The Making of "Rebel Without a Cause" (review)

Detailed Look

I live and teach in Indiana, the state that proudly claims iconic actor James Dean as one of its sons. Last year it was impossible to avoid celebrations of the actor's shortened life—he died fifty years earlier. In September 1955, Dean collided with another driver at the intersection of Highways 466 and 41 in southern California shortly after completing two films upon which his legacy has been built, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant. The moody, brooding persona Dean struck on the screen was reflective—as countless commentators have observed—of the actor's nature. When he died, the American silver screen lost a budding leading man. Because of that, every detail of Dean's brief career seems precious. And so we get to see how an icon is created through the pouring over of this handsome actor's troubled life through legitimate biographies to exposes on E!

Now, Douglas Rathgeb, a research librarian at the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California, offers a detailed look at the film that did the most to create Dean's legend, Rebel Without a Cause. Relying primarily on the copious production records, memos, and notes contained in the Warner Brothers file, Rathgeb has reconstructed the development of Rebel from story idea through the final picture's release. Because the work is based so closely on written records, it is quite different from so many offerings in motion picture studies, which typically reveal more about the author than the film. However, if many works suffer from a dearth of documentation, Rathgeb's book succumbs to the inverse—there is simply too little analysis.

Rathgeb does provide what his title suggests: this is literally the making of Rebel Without a Cause. Yet in his effort to negotiate every step of the moviemaking process—minor as well as major—Rathgeb rarely pauses to discuss what made this particular film unique. In fact, the most obvious reason—that it was one of Dean's last projects and still his most memorable—does not factor all that much into Rathgeb's story. Rather, he studies the machinations behind the production of the film, an approach that can be quite interesting, especially when Rathgeb discusses the morass of assigning credit for to those who helped write the screenplay.

One does get a sense of strange creatures that inhabit Hollywood, from director Nicholas Ray, who sounds like he had borderline personality disorders (and who slept with Natalie Wood, thirty years his junior, during the filming of Rebel) to the stable of writers, including Stern, a budding, young novelist named Leon Uris, and the largely forgotten Irving Shulman, who lost out to Ray's outsize ego and never received credit for helping to write the story upon which Stern based his script.

Rathgeb goes to considerable lengths to detail how the story and script came together, including Nicholas Ray's research on gangs in the Hollywood area. Of course, the meticulous care Ray and the writers gave to this story came under the blundering scrutiny of studio executives, or so Rathgeb implies. Jack Warner personally read Stern's script, making comments and changes to it that belied the studio boss's commercial expectations—he wanted to play it a bit safe—and his desire for brevity and sharpness. There were the inevitable trials with the Production Code Administration, but the film survived Geoffrey Shurlock, Hollywood's chief censor, without losing much of its bite.

Near the end of his book, Rathgeb offers Rebel's actors, writers, and technicians moved on to other projects with varying degrees of success and concludes, "For some, Rebel was a first stepping stone on the path to success. For others, it was an unexpected and memorable peak on the horizon of their otherwise unremarkable careers" (196). Rathgeb has...