diff --git a/crates/lib/api_clients/openai_sora_client/src/image_gen/raw_sora_image_gen.rs b/crates/lib/api_clients/openai_sora_client/src/image_gen/raw_sora_image_gen.rs
index 924483e129..b711e36724 100644
--- a/crates/lib/api_clients/openai_sora_client/src/image_gen/raw_sora_image_gen.rs
+++ b/crates/lib/api_clients/openai_sora_client/src/image_gen/raw_sora_image_gen.rs
@@ -97,12 +97,12 @@ pub (crate) struct RawSoraErrorResponse {
 
 const USER_AGENT : &str = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.0.0 Safari/537.36";
 
-pub (crate) async fn call_sora_image_gen(request: RawSoraImageGenRequest, credentials: &SoraCredentials) -> AnyhowResult<RawSoraResponse> {
+pub (crate) async fn call_sora_image_gen(sora_request: RawSoraImageGenRequest, credentials: &SoraCredentials) -> AnyhowResult<RawSoraResponse> {
   let client = reqwest::Client::new();
 
-  let request_payload = serde_json::to_string(&request)?;
+  //let request_payload = serde_json::to_string(&request)?;
 
-  println!("\n\n >>> request_payload = {:?}", request_payload);
+  //println!("\n\n >>> request_payload = {:?}", request_payload);
 
   //let request = credentials.add_credential_headers_to_request(request);
 
@@ -110,20 +110,33 @@ pub (crate) async fn call_sora_image_gen(request: RawSoraImageGenRequest, creden
       .header("OpenAI-Sentinel-Token", &credentials.sentinel)
       .header("User-Agent", USER_AGENT)
       .header("Cookie", &credentials.cookie)
-      .header("Authorization", &credentials.bearer_token)
+      .header("Authorization", credentials.authorization_header_value())
       .header("Content-Type", "application/json");
 
-  let response = request.json(&request_payload)
-      .send()
-      .await?;
-      //.error_for_status()?;
+  let request = request.json(&sora_request).build()?;
 
-  println!("\n\n >>> status = {:?}", response.status());
+  println!("\n\n >>> raw request = {:?}\n\n", request);
+
+  let response = client.execute(request)
+      .await?;
+
+  //let response = request.execute()
+  //    .send()
+  //    .await?;
+  //    //.error_for_status()?;
+
+  let status = response.status();
+
+  println!("\n\n >>> status = {:?}", &status);
 
   let json_response = &response.text().await?;
 
   println!(" >>> response = {:?}", json_response);
 
+  if status != reqwest::StatusCode::OK {
+    return Err(anyhow::anyhow!("the request failed; improve this message"));
+  }
+
   let response = serde_json::from_str(json_response)?;
 
   Ok(response)