The book in question is Raising Hell: Ken Russell and the Unmaking of The Devils, by Richard Crouse, a fellow Canadian film critic, and the wrongheadedness mainly lies in allowing various obviously slanted remembrances by participants to go completely unchallenged, particularly in the case of (say) people like Oliver Reed himself, who was unreliable at the best of times, and not just because he was drunk a lot. I know enough actors to take what they say about their working experiences with a huge grain of salt, specifically because their understanding of an entire production is necessarily extremely limited--limited to their own roles, their own scenes, their own interaction with the director, and the director--especially one like Russell--will frankly tell them any damn thing to get what they want out of them. This makes me trust Vanessa Redgrave's skewed and head-y observations about the film's content far less, say, than I trust the observations of somebody like Judith Paris, a dancer who played one of the possessed nuns, and reveals that they were shooting every day for ten consecutive weeks, naked, bald and covered in bruises. "I was young and I knew he was a genius and you go along, but on The Devils I met my Waterloo. Have you ever tried writhing sexually for ten hours at a time? Try it one day. It's not easy."