Stewart Stern was raised in New York City, and after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Iowa he served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After a stint on Broadway and a beginning in Hollywood he returned to New York to write for live television before resuming his screenwriting career. The first of his Hollywood screenplays was Fred Zinnemann's Teresa (1951), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, and his next feature was Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) starring James Dean and Natalie Wood. His subsequent films, all marked by his characteristic emotional and psychological intensity, include The Rack (1956) starring Paul Newman; The James Dean Story (1957), a documentary co-directed by Robert Altman; The Ugly American (1963) starring Marlon Brando; and Paul Newman's Rachel, Rachel (1968) starring Joanne Woodward, which also received an Academy Award nomination for screenwriting. He also wrote the Oscar-winning short Benjy (1951) directed by Fred Zinnemann, and the highly regarded teleplay Sybil (1976) starring Sally Field. No longer writing for film, Stewart Stern has lived since 1986 in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Marilee.


 
baer: You always felt that it was a party at Gene Kelly's house in 1954 that helped youget the writing assignment for Rebel Without a Cause.

stern: That's right. At the time, I was living in New York, and I'd come out to L.A. for Christmas vacation and was taken to Gene's party by my cousin Arthur Loew, Jr. Marilyn Monroe was there, and Nick Ray, Stanley Donen, Adolph [Green] and Betty [Comden], and others. The usual Gene Kelly crowd. At one point that night, as they were planning to play charades, Nick Ray, whom I'd never met before, came over and said that he'd seen my first film, Fred Zinnemann's Teresa, and that he liked it very much. Then he said, "Maybe you'd like to come out to the studio and talk some time?" Or something like that. What I didn't know was that Lenny Rosenman, who'd done the score for East of Eden, and who was a friend and roommate of Jimmy Dean's in New York, had talked to Nick about me because Nick was having script problems with Rebel—which Irving Shulman was writing at the time. I also didn't know that Jimmy, whom I'd only met a few days before the Kelly party, had also talked to Nick about me. So Nick got interested, screened Teresa, and decided to approach me at the party. Eventually, I went to Warner Brothers, talked things over with Nick, and was given the job.

baer: Rebel had a long studio history before you came on the project. The title came from an actual case study of a disturbed young man written by Dr. Robert Lindner in 1944. Three years later, Warner Brothers bought the screen rights, and Marlon Brando was contracted to play the lead. The studio, however, never followed through.But after the box office success of The Wild One, Warners' approved a completelydifferent project about "juvenile delinquency" that was suggested by Nick Ray and given the title of Lindner's book. When the novelist Leon Uris wrote an unsatisfactoryscreenplay, Irving Shulman, the author of The Amboy Dukes, was hired to do a secondversion. But Ray was still dissatisfied, and he made up his mind to "get a young,beginning writer," and you were hired to do a brand new script. Apparently, you never read the Uris script. Was the Shulman version very useful?

stern: It wasn't useful until it was clear that I didn't have to use it. The reason is that Irving and I had very different sensibilities. At the time, I was in my eighth year of therapy, and I was "hot" with it. Everything seemed psychologically motivated to me, and there was very little of that kind of psychological approach in Irving's script. I also couldn't identify with the kids in his script; they seemed awfully macho to me, and I was always afraid of the macho guys in high school. So I had a very different perspective, and I wanted to go in a different direction. For one thing, I couldn't wait to blame the parents. I also wanted to start from scratch and do my own research. Nevertheless, there were a number of things that Irving used—like the setting of the planetarium—which I liked very much, especially when I saw the place for the first time. It was like a Greek temple, like the Theater Dionysus, and the way the steps came down from its great doors reminded me of the skenethat used to stand in front of the back wall of the ancient Greek theaters—where they did the sacrifices. The king always came from there, and often died there, and the gods came down on the roof of it. So it seemed like an amazing place to round out the story of Rebel. I felt that the story should begin there and that some crucial, concluding event should take place there as well—maybe a sacrifice of some kind. So that was one thing I was grateful to Irving for. Another aspect of his script that I liked was something that Nick conceived in his original pitch to Warner Brothers called "Blind Run." The blind run was a head-on confrontation—with two cars coming at each other in the Sepulveda Tunnel—and whichever driver swerved out of the way first was called "chicken." But since I'm terrified of heights, I thought that an even worse possibility would be driving toward the edge of a cliff, as fast as you can, and then rolling out of the car before it went over the precipice. So that's why Millertown Bluff is in the picture. I also kept the character names that Irving had created—Jim, Judy, and Plato—and I used a scene of his that took place in a drive-in theater, but it never made it into the picture.

