For television
JAMES DEAN—The First American Teenager
Written and directed by Ray Connolly
We see his face on the sides of buses, in magazines
and on billboards as he helps sell the world cars,
jeans, beer and soft drinks. While in the souvenir
shops we find his image on T-shirts, posters, calendars
and postcards. Always he's the epitome of cool, the
perfect marketing image for the young. Yet he's been
dead for over half a century. He is, or was, James
Dean.
Dean's time in the spotlight was brief. Just six months
after his first film East of Eden was released
in 1955 he was dead, killed, aged 24, in a road accident
while driving to a racing car meeting in California.
Since then his image has been frozen in time as that
of the vulnerable, misunderstood kid, an identity borrowed
and worn by teenagers and students ever since. But
who was James Dean? What made him the perpetual symbol
of youthful angst? Was he that good an actor? And why,
after so long, does he still seem so contemporary that
advertisers pay five million dollars a year to use
his image?
I've been interested in James Dean since, at the age
of fourteen, I saw East Of Eden a few months
after his death. I can remember thinking I'd never
seen an actor so convince me that he wasn't acting,
that here was someone who said his lines as in life,
as though he wasn't sure what he was going to say next.
As one would expect of someone who died so young, biographical
details on him are short. His father was a dentist
in Los Angeles, but when Dean was nine his mother died
from breast cancer. Sent back to the family home in
Indiana he was brought up on a farm with his aunt and
uncle, a comfortable middle America, Quaker upbringing.
Nothing rebellious there.
He was obviously never going to be a farmer, but as
he grew older it was clear he had a gift for drama.
Winning a state competition in his senior year at high
school, he was upset to only come sixth in a national
competition. The ambition was already there.
Two days after leaving school at 18 he returned to
California, where one year in college proved enough
for him. With Hollywood just down the road, he picked
up a few tiny parts in movies and commercials, but,
restless
for immediate success, at 21 he caught the bus to New
York where television was then producing weekly live
television dramas.
Age mates Paul Newman, Martin Landau and Steve McQueen
would all compete with him for the same parts, and
at first he was often rejected because he was small,
never more than 5ft 6in, and wore glasses. But he was
very clever and articulate, extremely inventive, exceptionally
photogenic and fashionably Bohemian. Within eighteen
months he'd appeared in over thirty TV plays.
Joining the Actors Studio as an observer, thus following
in the footsteps of Marlon Brando, he inhaled the spirit
of method acting. And then after two very brief appearances
on Broadway he was called to Hollywood to appear in East
of Eden. He was 23 and flew there carrying his
belongings in a paper bag. With his first advance from
the movie, he bought himself a second hand MG sports
car.
Even before East of Eden was released director
Elia Kazan and Warner Brothers knew they'd discovered
something special, but already Dean was proving difficult
in a Hollywood more familiar with the quiescent Fifties
stars of the studio system. He knew how good he was,
and he had a pathological need to be noticed.
Quickly he was pushed into his second film, Rebel
Without A Cause along with Natalie Wood and Sal
Mineo, a study of middle class delinquency, complete
with its fabled chicken run sequence.
It was here, too, that his famous red zip-up jacket
and blue jeans made their appearance---though they
nearly didn't. Rebel Without A Cause had been
perceived as a low budget black and white film, and
indeed a week's shooting had taken place in monochrome
before it was decided to begin the movie again in colour.
By such commercial whims are iconic images created.
Almost as though racing against time he began his third
movie, Giant, just days after finishing Rebel
Without A Cause. This time he appeared alongside
Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. Taylor became a confidante,
but Hudson hated him. "He was hard to be around," Hudson
would say many years later. "Full of contempt." Dean
thought Hudson was a lousy actor.
By now his pay per movie was soaring, and he had a
Porsche sports car which he raced successfully at amateur
meetings around California. What he really wanted,
though, was a racing car, so during Giant he
bought a silver Porche Spider, only to be told by the
studio's insurers that he wasn't allowed to drive it
until filming was completed.
He had no option but to comply, but between scenes
he took the time to appear in a road safety commercial. "And,
remember," he says in it, "drive safely,
because the life you save…might be mine",
laughingly changing the line from "might be yours".
By now he had just a few weeks left to live.
On Friday, September 30, 1955, a week after finishing
his part in Giant, he picked up the new Porsche,
now with the name "Little Bastard" painted
on the front. And, after lunch with his father and
an uncle, he set off with a mechanic for a race meeting
in Northern California.
At three thirty that afternoon a traffic cop pulled
him over and gave him a ticket for speeding. He proceeded
on his way. Then at 5.45 pm a young student on his
way home for the weekend made a mistake on a dead straight
country road, and pulled his old Ford right across
the path of the Porsche.
The mechanic was thrown clear in the impact and survived
with a few broken bones. The driver of the Ford had
a bruised nose. But James Dean was killed instantly,
his neck broken, his head almost cut off his body in
the impact.
When his second film Rebel Without a Cause was
released a couple of days later it was an instant worldwide
success. Thousands of fan letters poured into Warner
Brothers refusing to believe that Dean was dead, insisting
that he was hideously crippled and being kept out of
sight in a sanatorium.
A year further on the cult of denial and hysteria was
still gripping when Giant was released, the
studio having to keep secret the fact that Dean's voice
in his last scene had had to be dubbed in editing by
another actor because the original sound quality had
been indistinct.
James Dean’s image was already like that of a
rock star, yet he was dead before rock and roll was
properly born, before Elvis recorded his first hit.
So what made him a legend? I think it was a synthesis
of his brilliance as an actor, that ability to convincingly
display neuroses on screen, and the fact that he came
along at the birth of our obsession with youth culture.
When we made this documentary producer, David Puttnam,
christened it James Dean: The First American Teenager, because
that was exactly how he seemed to our generation.
And pivotal to this lasting image was his role in Rebel
Without A Cause, which places the characters of
Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo around Dean like a teenage
family.
Bizarrely none of the three young epoch-making stars
were to reach the age their parents were in that film.
Sal Mineo was stabbed to death outside his home in
Los Angeles in 1976 at the age of 37, a couple of years
after we interviewed him; while Natalie Wood drowned
in 1981, aged 43.
Both their careers had both been fading by then, but
Dean’s early death fast-tracked those of several
other actors, Paul Newman getting the leading roles
in Somebody Up There Likes Me, the story of
boxer Rocky Graziano, and The Left Handed Gun, a
psychological Western, both of which Dean been contracted
to play.
For years after Dean’s death young film actors
aped his mannerisms, not least Warren Beatty in Splendour
In The Grass and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, while
later Martin Sheen, a huge fan, based his performance
in the movie Badlands on Dean. So although
you may not have realised it you've probably been watching
Dean's influence on cinema for years. Marlon Brando
is usually credited with having had the greatest effect
on film acting, but I would suggest James Dean was
equally important. Certainly he was no mere Brando
copycat.
For fifty years James Dean has been forever young.
But he was more than that. Certainly he was difficult
to work with. He was selfish, vain and a stealer of
scenes from other actors, but he was also one of the
great architects of movie acting.
The James Dean myth is interesting both as a social
phenomenon, and a way of marketing for youth culture.
But, for me, his real contribution was in the master
class of screen acting he gave in his three movies.
And, in that, he was better than his legend would suggest.
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