Picture A Story About Hollywood by Lillian Ross 1952 Vintage HCDJ

Ever since Hollywood began, writers had been trying to get it down on paper, but none of them had succeeded except fragmentarily. With this book, Lillian Ross accomplished superbly what others could not do at all. On the surface, Miss Ross wrote a precise, marvelously detailed account of how one motion picture, “The Red Badge of courage," was made. Beyond that, exuberant, she presented everything any sane person should want to know about how a big film studio functioned at that time, and in effect how the entire American motion picture industry functioned. And beyond that, she wrote 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 but not least, she told a dramatic story about some extraordinary people, and, in a triumph of interlineation, wrote a treatise on human nature. Employing methods of her own invention, Miss Ross demonstrates that although truth is not neces