baer: So, with those few ideas, you began your research?

stern: Yes. I asked Nick if he would facilitate my going to Juvenile Hall, and he did. Nick loved the way that the reception part of the juvenile office was laid out—with the booths and glass windows—so you could see the other people through the windows, and he wanted me to exploit that setting to develop the relationships of the characters. So I went down to juvenile hall, and the first kid I interviewed was a famous actor's son, who'd just gotten out of jail. He'd been in a lot of trouble, and he'd had a really heartbreaking experience with his father when he left the facility. I learned a great deal talking with him. So, every night, from around five o'clock into the early morning, I was at Juvenile Hall, and they gave me a clipboard, and I talked to an awful lot of troubled young kids. After about three days, I was even given access to some selected files: the psychiatric testing, the inkblots, and all the stuff they did in processing those kids.

baer: Did you talk to the kids privately?

stern: Yes. They were brought in from their holding areas, and we'd have a private conference.

baer: Did they know you were a screenwriter?

stern: No. They assumed I was a social worker or something. Someone they could talk to. Someone who would listen.

baer: Did any of the kids' specific experiences impact on the script?

stern: There was one young boy who'd been brought in for killing some ducklings—which I changed to puppies for the film. In talking to that kid, I discovered a great deal about Plato. And there was one very large girl who was having a terrible time with her father, but she was too young to understand any of the sexual connotations. She only knew that he was constantly rejecting her. She wasn't allowed to wear lipstick—or do anything to make herself look more feminine—even though her father allowed her younger sister to do it. And that became a kind of signal for the relationship between Judy and her father in the picture. It was very, very important for me to talk to those kids before I wrote the script.

baer: You were thirty-two at the time, and you'd been hired as a "young" writer. Was your relative youth an asset in comprehending the teenage angst and loneliness that James Dean—now a cultural icon in his famous red windbreaker—so powerfully portrayed in the film?

stern: I think it did. At thirty-two I certainly wasn't a kid any more, but I'd never been able to shake my own high school experiences. They were still very fresh in my mind. I clearly remembered my youthful, romantic idealization of certain high school kids who were older than I was—or who were more athletic than I was. I understood the longing to be accepted by them and to be "chosen" as a friend by one of them: to be taught, to be protected, and to be taken out of my creative shell. When I was in high school I wanted to be a painter, and I never participated in athletics. My dad wasn't that kind of father, and he rarely played sports himself. When my parents sent me off to summer camp, I always felt terribly isolated and even hid myself when the whistle blew for after-supper baseball. I was terrified of having to get up to bat, or having to catch a ball. So I was always searching for someone who'd take care of me and show me how to do things. At the same time, I knew the problem from the other side as well because in my high school days a number of other kids came to me for support. So I knew what it felt like to befriend somebody who wasn't popular, at a time when I had such a strong desire to be popular myself. I was forced to make difficult decisions. Should I be seen in the school hallway with someone who wasn't "in" with the girls who set all the social patterns? Decisions like that had been incredibly painful for me, and I was still trying to work them out when I was in the Army. By the time of Rebel, I was in therapy with Dr. Frederick Hacker and dealing directly with those issues. I still am. I think I'm the oldest patient in the world, celebrating my fiftieth year in therapy. I can't tell you how many therapists have been cured just dealing with me!

baer: I wanted to ask you about your war experience. In 1945 you were an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, and you were, for a time, listed as "missing in action."

stern: That's right, but I didn't know I was missing. Iknew where I was.

baer: Were you with other soldiers?

stern: Yes, but our division had been smashed to smithereens, and we had no overall organization. We were really just self-contained little groups fighting rear-guard actions with raggedy elements of other divisions.

