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Among the many high points of John Huston's film career, from The Maltese Falcon through Prizzi's Honor, his 1951 adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage would hardly rate a footnote if not for this, one of the great books on Hollywood, and one of the great hanging-out books in general. Ross, who wrote for the New Yorker over seven decades, embodied two of its great virtues here: patience and style. She hung out, with incredible fly-on-the-wall access, for a year and a half as the movie was made (and then butchered by the studio), filling her notebook with the comedy and the small tragedies, the charisma and the obsequies, the excesses and the petty finances of making a movie at that exact moment. It is a treat.