“It’s Going to be a Tough War”: On Lillian Ross’s PICTURE
by J.T. Price
Is it a spoiler to say the film wasn’t a hit?
The Red Badge of Courage (1951) is the one in question, directed by John Huston, and for the life of me as I read I couldn’t remember, couldn’t quite place how the film is regarded within Huston’s oeuvre. Hadn’t someone mentioned it before? Maybe I’d seen word somewhere, say, at Film Forum? Of course I wasn’t around when it was made—my parents weren’t even ‘around,’ in the sense of being conscious human beings—but Lillian Ross was.
A writer for the New Yorker, Ross took the assignment of profiling John Huston in L.A. as a way “to escape from [a] personal entanglement with [her] editor, William Shawn.” Who happened to be married to somebody else. What Ross intended as a West Coast sojourn of a couple months’ time turned into a year-and-a-half stay. At that distance, she corresponded with Shawn by letter and telephone, and from their dialogue her trim, splendid Picture (NYRB) was born.
Picture snaps right along. It’s a pleasure to read, in fact, and with layers to boot, unexpected turns. A book called Picture: it’s funny, get it? Ironic funny, absurdist funny; a producer’s wife asks why nobody takes the opinion of her dog seriously. Painful funny, vis-à-vis the mid-20th century pivot from literary culture’s perceived primacy to its near-total eclipse by the cult of the televisual—funny like the old man’s laughter at the end of Huston classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The old man played by Walter Huston, John’s father, who appears in Sierra Madre at his son’s direction. It was Walter Huston’s death, shortly before events in Ross’s telling kick off, that may have precipitated John’s desire to adapt Stephen Crane’s literary classic to film. Crane’s novel was one Walter would have encountered on first arriving in the US, or at least a text his son must have searched to understand the country his father had chosen to call home.
In partnership with dear friend Gottfried Reinhardt, who serves as Ross’s second principal protagonist, Huston undertook the project of poetic adaptation against a stiff wind of resistance at MGM. That resistance is initially embodied by the person of Louis B. Mayer, or “L.B.,” a giant of the Hollywood studio system heyday, and in our own present, the ur-exemplar of overbearing movie producer.
Ross’s portrayal of L.B. Mayer is deft as hell. The man’s ubiquity at the time of the book’s release might have obscured that fact, but from a distance of seventy years—how impossible it feels to write that, even as someone who, again, wasn’t even close to being alive then—Mayer leaps off the page, like an actor who believes he’s too big for his part… the whole play, the entire production, it revolves around him, do you see? Exists to please him or to displease, and if it displeases him, there’ll be hell to pay, be sure. But Ross has him there just the same, trapped as in a jar by her cool narration:
“I said to you the picture would be a wonderful hit. In here!” [Mayer] cried, poking his index-finger at his chest. ‘It wins the audience in here!’ He lifted his snowy head and looked at the cream-coloured wall before him as though he were watching the Music Hall screen. ‘Entertainment!’ he cried, transfixed by what he seemed to see on that screen, and he made the face of a man who was emotionally stirred by what he was watching. ‘It’s good enough for you and I and the box office.’”
In his day, Mayer was one of the wealthiest movie moguls in Hollywood, by every outward trapping a success, but one who until the day he died presented himself as an underdog facing off with the elitist prigs and so-called serious artists whose idea of quality fiction was for a son “to throw the Little Old Lady Down the Stairs!” (Dostoevsky, with whom Mayer most definitely never crossed literal paths, comes to mind, as does Nathanael West, with whom Mayer quite possibly did.)
Tensions between art (as personified by dashing, enigmatic Huston and steadfast Reinhardt) and commerce (the by-turns charming and insufferable Mayer), expediency and legacy, the literary and the visual, truth and power lie at the heart of this little book.
Ross does not reveal how the adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage will shake out until practically the very end of her book, at which point, the plot reasserts itself and what had seemed a sideshow attraction rears into view as the true climax of Picture. It may be a spoiler to state that Huston’s film did not make box office bank, but then, if you want, you can do what I did and cue the old film up where it plays now, perennially and apparently forever, in the crumbling old projection hall of online purgatory. The audience, it seems, is only you; the showtime, whenever you please. There, you may marvel at what they made of it in light of the knowledge Ross committed to the page—what was, what might have been, and what came of it all.
J.T. Price was the Managing Editor of Epiphany in 2019. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New England Review, Post Road, Guernica, Fence, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, Juked, Electric Literature, The Brazenhead Review, and elsewhere.