baer: So eventually they discovered that your small group had survived?

stern: That's right.

baer: You once said that you felt your war experiences helped you understand your audience better.

stern: Definitely. Because I was forced to deal with all kinds of different people that I'd never encountered before—and I found out that I didn't have to live in an "ivory tower" as I'd done in high school. For the first time, I realized that even rough, tough people could really like me if I was just myself—even if I wrote poetry and liked art. I also discovered, as I listened to other people's problems, that I sometimes had the answers they wanted, just as they sometimes had the answers I needed. I discovered an ability to communicate with a lot of very different people, without being afraid, without having to hide who I was. It was like a miracle, and I really bonded with the infantry and with my group in particular. Before we went overseas, at Camp Atterbury in Indiana, I became very close friends with a big, powerful kid from the toughest part of Chicago named Jim Sramek. He was a very devout Catholic who'd sneaked into the Army at sixteen, and I was a sheltered Jewish doctor's boy who longed to be in the Navy, but we liked each other very much—even though he often kidded me about writing poetry—and when they made me staff sergeant, squad leader, I chose Sramek as my assistant. Then one night, when I was working in the office, there was a terrible ruckus in the barracks—a terrible fight. It took me quite a while to learn the truth, but apparently some guy had called me a kike, and Sramek had taken him apart. Naturally, it made a great impact on me, and we're still close friends today. He even named one of his ten children "Stewart." So I learned back then that I could be friends with all kinds of people, even ones very different from myself, and that we really could help each other. I remember during the German attack on the first morning of the Bulge, there was a kid in my squad named Rogers, and he was just shaking himself to pieces with fear, as I was too. He didn't know what to do; he didn't know whether to cuss or cry. So I diverted him. I knew that he liked to draw horses and cowboys, and I pulled out my notebook, and we stood in that trench full of freezing water with everything coming at us, and I showed him how to draw a horse in a rodeo scene. I'd learned in the Army that I didn't have to abandon who I was—an artist—because I'd learned that it had weight with other people. It stunned me at the time, and I guess it still does. But I discovered that everyone, no matter how much tough armor he's created around himself, is, fundamentally, a sensitive, responsive person who needs just as much reassurance as the rest of us. And that gave me a great deal of strength and insight, and it also informed my writing of Rebel—especially this whole question of the masks we feel we need to wear in front of others—and what exactly defines a "man." I wanted to say something about that in the script, and I thought that the Jim Stark-Plato relationship was striving for that. Here's one kid who's moved from town to town with a desperate need to be popular, and here's this other needy kid who hangs onto him—which Jim needs like a hole in the head. If I were re-writing it today, I would dramatize that even more—Jim's initial reluctance to let Plato hang around him.

baer: In the film, he's very accepting of this nerdy young kid.

stern: Yes, right away.

baer: And even though we admire Jim for that, it seems much more likely that he would have held him at arm's length for a while.

stern: Yes, and then moved toward it more gradually. But that's hindsight now. I do think the film offers an excellent counterpoint from Jim's point of view because Buzz offers him what he's offering to Plato, and there's that one special moment between them that's my favorite in the film.

baer: Right before the race?

stern: Yes, when they look over the cliff and talk. "I like you, you know that?" "Then why do we do this?" "We gotta do something, don't we?"

baer: It's one of the best moments in the film, and it works because of the context of the danger. Given the circumstances, we can believe that such a powerful bond has developed so quickly between Jim and Buzz.

stern: I think it still works.

baer: Now after you'd been given the job by Nick Ray and approved by Warner Brothers, you apparently couldn't get started on the script. Then you saw Kazan's On the Waterfront, and it really got you going. Was that because the films had things in common, or was it just a matter of being inspired by a great movie and a great script?

