A Tortured Giant

As a struggling young actor in New York in the early 1950s, Mark Rydell was friends with another up-and-coming talent, James Dean. Even then, Rydell knew Dean was exceptional. “I never met anyone more dedicated to the craft of excellence,” Rydell says.

Rydell has now directed a loving tribute to his late friend. “James Dean,” penned by playwright Israel Horovitz, premieres Sunday on TNT.

James Franco, who was a regular on the NBC series “Freaks and Geeks,” stars as the brooding, brilliant actor. Dean starred in just three films--”East of Eden,” “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant”--before his death at age 24 in a car crash on Sept. 30, 1955. He was subsequently nominated for two posthumous best actor Oscars, for “East of Eden” and “Giant.”

Rydell (“The Rose,” “On Golden Pond”) also appears in his film as Warner Bros. studio head Jack Warner. Michael Moriarty plays Dean’s father, and Enrico Colantoni co-stars as “East of Eden” director Elia Kazan.

“James Dean,” Rydell explains, is simply a story about a father and son. After the death of Dean’s beloved mother when he was 9, his cold and distant father sent him to live with his aunt and uncle on a farm in Indiana. Throughout his life, Dean attempted in vain to gain his father’s love.

“Jimmy’s hunger for his father was the single most important factor in his development as an artist and led to his death,” says Rydell.

“He was deeply attached to his mother and then being savagely rejected by his father, he overcompensated for feeling worthless. He had to be the best. He became the great basketball player in school and was so driven to be someone because the information he got was that he was a nobody.”

Dean’s tortured childhood, says Rydell, produced a recklessness in his personality--”a testing of the boundaries. He loved bullfighting and motorcycle riding.”

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Rydell recalls one late Sunday afternoon when he and Dean were walking down Madison Avenue after performing together on a live television show.

“He was talking about bullfighting,” says the director. “Buses would hurtle down Madison Avenue because it was deserted on Sunday. He ripped off his jacket, jumped in the road because he sensed a bus coming at 40 miles an hour. He did a pass with his jacket [like a bullfighter with a cape] and the bus flicked his shirt. He laughed hysterically.”

Rydell, who was in psychoanalysis at the time, remembers telling his therapist: “ ‘Jimmy Dean will not live. There is no way he can be testing the limits of human experience without one day something horrible happening to him.’ So when I heard it a year or so later [that Dean had died], I was devastated, but not surprised. It seems like it was his destiny to die [young].”

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The director conducted an exhaustive search to find the right actor to capture Dean’s pain, alienation, power and charm. “I almost gave up,” admits Rydell. He was ready to call TNT to inform them the project was off when Franco walked into the room for an audition.

Not only does Franco resemble Dean, he is a big fan of the late actor. “I love his work,” says Franco. “Brando was technically proficient, but Dean was so raw--a raw force.”

Because Dean was a heavy smoker, Franco took up smoking for the role--he’s since given up cigarettes. Franco also studied Dean’s movies and TV appearances “for the physical manifestation.” Rydell introduced him to several of Dean’s friends and co-stars, such as Martin Landau and Dennis Hopper, as well as Leonard Rosenman, who composed the scores for “East of Eden” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”

During production last summer, Franco didn’t socialize with his friends in order to parallel Dean’s own deep-rooted pain. “Obviously, he had a lot of friends, but I think there was a certain isolation that went back to the loss of his mother and the desertion by his father,” says Franco.

“I never really had anything like that in my life, and so to approximate that I had to get rid of the emotional support in my life for a while and then just focus and forget who I was.”

On Monday, TNT’s sister station, Turner Classic Movies, will air the 1957 documentary “The James Dean Story,” co-directed by Robert Altman, as well as “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Giant.”

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* “James Dean” can be seen Sunday at 8 and 10 p.m and midnight on TNT. The network has rated it TV-14-L (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with an advisory for coarse language).