Synopsis
When it was released in 1955, the film Rebel Without a Cause had a revolutionary impact on moviemaking and youth culture, virtually giving birth to our concept of the American teenager. For the first time, Live Fast, Die Young tells the complete story of the explosive making of Rebel, a film that has rocked every generation since its release. Set against a backdrop of the Atomic Age and an old Hollywood studio system on the verge of collapse, it evokes the cataclysmic, immensely influential meeting of four of Hollywood's most passionate artists.
When James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and director Nicholas Ray converged, each was at a crucial point in his or her career. The young actors were grappling with fame, their burgeoning sexuality, and increasingly reckless behavior. As Ray engaged his cast in physical melees and psychosexual seductions of startling intensity, the on- and off-set relationships between his ambitious young actors ignited, sending a shock wave through the film.
Through interviews with the surviving members of the cast and crew and firsthand access to both personal and studio archives, Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel reveal Rebel's true drama - the director's affair with sixteen-year-old Wood, his tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and his role in awakening the latent homosexuality of Mineo, who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film.
Complete with thirty photographs, including ten never-before-seen photos by famed Dean photographer Dennis Stock, Live Fast, Die Young tells the inside story of an essential American film - a story that is, in many ways, as provocative as the film itself.
Reviews
Frascella and Weisel's expansive overview isn't the first book to document the influential Warner Brothers classic, but it does deserve recognition for its exhaustiveness. With the first third of the book focusing on script problems, casting and unusual prefilming improvisatory rehearsals, the detailed chronological coverage of the actual filming doesn't begin until just after page 100. As Frascella (former chief movie critic of what was then Us Magazine) and Weisel (a Premiere contributor) explain, screenwriter Stewart Stern struggled to develop director Nicholas Ray's innovative idea for a film about middle-class juvenile delinquents, delivering the final script only four days before the 1955 production start. Upon revealing this fact, the book kicks into high gear, examining everything from the history and symbolism of James Dean's red jacket to Natalie Wood's affair with Ray. Dean created friction with the film's older actors, the authors say; some were taken aback by the on-set "atmosphere of improvisation and borderline anarchy." Behind-the-scenes conflicts, feuds and power plays come to life thanks to the authors' thorough research and interviews with surviving cast and crew members. Concluding chapters probe the Dean cult and the film's "enduring power." Photos.
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Rebel without a Cause (1955), a sympathetic view of those of its era's teenagers demonized as juvenile delinquents, is one of the rare movies that had a massive cultural impact and was of significant artistic merit. Its immediate renown came because of star James Dean's car-crash death just before its release, which sparked his myth and the film's big box office. Frascella and Weisel credit director Nicholas Ray for Rebel's artistic excellence, noting that his insistence on getting his vision to the screen was fueled by estrangement from his teenaged son and anguish over his failings as a father. They construct Rebel's production history from archival research and interviews with surviving cast and crew members (costars Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo met violent ends, too, and Ray spent most of his last 20 years in exile from Hollywood) and satisfyingly balance scholarship--in, for example, detailed accounts of such key scenes as the knife fight at the planetarium and the chickie run--and gossip, such as dish on Ray's affair with then-16-year-old Wood. Gordon Flagg
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