stern: It was both. Writing has always been torture for me, and I'm terrified the whole time. A lot of writers are. And I just couldn't start the script. In more recent times, I would have been grateful for a short writer's block like I had on Rebel because it only lasted a few days, not months or years. But back then, I just couldn't shake loose on Rebel, and I'd heard that On the Waterfront was a very powerful film and that it also dealt with the problems of some young people—although from a very different social class. I also thought that Brando and Dean, as performers, had a lot in common, having seen Jimmy's performance in East of Eden. Jimmy's sensitivities and choices of behavior were very similar to Brando, so I hoped that seeing Waterfront would be illuminating for me in some way. And it was. When I saw the film, it opened up everything for me—even more than I realized at the time. Last year, in a class I taught at the University of Washington, I had some of my students track various significant objects in On the Waterfront. We watched the film five times together, and I was amazed by the jacket of Terry Malloy!

baer: I was planning to ask you about that—if Dean's windbreaker was a little homage to Terry's jacket in On the Waterfront?

stern: I guess it was, but I didn't realize it until a year ago.

baer: That's amazing because it's so significant. It's not just about keeping "warm," it's. . .

stern: It's a talisman. In both films, it's a talisman of protection, and it's also something that I'd used in my first film, Teresa, with the sergeant's scarf. So the impulse came from Teresa, but the specifics came right out of On the Waterfront, without my being aware of it. Thank you, Budd Schulberg!

baer: So now you were underway—writing a script that David Dalton later described as "lean, provocative, psychologically charged and appropriately cosmic." You clearly wrote Rebel with great confidence, with very few corrections and few rewrites. Were you writing with the actual cast in mind? Warner Brothers had apparently considered Tab Hunter and Robert Wagner for the Dean role, and Margaret O'Brien and others for the Natalie Wood role.

stern: I knew Jimmy was doing it, and that was it. I knew that other girls were coming in to test for the Judy role, even Jayne Mansfield. All kinds of people.

baer: Was the Jayne Mansfield test serious?

stern: From her point of view, I guess it was. I don't know whether Nick ever had any intention of using her.

baer: You're well-known to be a very slow writer, but you wrote Rebel, your second feature film, very fast. Was it really five weeks?

stern: It was more than that. I think that's a legend. When did they begin shooting?

baer: The last script was dated March 25th, and the shooting began on the 30th.

stern: So I finished on March 25th, and I'd begun writing on the 1st or 2nd of January. I'm sure of that because I got stung on the eye by a bee at the time. So it took all of January, all of February, and most of March—eleven or twelve weeks to do the whole thing.

baer: That's still pretty fast.

stern: Yes, especially for me, and that was the whole thing because it included the research.

baer: Nick Ray clearly felt that the fifties' phenomenon designated "juvenile delinquency" was the result of emotional deprivation and not material deprivation—thus a sad repercussion of middle-class malaise. Were you completely comfortable with that assessment?

stern: I was. And I'd come across related material when I was doing research on the whole question of battle fatigue for Teresa. John Huston, of course, had done that wonderful documentary Let There Be Light about the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers with sodium amytol. The doctors couldn't find a way to treat the stammering, paralysis, and other phenomena that happened as a result of battle trauma until the "truth serum" let the patients relive the precipitating event, let it all surface. So my research made me realize that combat was merely an arena that could "trigger" feelings and behaviors which had their causes in pre-combat situations, and that such problems could have been triggered without a war. The initial damage could have happened in a kitchen somewhere with the dooming predictions of the parents. I'm convinced that many kids collapsed because of what their parents told them they were—or would be.

baer: Living up to the parents' worst fears?

stern: Yes, and often through subtle messages. For example, parents will often say, "Whatever you want to be is fine with us, we don't care, just be the best." But underneath that statement is a very important, understood caution not to be the very best, because dad was the "best." And if you got to be "better" than dad, then dad was in some way going to be demeaned—or even killed. So the cautionary limit that a child often put on himself so that he could maintain the love and interest of his parents—and not be abandoned for having gone too far—was to set impossible standards and then, consequently, to fail to fulfill them despite trying very hard. So I brought all of this with me in my thinking about the young people in Rebel and the problems they were going through. In the past, poverty had always been blamed for "juvenile delinquency," but the war made us realize that there were other, psychological causes—and that fact exacerbated the issue and made it more dramatic.

baer: Sometimes when you're speaking about these issues, you seem to be talking from Plato's point of view, and at other times from Jim's point of view. How much did you identify with these two male characters?

