the film's subsequent fate at the hands of its studio bosses was first published as a serial in The New Yorker and was released in book form as Picture in 1952. It remains the best account of the inner workings of Hollywood. Picture received tremendous praise not only for the sheer quality of the writing but also for its technical innovation--the presentation of reporting as a novel. Picture received plaudits from the worlds of film and literature in equal measure. Charles Chaplin acclaimed it as "a brilliant and sagacious bit of reporting," and S. N. Behrman deemed it
Author Notes
Lillian Ross was born Lillian Rosovsky in Syracuse, New York on June 8, 1918. She received a bachelor's degree from Hunter College in New York and later did graduate work at Cornell University. Her first job in journalism was as a reporter for the New York tabloid PM. In 1945, she started working for The New Yorker and worked there for more than six decades. Her last writing for the magazine appeared online in 2012 as a blog post about J. D. Salinger. Her last New Yorker article in print was a Talk of the Town piece in 2011 about the comedian and actor Robin Williams.
Her article describing John Huston's effort to make a film of The Red Badge of Courage was reprinted as a book entitled Picture in 1952. She wrote several books about journalism including Reporting and Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism. She also wrote a memoir entitled Here but Not Here: A Love Story, which described her 50-year love affair with editor of The New Yorker William Shawn and a collection of her journalism entitled Reporting Always. She died from a stroke on September 20, 2017 at the age of 99.
(Bowker Author Biography)