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

“You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye” — The Eagles

Throughtout my life, I’ve always held a strange fascination for the films of James Dean and for the longest time could not recognize why I did. But the more I screened iconic masterworks like “East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and Dean’s final film, “Giant,” I realized it was nothing about the movies that drew my fascination. It was the man himself.

Dark, brooding, angst-ridden and teetering on the edge of a slow burn boiling over into a raging inferno, no other actor in the history of motion pictures was born to bestow true movie star status quite like James Dean.

Nearly 70 years after his tragic death on a lonely Cholame, California highway on September 30, 1955, Dean has forged himself a place in American pop culture that remains unmatched.

And no film has epitomized the “rebellious teen angst” element conceived in the 1950s quite like “Rebel Without a Cause.”

Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel's magnificent book “Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause” is an eminently serious, revealing look behind the scenes at a film that seemed ill-fated long before it opened.

The time was just right for “Rebel Without a Cause,” a zeitgeist film if ever there was one. The thing called the "teenager" was just becoming a social reality; youth culture would explode just a few years later, and Frascella and Weisel make a good case for “Rebel Without a Cause” as a premonition, if not a cause, of the flower-power era. And in 1955, juvenile delinquency was much in the news, as those feared teenagers came up against the law. Thundered one judge in Boston, "We have the spectacle of an entire city terrorized by one-half of one percent of its residents. And the terrorists are children."

But millions of teenagers were ready for a film about their lives, even if that film starred an actor who was well into his 20s at the time and even if it was written by “oldsters” in their 30s and 40s. James Dean, fresh from the success of “East of Eden,” soon achieved rock star status (both Elvis Presley and John Lennon were greatly inspired by director Nicholas Ray's film). He became an icon, for he did the rock star thing by living fast and dying young just one month, in fact, before “Rebel Without a Cause” opened.

Unfortunately, Dean's co-stars, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, lived fast and died young as well. Their sad ends gave rise to the notion that a curse hung over the film. And it didn't help that Ray lived out much of his life unhappily and unproductively after the film’s completion and success.

Cursed or not, the filming was an arduous process with reshoots and endless studio interference, which ultimately led to one positive aspect – originally shooting a quarter of the film in black and white, Warner Brothers decided color stock was the way to go to utilize the new technical sensations CinemaScope and Technicolor (thus making Dean’s red jacket a legendary movie icon in of itself). In the end, “Rebel Without a Cause” came in eleven days late and much over budget, even as Warner Brothers labored to rein in Ray and his independent ambitions — partially the reason Ray worked less and less in the years following.

“Rebel Without a Cause” could be read on many levels — as a pioneering depiction of what Mineo called "the first gay teenager in films," as an endorsement of youth rebellion, even as a thinly disguised Cold War allegory. What is certain is that once it lit up the screen, its fire would never be extinguished.

The influence of “Rebel Without a Cause” has been immeasurable. At once gossipy and scholarly, this fascinating book is the most detailed look at its making that we have. And those who admire Nicholas Ray's creation will find much to value in it.