The Failure of Story in "Picture"

Hollywood is too large of a space to name- the hills and the gutters and the strips of stars all cater to the life beneath its nine floating letters. Yet when deconstructed, as in the way Lillian Ross manages to do in Picture, Hollywood becomes less of the fantasy we imagine it to be.

Picture is a detailed account of the making of John Huston’s film “The Red Badge of Courage.” The film is based off of Stephen Crane’s famous novel, written when he was only 22, about a young man’s disillusionment in war. The progressions and digressions throughout Picture are also a type of disillusionment experienced by the director and producers, and although not directly mentioned, even Ross herself. The culture of Hollywood is unmasked under Ross’s microscope. We see the culture at war with itself and finally defeated by the type of criticism it has so often managed to shield out.

Lillian Ross’s in depth reportage of the movie-making experience has all the elements of a great novel, from the escalating drama to poignant dialogue, that frame Huston’s unraveling vision throughout. From the beginning, we are exposed to the recurring theme: profit vs. art. The struggle between an artistic vision and appeasing a mass audience tugs at the dynamics betweens characters. John Huston is not the last devil to throw the ball into a rolling tide, but the success they gain is momentary and quickly regresses because the film ultimately did not have a “story.” This is repeated as the primary reason for the film’s failure. It did not appeal to public interest because it was missing story. And in Hollywood, when there isn’t a story for an audience to latch onto, even if the art of it is genius, the Picture is useless.

Ross includes all the numbers around the filming, and the final $1,642,117.33 price tag, reminding us throughout that the fiscal demands dictate the minute decisions, and ultimately the shots. What begins as a meaningful attempt to transform great literature into a great film, quickly becomes a farcical display to appease studio heads, and more so, a popular audience.

“What stops you is the equity that goes with the classic. It’s borrowed imagination. You know, I’m not of the school that believes that popular entertainment need be art. And neither is Schneck. He’s a showman. That’s our business.”

The disintegration of values, even Huston’s own, is what leads to the ultimate downfall of the film. After it is completed, Huston leaves to Africa to work on “The African Queen.” Reinhardt is left to quite literally clean up the mess of a film that is receiving highly negative audience reviews. This part of the book is difficult to bear at times, filled with the anxiety of failure, abandonment, and prestige of Hollywood heads. Huston seemingly gives up, goes silent. The narrative and his art are transformed into what the studio believes will work for audiences. They have to lay out the story. Critics were impressed and moved, giving positive reviews but not general audiences. And at the end of the day, you aren’t quite sure who to blame.

While the characters are entertaining and it is always exciting to be behind the scenes, the flurry of indecision and uncertainty that plagues the main characters becomes tiresome. Not only this, but the soundtrack of the story is all male voices in conflict with one another. In this we are reminded of the absence of women throughout- even in the picture itself. Lillian’s presence is ghostly, floating in and out of pages. Her astute observations leave out her own opinions, even though they may be reflected in the grammatical choices she makes. The other women function as mere props, aloof to what’s happening. At the end of the book, the last splash of irony on the story is Reinhardt’s wife saying, “I always hated it. I knew it would never work.”

What Picture means today, the scale, the efforts, the people who believed and those who didn’t in Huston’s artistic vision, in the end, neither mattered because of the fiscal consequences of the film’s unpopularity with mass audiences. When I think of an equivalent today- an artistic risk by a big studio, I think of movies like “Mother”- a film that is largely despised by half of the public, but also redeemed by the vigorous admiration from the other half. The art of making movies today is not all that far from the reality we peer on in Picture. The tension between art and money. Artists and Studio Executives. The priorities in Hollywood remain the same, but even in a profit driven world, there is room for possibility. All art is negotiation, and I hope for the future that big studios start negotiating more often.