Behind the Scenes: Rebel Without a Cause (Ray, 1955) with James Dean and Natalie Wood

While the city slept, the caravan of trucks was loaded with everything from lights to lunches, from catwalks to cameras, from pins to people, everything, tons of it. A city on wheels guarded by its own police, all just to bring life to a bundle of typewritten pages we call the scripts. Grip trucks, light trucks, prop trucks, wardrobe trucks, a truck for cameras, three dressing room trailers, a high lift truck, a boom truck, buses for the crew, bus loads of extras, generator trucks capable of lighting over 400 homes like yours and mine. Yes, when Warner crews go on location, they go like the U.S. Army, prepared to stay. 9 30 a.m. Here we are on a mountaintop more than a thousand feet above the city of Los Angeles, the Griffith Park Planetarium. This is our location and this is its heart, power. A diesel-operated dynamo that produces 2,000 amperes of direct current and pushes them through 320 feet of heavy-duty cable into the connector boxes and on into this battery of man-made suns. 9 45. The high lift truck comes down onto the location proper, the planetarium parking area, and here's the camera in position for the first shot. The assistant director's voice is heard. All right, fellas, let's go. The first shot of the day is a close-up of Sal Moneo, who plays the part of a boy named Plato. In this scene, he is threatened by a gang of kids, and here are the kids. It's a quick shot, not a very complicated one, but it's now 10 30. There's a schedule to keep. All right, quiet, quiet for rehearsal. There's the producer of Rebel Without a Cause, settling a point with a script girl. The producer, you know, is a busy fellow. He's a combination of father, mother, and midwife. The picture is his baby. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. David Weisbart. Mr. Weisbart has been working on Rebel Without a Cause for many months preparing. Is that right? That's right, Gig. As a matter of fact, about a year before we ever turned a camera. By we, I mean Stuart Stern and Irving Schulman, our two writers, and Nick Ray, our director. That's Mr. Ray, seated to the left of the camera. The big fellow with the curly hair. I think I better explain right here what this picture is about. Rebel Without a Cause concerns itself with young people, boys and girls who don't understand the world, and about a world that doesn't understand them. Okay, Dave? Close enough. Now, what's the action here? What? Well, in the sequence we're going to shoot today, Jimmy Dean and his friend Plato, played by Sal Moneo, are cornered by a high school gang up here in the planetarium parking lot. I see, and Jimmy gets pushed around. This scene's a little more complicated, and it gets a more complicated treatment. Different angles, different setups. The day grows. The light changes. Suddenly, it's high noon, and speaking of movie magic, presto. Swiss steak, string beans, macaroni with cheese, soup, salad, dessert, tea, milk, and coffee. For 300 people, served piping hot on top of a mountain. Pardon me, for 302 people. Here's Natalie Wood, the kind of fresh young face and macaroni-proof young figure that the movie industry is always seeking, and who isn't? Hello, Natalie. Oh, hello, Gabe. Please sit down. Thank you. How's the food? Best location food I ever ate. Well, I must say you certainly seem to thrive on it. Well, I was brought up on it. I've been eating lunch on the set since I was four years old. That's correct. Natalie's a movie veteran, been in pictures since 1941. Is that correct? That's right. She's played daughter and granddaughter to almost every top star in the business. Oh, but I can be a femme fatale, too. Why, in Rebel Without a Cause, I play a very bad girl. But a very pretty veteran, and if what Mr. Jack Warner tells me is correct, and I'm sure it is, we're going to be seeing a lot of you. Thank you, Gabe. Thank you, Natalie Wood, and I hope you enjoy your lunch. The trouble is, you see, the sun doesn't stop for lunch. It moves right on into the afternoon, racing toward evening. Even at 2.45, shadows begin to form. When you're working in CinemaScope and WarnerColor, the sun needs help. And shot by shot, the big scene of the day is put on film, a knife fight played against the backdrop of a city far below. Each line in the script girl's master book represents a new angle, another viewpoint, perhaps a close-up of one of the boys, perhaps a sudden glimpse of a flashing hand, a smile, a lunge. The scene is a challenge, a duel, a dance between two boys in rebellion against the world. The film must tell it all, and as the day marches on, the lines in the typewritten page slowly grow and multiply. 5.45, the same scene, 11 different angles photographed on 11 different strips of film, each carefully numbered. And now, okay boys, wrap them up. The day is done, put to bed all through. What you saw today up at the planetarium doesn't really begin to tell the story of Rebel. That knife fight, for example, is a result, not a cause. The real cause of Rebel is here, in what we call our key scene. I'd like to show it to you. No, I don't want you to go to the police. There were other people. Why should you be the only one involved? Because I am involved, and you're involved. Mom, a boy was killed tonight. I don't see how we can get out of that by pretending it didn't happen. Now look, look, Jim, you know that you did wrong. That is the main thing. That's nothing. That's nothing. You told me to always tell the truth. You can't turn that off just like that. But he's not saying that. He's saying