New James Dean Movie to Explore Queer Relationship
"Surviving James Dean" will dramatize James Dean's complicated relationship with best friend and onetime lover William Bast
Timed to the sixty-ninth anniversary of James Dean’s death on Sept. 30, writer-director Guy Guido announced that he has acquired the film rights to William Bast’s 2006 memoir Surviving James Dean and plans to make a movie depicting Bast’s relationship with Dean. Bast’s book depicted a complex relationship between Bast, who was gay, and Dean, who kept his sexuality a secret, even from Bast. According to Bast’s memoir, the two briefly had a sexual relationship during a retreat in Borrego Springs in the spring of 1954, and in the fall of 1955 Dean had promised Bast that they would live together once he finished shooting Giant, a few days before Dean’s death.
“I have been a fan and historian of James Dean since I was 18 years old, so I knew about his ‘friend’ Willie, even when information about their relationship was straight-washed by the Hollywood machine,” Guido said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. “As a filmmaker, I love telling the story of a celebrity’s life in their coming-of-age period. As a gay man, I was particularly drawn to Bast’s unique story.”
Guido said that the script is finished and the movie is already attracting attention from production companies. I am glad to hear it, since the publicity surrounding a movie about James Dean’s sexuality can feed directly into interest for my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, out November 19, which covers some of the same material with thorough documentation and critical analysis.
Surviving James Dean was a revision of Bast’s 1956 biographical memoir James Dean, which the propriety if the 1950s and of the editors at Ballantine Books required be expurgated. Bast’s revised version restored much of the gay content Bast had self-censored from the earlier edition, including descriptions of the pair’s sexual relationship and information Bast knew about Dean’s sexual relationship with radio producer Rogers Brackett, theater producer Lemuel Ayers, and at least one TV director. Contemporary documents I uncovered, however, show that Bast’s 2006 book was not always accurate, as Bast’s memory faded a bit over the intervening half century.
Guido’s film, if produced, will be the third version of the story to hit screens. In 2012, Joshua Tree, 1951: A Portrait of James Dean presented a highly fictionalized version of Bast’s and Dean’s relationship, taking significant liberties with the facts and including longstanding false claims about Dean’s alleged sadomasochistic sexual interests. The much-earlier 1976 TV movie James Dean, written by Bast, dramatized Bast’s 1956 memoir.
Notably, the 1976 film included the first indications from Bast that Dean had been involved in same-sex relationships. Bast told The Advocate at the time that he made the movie to “refute” claims that Dean had been gay, but the movie included surprising amounts of homoeroticism, including a somewhat confusing scene not included in the 1956 memoir (but later explained in Surviving James Dean in detail) in which Dean (Stephen McHattie) discusses homosexuality with Bast (Michael Brandon), suggests that he has had gay relationships, and encourages Bast to visit a gay bar.
NBC had forbidden the film from using the words “gay” or “homosexual,” but the resulting film was nevertheless so queer that the network aired it with an on-screen viewer advisory warning audiences about its homosexual content. (Published reviews from 1976 quoted explicitly gay dialogue that does not appear in the version of the film available on streaming services; I am unsure whether these were edited out at a later date or if newspapers worked from a rough cut that was trimmed before air.)
Guido’s film will follow in this tradition, providing a more complete and honest version of a story that had previously appeared only in allusion or under the cover of fiction.
Such honesty is needed. In announcing Guido’s movie, The Hollywood Reporter called the story a “purported gay romance,” while Rolling Stone labeled it an “alleged gay romance,” words that would rarely be applied to memoirs of male-female pairings.
Well, then maybe there is no objective truth even what one says. I know that your book, based on what I have read, will attempt to shoot down egregious falsehoods and provide some truth. But irrespective, Dean’s art is alive and well and seems secure in the future.
Interesting, I think one can accept as fact that Bast was moving in with Dean prior to latter death. Dean may have been gay and recognized that fact. I don’t know why Bast would stick to the sanitized story of the 50s and 60s publicly in a 2010 email transmission. In email, he stated that he thought there was a fine line between gay and straight. But Dean also said and did things with women that show that he may have been bi or still searching. The list of women include teacher in hometown, Beverly Wills, Liz Sheridan, Betsy Palmer, Arlene Sachs, Geraldine Page, Vampira, Barbara Glenn, Connie who was waitress with Dean while he filmed RWAC, Ursula Andress, Pier Angeli, Mitzi McCall, Alice Dunham, Lili Kardell, Natalie Wood. I am sure there are others I am missing. I think it not right for fabrications by heterosexuals or gays to be perpetuated because they wish him to be what they want him to be as opposed to what he was. Thanks for response.