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Lillian Ross spent eighteen months watching John Huston make The Red Badge of Courage for MGM, sat in on the meetings, and published the result first in The New Yorker and then as a book. What she recorded was the film being steadily dismantled by executives who liked it and were frightened of it. It is generally reckoned the first work of long-form reporting to use the techniques of the novel, and the studio bosses never forgave her for quoting them exactly.