don't volunteer. Just tell a little white lie. Is that what you want? You'll learn, you'll learn, Jim, when you're older. I don't think that I want to learn that way. Well, it doesn't matter anyway, because we're moving. You're not turning me loose. Well, that's news to me. Just why are we moving? Oh, do I have to spell it out? You are not going to use me as an excuse again, Mom. Oh, you every time you can't face yourself, you want to move, and you say it's me. That's not true. You say it's me. She says it's the neighborhood. You give me all kinds of phony excuses. I just want to do one thing right. James Dean was obviously an extremely complex personality, a riddle even to those who knew him best. On rare occasions, however, he let the curtain part and permit a glimpse into his past. And it was Dean's past that put an indelible stamp on what he was to become. James Byron Dean was born in 1931 to a sensitive mother who surrounded him with warmth, encouraging him to These were his only serene years, for at nine, his mother suddenly died, and to a child's mind, she had deserted him. Sent by his father to the Indiana farm of an aunt and uncle, he felt this too a form of parental rejection. Something would be emotionally missing for the rest of his life. He seemed to like the farm and its simple ways, which haven't changed much to this day. And his uncle and aunt, hard-working Quakers, gave him all the comfort and affection they could. But they could never enter the hidden places of childhood where he nursed the pain of losing his parents. The nearest town was Fairmont, a quiet, Andy Hardy sort of place, where Dean went to school and despite his secret hurts, became an apparently well-adjusted emerging, though comparatively short, as a high school basketball star. He also distinguished himself by capturing first place in the state's dramatic speaking contest, with a monologue called The Madman, which he began with a blood-curdling scream. High school dramatics, undoubtedly the influence of his artistic mother, began to intrigue him, and here too he gave everything his own distinctive, if bizarre, touch. At 18, James Dean left Fairmont, Indiana, for Hollywood, California, to live again briefly with his father, now a virtual stranger, and to become an actor. This was Dean's very first professional role as the Apostle John in a father-patent television drama. Jimmy had barely a handful of lines, but his brief appearance in this religious program inspired girls at one Catholic high school into forming the first James Dean fan club. His acting was stilted, yet something else must have come across. I suggest we leave these precincts and go back to Galilee, where we belong. Good suggestion, Andrew. Well spoken, Andrew. Now that's wisdom. Surely we did not spend three years following the Master to return again to our nets. Was it for this the Master sent us out to cure the sick, cast out death? Andrew, rejoice. He has risen as he promised. No one! You're just like all the rest of them! You're all against me! All of you! All of you! An astonishingly new James Dean, without robes or sainthood, began to emerge on television in the early 1950s. Raised on an Indiana farm, Dean was the antithesis of a big city delinquent, but he had a raw sensitivity for roles filled with anger and rage. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Johnny, boy, I'm coming! I'm coming down, boy! No, I said put that gun down! Come and get me! We can't take any more chances. Let him have it! That was one of James Dean's first and rather typical television roles in New York. He went there in 1951 because that's where the action was for young talent in those early days. He was fiercely ambitious, an ambition that began, as one version has it, when as a boy he wept angrily over his mother's grave and vowed that because she left him, he would show her he would be great without her. As a struggling actor, James Dean did some starving, but not for long. He was soon appearing in numerous early TV dramas, like this one with Georgie Ann Johnson, in which he played a psychotic convict. At the same time, on the Broadway stage, he won a Tony as the most promising young performer of the year. In acting circles, he was already being recognized as a natural, projecting remarkable emotional intensity. Tell me what my name is. My name is Hank Braden. Before I was a convict, I was an intern, a good intern with a bad temper. My only weakness was, never mind. Now you say to me, hello Hank Braden. You're hurting me. Go on, play it! Make believe I'm carrying your books home from school and you're hysterical with joy because my name is right, my money is right. I belong to a good fraternity. My car's a long yellow convertible. Dean's early success and distinctive personal chemistry brought him back to Hollywood within three short years. This time as a star, not an easy transition to make for an insecure 23-year-old. But somehow that insecurity and all the other emotions that drove Dean personally were poured with stunning impact in films like Rebel Without a Cause, which also transformed a child actress into a major new star, Natalie Wood. Natalie, all kinds of studies are coming out now about James Dean and his significance as a social rebel. You starred in that picture. So many years later, what do you think that Dean's screen image conveyed? Well, I think the main thing that it conveyed was his need, you know, was his kind of emotional need. And I think that really he was not a rebel in the sense that he was not rejecting parents. He wasn't sort of saying, leave me alone, I don't want to have