stern: I'm both of them. Of course, with some aspects of Jim, he's really the person I wish I'd been, while Plato is the me I always tried to leave behind but never could.

baer: In an attempt to portray the psychological complexity of the Jim character, Nick Ray apparently envisioned a split-screen sequence in which Jim, while talking to his parents has this odd reverie about entering a carnival shooting gallery and shooting a balloon that has his father's face on it. Is that true?

stern: Yes, it is.

baer: Did you actually write it, or did you just talk him out of it?

stern: I wrote it. I wrote a couple of split-screen sequences, including one for Plato. Nick came up with the idea because he didn't know how to fill up the CinemaScope screen. He was very afraid of "big heads" taking over the screen, so he thought he could show, simultaneously, what these kids were doing and what they were fantasizing in their heads. He never did decide what would happen to the people in the foreground when the fantasy started. Do these other people shut up? Do they continue to move? Do they move in dumb show? Do they freeze? What happens? But even though Nick was undecided, he told me to write that scene, which I did. I sometimes read it aloud to people because it's hilarious. It's a terribly funny scene. So back then, I showed it to David Weisbart, the producer, and he said, "Well, what do you think?" And I said, "I think it's terrible. I hate it." And when David admitted that he felt the same way, I said, "He can't be allowed to do it, David," and he agreed, "I'll talk him out of it." So David laid down the law with Nick, and that was the end of it.

baer: When the script was done in March, Ray sent you to his mentor, Elia Kazan, so Kazan could read the screenplay. You've said that it was a very unpleasant experience. What happened?

stern: It was very uncomfortable, but not because of Kazan. Nick had instructed me to take Kazan the script, so I went to his home on the East Side somewhere, just down the block from Steinbeck's. Kazan was very gracious, and he gave me a sandwich, and I sat in the living room while he took the script inside—because Nick insisted that I wait there while Kazan read it. When Kazan was done, he handed me back the script, and I said goodbye.

baer: He didn't say anything?

stern: Not that I can remember.

baer: Did he say anything to Ray?

stern: I guess so, but I don't know what.

baer: It sounds very strange.

stern: It was. I remember standing in Kazan's house, watching a man I assumed was Steinbeck out the back window. He was about two gardens away, sitting in his backyard typing.

baer: Now just before shooting was about to start, James Dean vanished and the bewildered studio was threatening to replace him. Then he called you up one night and asked your advice. What was he so worried about?

stern: Nick. Nick in comparison to Kazan. By that time, there was a lot of talk about Kazan's East of Eden, and how superb it was, and Jimmy said, "I really want this picture to be as good as Eden, but I'm worried that Nick might not be able to do what Kazan did." Then he said, "I just don't trust him the same way I trusted Kazan. What do you think?" And I said I didn't know. I also told him that I didn't plan to be on the set of Rebel. I said, "You and I have a different relationship than you have with Nick, and I don't want him seeing me in your dressing room and wondering what we're talking about. The most important thing to Nick, and to any director, is his relationship with his actors, and he already has a sense of ownership about you." Which he did. So Jimmy said, "Well, do you want me to do it?" And I said, "You're asking me if I want the most talked-about young actor in Hollywood to do my picture! But I'm not going to tell you to do it, because I'm not going to take that responsibility. We're friends, and I want it to stay that way."

baer: So you didn't encourage him at all?

stern: No. And, at the time, I really didn't know if Rebel would turn out to be good or bad. No one did, except David Weisbart, who later said that Nick made "a very good film out of a marvelous script"—for which I've always been grateful.

baer: So where were you when the shooting began? Was that when you were adapting Rod Serling's teleplay The Rack for Paul Newman?

stern: No, not yet. I went back to my apartment in New York, where I lived when I was doing live television, and I used the opportunity of Rebel's shooting to pick up my furniture and drive it back across the country. I didn't start The Rack until I got to California.

baer: So you moved furniture in order to avoid the set?

stern: That's right.

baer: Because of your friendship with James Dean?

stern: Yes. But I did have an agreement with Nick that I would check in by phone every night to see if he needed any new lines for the next day's shooting. We had a deal: I'd write any new lines he wanted, but in my own words, and he agreed not to write anything himself.

baer: Did you talk every night?

