Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause - Softcover

Frascella, Lawrence; Weisel, Al

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743296184 ISBN 13: 9780743296182

Publisher: Touchstone, 2006

Synopsis

The revolutionary film Rebel Without a Cause has had a profound impact on both moviemaking and youth culture -- not only upon its 1955 release but on generations since. In Live Fast, Die Young, the complete story behind this groundbreaking film is revealed, vividly evoking the cataclysmic meeting of actors James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo and director Nicholas Ray -- all at crucial points in their careers as they grappled with fame, burgeoning sexuality, and increasingly reckless behavior.

Through interviews with surviving members of the cast and crew and firsthand access to both personal and studio archives, Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel depict the explosive making of Rebel Without a Cause, complete with never-before-seen photos by famed Dean photographer Dennis Stock. A fascinating look behind the scenes of an unforgettable American film, Live Fast, Die Young tells a story that is as provocative as the film itself.

About this title

About the Author:

Lawrence Frascella has served as chief movie critic of Us Magazine and theater critic for Entertainment Weekly, as well as an editor at Aperture. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Harper's Bazaar and Rolling Stone.

Al Weisel is a regular contributor to Premiere magazine, a former contributing editor at Us Magazine, and has written for Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Spin, and New York Newsday. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Near dusk, on the evening of September 30, 1955, a telephone rang at the main gate of Warner Brothers Studios. When the guard on duty answered, a woman on the other end said that she was calling from Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital. Speaking calmly, without emotion, she told him that an actor who worked at the studio, James Dean, had been killed that evening in a car accident. Though Dean had starred in a mere three films and only one -- East of Eden -- had been released at that point, the guard knew who he was. The untamed young actor's reputation in the industry was growing much faster than his film resume. And only a few days earlier, he had been stopped by security for speeding around the lot in his brand-new Porsche and told never to drive there again because he might kill somebody.

Immediately after hanging up the phone, the guard called Warners' publicity department, and word began to spread throughout town. "It was like a strange wind that came right through the streets of Hollywood," said screenwriter Stewart Stern about the news. And that wind blew quickly through Dean's favorite hangouts: Googie's diner, the Villa Capri, the Chateau Marmont. It cast a pall over that evening's black-tie functions: the Whisper Ball, sponsored by Jane Russell's new World Adoption International Fund, and the Deb Star Ball, a beauty pageant hosted by the town's makeup artists and hairstylists. At the Deb Star Ball guests thumbing through the official program were stunned to find a full-page ad that Dean had taken out thanking his makeup artist, which featured nothing but a close-up of Dean's eyes staring back at them. When the wire services got hold of the story, radio and TV stations around the country interrupted their programs to announce Dean's death to his growing legion of fans, young people who had responded enthusiastically to their first emotionally wrenching encounter with him in East of Eden.

Despite the immediate sense of shock and loss that accompanied the news, Dean's death might not necessarily have gone on to become such an enduring tragedy on the basis of East of Eden alone. After all, Dean's career had only just begun, and he wasn't the first young promising actor who would never get the chance to fulfill his potential. His sudden demise might have been just another sad story in a town full of sad stories, eventually fading away like a bad Technicolor print or a once-famous star of the silent screen. But the image of Dean was about to seep deeper into the public consciousness when, less than a month after his fatal accident, Warner Brothers released his second film -- Rebel Without a Cause.

Almost immediately, Dean's image became inseparable from Jim Stark, the character he played in Rebel. With his white T-shirt, blue jeans and red jacket, Dean was instantly transformed into an adolescent ideal. His magnificent confusion, pained fragility, sexiness and even his narcissism made Jim Stark the template for teen rebellion. In fact, in many ways, Rebel Without a Cause invented the teenager.

Largely because of his work in Rebel, James Dean remains an undeniable force half a century after his death. But Dean's presence is not the only reason for the film's continuing relevance. Rebel Without a Cause asserted a romantic, mythic notion of adolescence that remains with us, that colors the way we see our own youth. And its preeminence resulted from the intense interactions of many fresh, raw-nerved personalities who came together at critical junctures in their lives and careers, including actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo and fledgling screenwriter Stewart Stern. Even the film's young supporting players -- who portrayed the various gang members -- contributed to the film's authenticity. But more than anyone, it was director Nicholas Ray who continually stoked Rebel's fire.

The forty-three-year-old Ray was someone who revered youth, who viewed adolescence as a heightened human state and who refused to relinquish the teenager in himself. He was one of the great dark neurotic geniuses of American film. He raised the bar for emotional nakedness on screen, pushing his juvenile cast to reach ever more precarious heights of film acting. Ray had a dream vision of kids creating a world of their own. And under his direction, Ray's young cast coalesced into one large dysfunctional family, embarking on a journey rife with reckless behavior, deep devotion and betrayal.

