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John Huston shot The Red Badge of Courage, then left for Africa to make The African Queen before editing and previews were finished. An artist's leverage over a work depends on physically staying through the stage where it can still be changed.
After a poor test screening, MGM treated the audience comment cards as a verdict rather than one data point among many. The studio responded by cutting the film to about 69 minutes, dropping scenes, and adding a voice-over narration that explained what the images had been left to imply. When a system fears commercial failure, it lets its least engaged viewers' reactions dictate the structure of a work.
Production chief Dore Schary championed the film, Louis B. Mayer opposed it, and New York president Nicholas Schenck approved it so the young Schary could learn a lesson, whatever the outcome. Seen this way, the picture was mostly a token in a contest over who ran the studio, not an artistic project to be judged on its merits. In layered hierarchies, a project's fate is often settled by what it signals in power struggles above it.
Ross records scenes and verbatim dialogue, orders them like a novel, and adds almost no authorial judgment. The subjects' own words and choices, placed next to one another, expose the system's vanity, fear, and self-deception more effectively than editorializing could. The reporter's argument lives in selection and sequence, not in stated opinion.