The James Dean Story

“A different kind of motion picture,” an artist’s biography from documentary photographs given a “dynamic exploration”, from interviews with family and friends, with location footage of his home town in Indiana (Fairmount), and concluding with a screen test for East of Eden.

The film is addressed to “the fans who made him,” so as “to separate hero from legend”. James Dean in high school won the statewide championship of the National Forensic League in a piece by Dickens, he drew and painted and sculpted.

At UCLA, he quarreled with the fraternity regimen and left the theater department to go to New York, where he acted extensively in live and filmed television, took dance class, and appeared on and off Broadway.

Kazan brought him definitively to Hollywood, where his success created the myth of his characters.