Rebel Without a Cause is a film of sheer poetic expression that attempts to give shape to the internal feelings of kids alienated from the restrictions and contradictions of the adult world around them. At the time of its release, it frightened many parents with its violence, its upfront sexuality and its relentless desire to imbue teenagers with power -- and glory. But in many ways, the behind-the-scenes story is more provocative than the already provocative film. James Dean stands defiantly at Rebel's center, but the unbridled emotions that were channeled offscreen are the essential source of the film's dynamism and its endless ability to speak to the teenager in all of us.

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel

Chapter One: Birth of a Rebel

In the early 1950s, director Nicholas Ray was a regular at the classic Saturday night parties thrown by actress Betsy Blair and her husband, Gene Kelly -- the kind of exclusive Hollywood soirees that would find Judy Garland singing at the piano, Leonard Bernstein playing charades or Greta Garbo sitting casually on the edge of the Kellys' kitchen sink. Blair remembers the tall, handsome, seductive Ray with great fondness. "He was always lively and iconoclastic and full of serious opinions," says Blair, who calls him "a Melville hero" for the way he chased dream projects and battled against the confines of the studio system. Blair knew Ray to be a compulsive womanizer, gambler and drinker, although "never a sloppy drunk." But one night in July 1951, after their weekly party broke up, Blair and Kelly looked out their front window and encountered a bizarre sight.

"There was a little slope in front of our house," says Blair, "and I remember Nick leaving and instead of getting into his car, he sank onto the grass, just sort of lying there. I was ready to go out and get him. But Gene said, 'Let's see if he gets up again.' And so we waited, fifteen to twenty minutes. I think Nick was actually planning to lie there all night. Eventually, we did go out and get him." Like everyone else in Hollywood, the Kellys knew that Ray had just filed for divorce from his second wife, the quintessential film noir blonde, Gloria Grahame, after a stormy three-year marriage, but they had no idea what precipitated the separation. "We didn't know in the beginning what had happened," says Blair, "just that they were fighting and breaking up and that he was desperate. And then, when I found out, it was hard to believe." The real story behind the breakup was shocking even by Hollywood standards.

Earlier that summer, everything seemed to be going well for Ray. In June 1951, he signed a lucrative contract with RKO Pictures, negotiated by his powerful new agents at MCA, making him RKO head Howard Hughes's right-hand man. That year, with the red-baiting McCarthy hearings getting under way in Washington and the Rosenbergs on trial in New York, having a protector like Hughes gave Ray -- who had a history of leftist affiliations -- a security and stability he rarely felt in his peripatetic career. Hughes kept him busy that summer doing uncredited patch-up work on such potential RKO disasters as The Racket and Josef von Sternberg's Macao.

One afternoon late in June, Tony, Ray's thirteen-year-old son from his first marriage to journalist Jean Evans, unexpectedly appeared on the doorstep of the Malibu beach house Ray was renting next door to his close friend, producer John Houseman. On vacation from military school, Tony had made the three-thousand-mile journey from New York all by himself, without telling anyone he was coming. Ray was not home when Tony showed up, so Grahame, who had met Ray's son only once, when he was ten years old, invited him inside. When Ray arrived home later that afternoon, he walked into the bedroom and stumbled on a sight almost too outrageous to believe. He found Grahame and his barely teenage son "in bed together," as Ray described it years later to his friend, writer Gavin Lambert.

Nicholas Ray was someone who always allowed himself -- and those around him -- an astounding amount of moral wiggle room. But this level of crisscrossing betrayal was too much to bear. Ray exploded in fury, smashing up the house and flinging Tony out into the street. Then Ray took off, refusing to spend another minute in the house with Grahame. Tony slept that night beneath a neighbor's porch.

Ray and Grahame had a famously tempestuous relationship. Ray claimed he married Grahame only because she was pregnant with his second son, Timothy, who was born five and a half months after the wedding. Ray said he spent their Las Vegas wedding night at the craps table, losing almost all his money because he "didn't want this dame...to have anything of mine." Their marriage had no chance of surviving the events of that afternoon in June 1951. Immediately, Ray filed for divorce and moved for a time into the Garden of Allah, a hotel once popular with screenwriters and silent-film stars. Seething with rage and paranoia, he forced Tony to make a tape recording detailing what happened, and threatened to make the tape public if Grahame tried to seek a large alimony settlement. In the end, Grahame did not ask for alimony and received only child support for their son Timothy. Ray never played the recording or made any mention in court of what happened that summer afternoon -- which did not stop the story from becoming common knowledge. "In the circle emanating from Houseman's house we all knew," says actor Norman Lloyd, who was a friend of Ray's for many years, dating ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0743296184
• ISBN 13: 9780743296182
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384