stern: Just about. Maybe I missed a few.

baer: When did you first see the finished film?

stern: At a sneak preview, and I hated it. I was horrified! I thought it was endless and self-indulgent, and I was shocked by the raucousness of the color—which I later got to like. I remember meeting Jack Warner and David Weisbart in the lobby of that Encino theater, and I lost my composure and told them what I thought.

baer: Did they do anything?

stern: They cut parts of it out and re-edited other parts. Quite a bit, in fact.

baer: Now let's start with some of the larger issues. You've often criticized the film as well as your own script for being unfair to the parents, calling them, on one occasion, "cartoons." And while there's no doubt that all the adults in the script clearly risk stereotyping, it's also true that the script contains more development of the parents than the final film. Judy's father, for example, is much more sympathetic in the script, but the film eliminates a number of key lines and thus creates a one-sided villain.

stern: Yes, and it hurts the film quite a bit.

baer: Why do you think Ray simplified the parents?

stern: Nick can be accused of a lot of things, but never subtlety. Just as all the colors had to be primary, so did the situations and the motives. Nick hated himself as a father because he felt he hadn't done right by his son. So he took what was already a highly charged theme in the movie, and he overdid it. The changes in Jim's father, for example, were also oversimplified; they didn't have enough steps in the finished film.

baer: It happened too fast and too easy.

stern: That's right. Last year, at the Seattle Film Festival, I heard, for the first time, the original script performed in a rehearsed reading. In their version, which was cast locally, the relationship between Jim and his father was much more complex and affecting. It was clear that the kid who was playing Jim truly loved—and had reason to love—his father. He just wanted his father to be more of a man, and he was clearly on his father's side in the war against the mother. That Seattle script-reading, a tape of which was shown at the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab, had much more dimension and shading in certain scenes than the film, and I was very grateful for the experience. It was a revelation.

baer: I'd like to turn now to the beginning of the film. After a week of filming Rebel in black and white, Warner Brothers realized that the CinemaScope lens was only supposed to be used for color, so they told Nick Ray to start again and redo the movie's opening sequence in color. In doing so, he shortened it quite a bit. Christmas was changed to Easter, and the gang's terrorizing of the man with the Christmas packages—including the toy monkey—was cut out entirely. How do you feel about the opening now—which is basically James Dean lying in the street with the toy monkey?

stern: Well, Jimmy does it so well that I've always suspended my wish for the original beginning, but when I heard them perform that sequence in Seattle last year, and I remembered that the kids who terrorize the innocent man with the Christmas packages are the very same kids whom Jim meets at school—Buzz and his friends—I thought it was a terrible loss. Nevertheless, I'm glad they cut it out of the film because, in the footage they originally shot, the whole gang was dressed in suits!

baer: Which doesn't make any sense at all. Now, let's jump to the end of the script, which ends with Plato shot down from the planetarium dome, and a definite reconciliation between the parents and the teenagers—especially Jim and his father. But in the film, not only is Jim reconciled with his dad, but his parents look at each other and smile, as if all their problems have been resolved, which is the most unbelievable thing in the whole film. So I guess my question is this: why did Nick Ray take the "happy" part of an already risky ending and extend it even further?

stern: I can't answer that. I don't know.

baer: And what about Jim and Plato? Originally, you had both of them dying at the end of the picture.

stern: That's right.

baer: Who changed it?

stern: Nick said, "We can't do it." And I think David did, too. They felt we couldn't do it to the audience, but I still believe that after Plato is shot, Jimmy should also be shot when he runs to Plato—trying to give him the jacket.

baer: Even more like a Greek tragedy?

stern: Yes.

baer: So how do you feel about it now?

stern: Oh, I'd love to see it that way. I still prefer it.

baer: Then, possibly as a private joke, Rebel Without a Cause ends with a man, who's carrying a briefcase, walking through the crime scene to the planetarium. The man is actually Nick Ray himself, and some critics have made the illogical assumption that he's supposed to be the professor arriving at the planetarium for the next day's work—despite the fact that, even from a distance, Ray looks nothing like the professor seen earlier in the film. What do you make of this?