anything to do with you. I'm going to do my own thing. He was really saying, listen to me, you know, hear me, love me. He wasn't blaming anyone. He wasn't, but he was just trying to get that connection, you know, so much in Rebel, the scene where he was saying to his father, you know, he was trying to make the parents into people that, you know, he could love and into people that would help him, that would give him. It seems to me that kids today are sort of saying, it's a wrap. I'm turning on and I'm dropping out. And Jimmy was really trying to fight his way through still, I think, you know, in a very active way. You know, he was saying, stand up to his dad, you know, and communication. Yeah, exactly that. Is it possible that Dean blazed the trail for the Mick Jaggers, Bob Dylan's, David Bowie's, even the Alice Cooper's without one, wouldn't we have had the others? Well, maybe not. I mean, maybe one is the, you know, it's the, it's the other side of the moon. But I think that it's interesting that at that time he had such an impact, even before his death, you know, and then certainly with his death and now still again, all these years later. So there must be something universal in what Jimmy transmitted, you know. He planted a big seed. Oh, yeah. Now, what about Dean himself in those days? What can you remember about him that made him so intriguing? Well, again, the thing about Jimmy that strikes me now in looking back, I mean, at the time, he seemed like a great nonconformist and a great rebel and eccentric and all of that. But really, he was eccentric only, by today's standards, he wouldn't be eccentric at all, I don't think. I mean, he wouldn't wear ties. He wouldn't wear suits. He wouldn't go to social functions. He wouldn't do the Hollywood thing. You know, he wouldn't do what the studios expected him to do. But yet today, many actors don't do any of those things. You know, most young people don't wear, you know, don't get dressed up and do all of that. Exactly. I mean, nobody does. But I think, you know, he was not into drugs or anything very spooky or weird. I think he was a very healthy young man. Spiritual, I want to say. Yeah, it's very moody and poetic, but not freaked out or drugged out or anything like that. Natalie, at the time, was he aware of the fact that he was becoming a cultural symbol and a star? No, not a cultural symbol. He certainly wasn't aware of that. I don't think he was at that time. But he was very aware of the fact that he was a star. There was no escaping it. I mean, eyes were on him. And I remember when we did a television show before we did Rebel, and we used to go to lunch on his motorcycle to a nearby hamburger joint. And he used to be fascinated with the stories that were being written about him in the movie magazines, you know. A lot of them were about his love affair with Pierangeli, and he would read them. He wouldn't buy them, but he would be fascinated, you know, and then he'd sort of, you know. Well, he'd think they were trash and sort of... Well, he wouldn't really say, you know. I think he was trying to figure out, you know, or keep a part of himself to himself. And then he was trying to figure out why did they see him in this other way, or how was he being seen by others, you know. Nick had felt passionate about a discovery that really he was one of the first to make. And that was that the kind of delinquency we were seeing among young people wasn't restricted to what was then called the ghetto. There was a lot of restlessness among middle-class young people who were acting out in ways that one would never expect. And he realized that this was a function of the family, not a function of an economic situation at all. It was their own rage at being raised by people whose values were old-fashioned to them, and at the kind of parenting that young people were experiencing in the wake of World War II. Explanations had to be found, and that this was certainly food for Hollywood. There was this property at Warner Brothers called Rebel Without a Cause. Which was a book by a psychiatrist named Robert Linder that had nothing to do with this, but was the day-by-day psychoanalysis, one part of it at least, of a young prisoner. When Ray went to see Trilling at the studio, Trilling assumed that Ray was going to do the film based on Robert Linder's book. And Ray said, no, I want to make a film about the normal kid who lives next door who is about to explode. And Trilling said, everybody knows that all delinquents come from poor homes. They come from poverty. These kids go to good schools. These kids have good families. They wouldn't turn into crime. And Ray said, well, I can't explain it. All I can do is tell you what I've read in the newspapers and in magazines and in talking to kids and cops and adults. And he had found that on Mulholland Drive, there was a tunnel. And that at night, various groups of these kids would dare each other to race through the tunnel at each other. And the first one to pull out of the line of approach was Chicken. He wrote a 17-page treatment, which he called The Blind Run. The treatment opens up with three vignettes, violent vignettes. One is of a boy setting a man on fire and then watching him burn. Another is of, I guess, two boys beating a girl with a whip. And the third is a blind run. There's two cars coming at each other inside a tunnel. And he presented it to Warner Brothers. And then they turned around and called it Rebel Without a Cause and not The Blind Run. And he was very upset about that. Nick Ray's first attempt to get a screenwriter was Clifford Odets. Clifford Odets