Picture, by Lillian Ross (Faber, £8.99 in UK)
Lillian Ross's book began as a series of articles/essays in the New Yorker in the early 1950s, and in its present form has gone through several editions since. It is, in effect, an on-the-spot account of the making of John Huston's film The Red Badge of Courage, based on the Hart Crane novel. The result is more than simple reportage (if reportage is ever simple); it involved frequent interviews and "colour writing". thumbnail character sketches of Huston himself, his producer Gottfried Reinhardt (son of the great Max) and a whole line-up of Hollywood personalities. She noted their conversations, their reactions to stress and challenges, their differences of opinion and verbal sparring, and their occasional deviousness or bitchiness. The dead-pan depiction of Louis B. Mayer is hilarious, while Huston himself is shown as a man of many moods and facets. The film itself, made without the approval of many of the MGM top brass and costing a lot of money, was not a box-office success, though Huston consoled himself with the thought that he had created a masterpiece (debatable, from my own memories of the film). Picture has been called the best book written about Hollywood, while Hemingway thought it "better than most novels". It certainly makes a first-class read, more than forty years later, but why do Faber & Faber spread it across nearly 400 pages of decidedly large print?