Art, Commerce and The Red Badge of Courage
Picture by Lillian Ross
Sunset and Jericho has been shortlisted for Best Indie Crime Novel at Crime Fiction Lover! This is a reader-voted award, and I’m very grateful.
Since both the writers’ and actors’ guild strikes are now over, it seems fitting to revisit one of the great books about showbiz and the clash between art and commerce.
Picture by Lillian Ross is one of the early works of long-form journalism about the movies. Ross followed the battles to green-light, produce, shoot, and release The Red Badge of Courage, John Huston’s adaptation of the Stephen Crane novel.
Huston is the hero of Picture, charismatic and taciturn and beaten down by the effort to get Red Badge made—and made properly. He casts Audie Murphy in the lead, the most decorated soldier in World War Two, but an unknown actor. Much of the filming was done on Huston’s own ranch.
At one point, Huston, the director of The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, calls Red Badge the best film he’s ever made.
The studio doesn’t agree. The audiences at the previews don’t, either.
Slowly Huston’s support erodes, and Red Badge is chopped up, intrusive narration added, key scenes removed, and the theme of the film simplified. Even so, it becomes what one MGM executive calls “a flop d’estime.”
Picture is a book about compromise. Necessary compromises, such as Huston shooting a Civil War battle on a California ranch, using fewer extras than he asked for. Desperate compromises such as producer Gottfried Reinhardt’s decision to add narration to help the film resonate with indifferent audiences and appease his bosses. And cowardly, meddling, but well-intentioned compromises done to make Red Badge easier to understand, more traditional, and ultimately a safer addition to the company’s bottom line.
Originally published in five instalments in The New Yorker, Picture captures the personalities of Huston and the executives and their families, including a very funny portrait of Mrs. Reinhardt and her dog Mocha, neither of whom give a shit about the film.
Ross is a clear and sharp journalist who engineered a type of showbiz narrative that hadn’t existed before. Hemingway, Chaplin, and Graham Greene were all fans of Picture. With good reason.
There are other great books on the same topic: Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris and The Studio by John Gregory Dunne, and of course William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade. I’m eager to track down Julia Solomon’s The Devil’s Candy, about the fiasco of making Bonfire of the Vanities.
Years ago, Netflix kickstarted their film production with a couple of prestige projects: The Irishman, reuniting Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci, and the completion of Orson Welles’s unfinished final film The Other Side of the Wind—starring John Huston.
That company’s abandonment (for the most part) of prestige filmmaking in favour of metrics-pleasing star vehicles and cheaply made series is no different from how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer treated The Red Badge of Courage.
It’s always a fight.
You can read Anjelica Huston’s introduction to Picture over at LitHub.
Interesting, a sad story about how they ruined his film. I haven't seen this one, but I loved The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, and so forth. And his last one, an adaption of the Dubliner's short story "The Dead." It's beautiful!
It isn't the same kind of look at the making of a film, because it's fiction, but I remember liking Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald was an insider (and a battered one). Monroe Stahr the producer MC, is a veiled portrait of Irving Thalberg.