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It is difficult to describe the last extraordinary days, although they are still very much alive. Their colours are still fresh and, when I close my eyes, the road still seems to be passing in front of me, running straight and hot through the desert.
-Inge Morath, The Road to Reno
The Misfits was originally a short story by Arthur Miller, published in Esquire in 1957, about modern-day cowboys who hunt mustangs with pickup trucks but live off the largesse of divorcing women. In 1956, Miller had spent his statutory six weeks in Nevada in order to divorce Mary, his wife of sixteen years, whom he left for Marilyn Monroe. Miller later adapted this unlikely vehicle into a screenplay for Monroe, in what biographer Martin Gottfried calls a "love offering" (313). As a chance for Monroe to work again after the pain of an unsuccessful pregnancy, Miller may well have seen a new film, especially one that was not a comedy, as a gift even as The Misfits also provided him with a much-needed financial windfall (Gottfried 312-6). What John Huston's 1961 film clearly evokes in audiences today is the pain and complexity of Miller and Monroe's disintegrating relationship. But while marital disaster loomed in Nevada, a pair of European photographers made their way from New York to document the film production for the Magnum photographic agency. One of them was Inge Morath, the Austrian who in 1962 would become the third Mrs. Arthur Miller. Published posthumously in 2006 by the Inge Morath Foundation, The Road to Reno collects Morath's photographs and journals from that three-week, cross-country road trip with Henri Cartier-Bresson. Together with Arthur Miller's last play, Finishing the Picture, which premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2004, The Road to Reno creates a new lens through which to see The Misfits and the now-notorious story of its creation.
Before filming on The Misfits began, Lee Jones proposed to the film's producer, Frank Taylor, that Magnum have exclusive rights to photograph on the set. In Making The Misfits, Jones recalls predicting that given the star power of the actors involved, "it will blow up in your face unless it's controlled by people who care about what happens to the people they photograph,...