was a friend of Ray's and he trusted Odets' instincts as a writer. And the studio said, well, okay, that's fine. But we really have our own writer already. And his name is Leon Uris. He's written Battle Cry. Battle Cry is doing fabulously well. But then he and Uris could not agree on the concept of the film. Uris saw this macro picture. He saw communities at risk rather than individuals. Ray saw the film as a character study. The studio then made a second choice for Ray. Again, not his own choice. And that was Irving Shulman. And Shulman came into the project without preconceptions. But somewhere along the way, they had disagreements over the final planetarium sequence. Ray had a feeling that he wanted a sense of classical tragedy about the story, that there should be symbolic qualities to the scenes at the planetarium. Shulman insisted that the planetarium sequence was just a setting. So, okay, now you've got two writers. You haven't gotten along with either one of them. You're now about four months into pre-production for the film. You haven't got a finished script. Enter Stuart Stern. I went to a party at Gene Kelly's, and Nick Ray was a guest. Ray remembered a film called Teresa, which had been directed by Fred Zinnemann. And Stern had been nominated for an Oscar for his writing in that film. Ray admired the film for the way the characters were portrayed. Being with Fred, who had a gift for empathizing with people from a different background, and getting them to talk, and seeing the wealth of story that came out of life, taught me everything that I ever needed as a writer. In looking at what Irving had done, those are not people I would have written, because I think almost everything I've written has been autobiographical. If I can't respond to material, it means it's not for me. And neither was his script. I think it was extremely competent, but I was nowhere in it. Nick sensed that, knew that. We talked about that. And he said, you've got to write your script, and I've got to make my picture. He had terrible pangs of conscience about himself as a father. And I had terrible fury about myself as a son. And we both knew that that was a stream that we both shared in different ways. What's the matter with you anyhow? He's just loaded, honey. I was talking to Jim. My mother really was never content with anything. And that there was really nothing dad could do that could win her, because she could not give him love. He fell into that role of being a placater, idolizing her, adoring her. As he said to me once, my life has been a series of insults. Oh, she eats him alive and he takes it. He did put her apron on one night. These things just, they pop out of your own dramatization of what it was like for you. I'm in there like glue in every scene. I'm both Plato and Jim. I had never acted out the way Jim Stark acted out. I had wanted to, but I had had heroes. I don't know what I would have done without a model to cling to. And there were others who used me. And Rebel was like that to me. Plato, in my mind, was the starving orphan. Who needed to be sure there would be a father and a mother there that would protect him. Know what he wanted? What? He tried to make us his family. And then I felt that Jim being fatherless would have the same search. He was searching for his father to stand up. You better give me something fast. I think Buzz saw in this new kid what he was and that this knife fight was a ritual of that. When we decided that they would run away to a place that was an ideal, they arrive at Neverland where there was mystery and privacy, but a million doors. And Plato is the Lost Boys. So it's Peter, Wendy and the Lost Boys. And I said, it's going to be operatic. These are not going to be realistic scenes. And Nick said, well, that's what it is. It's opera when you're that old. And then the idea of rounding it, having the symmetry of an early sequence at the planetarium in which the whole subject of the unimportance of man and of man existing alone. And this whole story being about children existing alone and having to find each other. And will the world end at night or at dawn? And I knew right away that it was going to be 24 hours. It would start ending at night, but it would not end until dawn. Well, this is going to be one terrific day. And Nick said, that's really tight. Tomorrow you'll be nothing. He said, that's right. When you're a kid, he said, it can be a whole life that happens in 24 hours. Nick Ray was trained to be an architect. He was a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright. And that was probably the field he would have gone into if he were not fascinated by the theater. He loved the theater first as an actor, then as a writer. And in the 30s, he worked with a theatrical group called the Group Theater in New York City, which was a kind of a radical left wing kind of a group. There he met Ilya Kazan. While they were screening East of Eden, Nicholas Ray was there by invitation of Ilya Kazan. And over in the corner was James Dean. He watched Dean in the film play Caltrask. And then he would look back at the real James Dean. And it was like, this can't be the same guy. And that's when actually Nicholas Ray met James Dean. And he didn't have any teeth. He always wore a bridge in front because he'd fallen out of the barn loft as a kid and broken his front teeth. Natalie Wood was looking for a role that would get her out of adolescent roles and into adult roles. Oh, that's a new disease. A friend of yours. Natalie understood that Ray was looking for a bad girl. She would kill for this role, you know, and she went to Jack Warner about it and she went to Nick about it. There's a wonderful story about her, Faye Newell and Dennis Hopper being in a car accident and calling Nick Ray, not her parents, but Nick Ray to come down to the hospital to to see her. So Nick Ray went down to the hospital and here's Natalie on a stretcher with a possible concussion, points down the hall to a doctor and says, you see that son of a bitch? He called me a juvenile delinquent. Now do I get the part? She felt a little insecure with Jimmy, I think. She respected his ability and she was thrilled to be able to work with someone so in touch with his feelings. And interestingly enough, that was the place where Natalie felt weakest because she had never studied. She wasn't a New York actress, but she sure knew the movie business and knew what the character was. She really knew that character very well. Salminio had been in a film called Six Bridges to Cross, but other than that he had no major film experience. His chemistry with Dean was so good that I don't think Ray could choose anybody else. And one of the things that Ray was trying for was to surround Dean with as many sympathetic people as possible. Night after night on that old platform they had in the parking lot, working with one hot floodlight, putting these kids to the test to see who would function together as a real gang. Nick said, what do you think about the film? I said, well, some of it's kind of phony. And Jimmy kind of broke into a laugh. It was like kind of an immediate bonding because I was being honest. So he said, well, what's phony about it? And I said, well, the gang just seems a little strange. Some of the dialogue and the cars are driving and some of the clothes just seemed like it wasn't what was really going on at the time. Nick said, can you prove that? So what I did is I called an Athenian meeting. So we're going to meet this gang down at Mimi's because they hassled Nick and Jimmy, who were supposedly an uncle and a nephew. Because nobody knew who James Dean was at that point. You'll see what it's like when a group of guys are getting ready to go to war. Nick had this little wire recorder at the time he had in his jacket. The fight almost broke out and I had to really shut it down. Nick said, OK, we get the picture. I want you to come out to the studio. He says, I'll give you an office right next to me. He says, I want you to take the script, go through the script. And I'm not rewriting any of Stuart's stuff, obviously. He says, but if anything strikes you strange, just let me know. Just make a note. He says, I want you to select the cars. I want you to select the clothes and I want you to hang out with Jimmy. And then Jimmy would go to club meetings, hang out with the Athenians. All of us wanted to make this a black and white film because it just asked for it. It would have been much more convincing, we thought. The lawyers apparently had not read the fine print. In the contract for anybody using Cinemascope, the licensor of Cinemascope said, if you film in Cinemascope, you must also film in color. I remember hassling with the guys. It's not what these guys drive. And the car that we all love was a 49 Merc. So I said, Jimmy should drive the 49 Merc and we'll just customize it. I was talking to Nick and Jimmy one day and this knife fight situation came up. My best friend got stabbed. And this guy does a switchblade on me. And I'm standing there thinking, well, OK, I'm not going to back up. And I pulled my leather jacket over my hand. And what I did is I started boxing, fainting. And I think I hit him with a nice left hook because I could throw the left hook and proceeded to do him in. And Nick said, look, what I want you to do is get with Jimmy and Corey and stage it just the way it happened, just the fainting and all that kind of stuff. So if you look at the knife fight, it's a boxing match, except two guys have knives. He catches Jimmy and actually actually clips him. And Nick sees that he's been hit with the knife and he says, cut, cut, cut. And Jimmy gets furious and grabs Nick and says, don't ever, ever say cut. Don't ever, ever say cut to me. I'll say cut if something's wrong. Don't you ever cut the scene. He really cut me. And like, you know, this is part of the scene. And I want that reality. I was furious and walked off the set. And it took a while before we started shooting again. There was a scene in particular where Dean was having trouble with the confrontation scene with his parents and Dean saw the staircase in Ray's house and said, that's where we should do the scene. He said, yeah, my mother's at the top. My father's at the bottom. And I'm symbolically in the middle. Well, Ray said, great. And so he went and he told the set decorator, I want you to replicate my entire living room. And that's the way we're going to do that scene. Bacchus described it as a hair raising experience. They did the shot about 12 or 13 times. On one of those occasions, he actually broke part of the staircase. I mean, Nick, I have such adoration for so much of what he did and the way he bowed to Jimmy, the way he seduced that performance out of him by giving him so much room to be creative himself. It was a foretelling of how a boy who wants desperately to have a father who will protect him finally realizes that that father exists in himself. To put that together, as Jimmy had to have done, and realize that he could create that nugget at the beginning that would let the audience know what this movie was about without explaining it to them was some of the most elegant screenwriting that I've ever come across.