stern: Maybe Nick wanted to be Alfred Hitchcock. He told me he was going to do it before shooting started. We were out at the planetarium one day discussing the ending when he gave me the news that he was going to make an entrance at the end of the film. I insisted that the film should end with Jimmy saying, "He was always cold," and leaving it right there. But Nick said, "Well, we have to have a reconciliation of some kind with the parents, and Jim has to introduce Judy—'This is my friend' or something like that"—and I said, "You're ruining the movie." And that was that.

baer: So he did his cameo.

stern: Yes, he was determined to do it. You can see it in his very determined walk!

baer: Two of the most awkward moments in both the script and the film are Jim's mooing at the planetarium and Judy's kissing her father on the mouth. Both create a very palpable embarrassment in the audience: seeing the hero making a fool of himself in public and watching the pathetic and peculiar impulses of the heroine. Were you pleased with how Ray captured these difficult moments on film?

stern: I was, and the more I see the movie, the more wondrous I think certain moments are. For example, I think the way Nick orchestrated the whole chicken run sequence is brilliant, and I feel the same way about the knife fight and most of the action at the mansion. I'm very grateful for much of the film. It's the finest work Nick ever did.

baer: Rebel has wonderful moments all the way through, but I do think the knife fight is better in the script.

stern: You do?

baer: Yes, because in the script, Jim flat-out refuses to do it, and it isn't until Plato is drawn into it, that he takes action—which seems more reasonable. Then, once Jim's into the knife fight, he's more dominating than he is in the film. He knows exactly what he's doing. He seems more like someone to be reckoned with—someone who's done it before and who's had to move from town to town to escape his past.

stern: That's true.

baer: I think both of those factors tie in more appropriately with Jim Stark's character.

stern: Yes, he really wanted to be good. He didn't want trouble, but he was "good" at trouble.

baer: But having said all that, I still like the scene in the movie, even though the script seems more effective. Now I'd like to ask you about a few of the performances, starting with James Dean's legendary characterization of Jim Stark. What was your reaction?

stern: When I first saw it?

baer: Yes. You'd created the character, and now your friend had portrayed him on film.

stern: My recollection is that I loved what Jimmy did from the start. I thought that he was wonderful, but I had many reservations about Jimmy Backus when I first saw the film.

baer: That was clearly the oddest casting choice given that Jim Backus was a well-known comedian—a fact that has no relevance to contemporary audiences. So what did you conclude about Backus's portrayal of Jim's father?

stern: Seeing it again—and many times again!—I do think that he gave a very good performance. Not the one I would have preferred, but very good. The one I always hated was the autocratic grandmother. And I must admit, I was very put off by the performance of Jimmy's mother because I wanted her to be more like my own mother. I don't know why, but I expected her to look like my mother and sound like her, too. But I'm over that now, and I think she was very good.

baer: I've noticed that young, contemporary audiences, who are always knocked out by Dean, sometimes find Natalie Wood's performance a bit off-putting, a mixture of believable anxiety with over-the-top acting.

stern: When I wrote the script, I didn't think of Judy as having the hard edge that Natalie gave her in the film—a brittle edge. I thought of her as much softer and more confused and helpless. More like a lonesome child dressed up as a woman. So I wasn't prepared for Natalie's edgy, anxious performance, but I liked it.

baer: After the success of the film, and possibly inspired by the French auteurists, Nick Ray made many unfounded and unfortunate claims as the "author" of the film. He even claims to have laid out the story essentials in a twenty-page outline called "The Blind Run," although I can find no evidence that anybody ever saw it. stern: I never did.

[figure]
James Dean and Natalie Wood share a quiet moment in Rebel Without a Cause.
baer: Even though Ray admitted that you wrote the screenplay, he insisted on a solo story credit for the Oscar nominations, and, later, a French novelization of the screenplay appeared in Paris which listed him as the sole author and made no mention of you. This must have been very difficult?

stern: It was terrible.

baer: Did you talk to him about it?

stern: I wrote him an angry letter.

baer: Did he respond?

stern: We had a meeting. I was shocked that he wanted sole story credit. In those days, there were two separate Oscars, one for story and another for screenplay, and Nick wanted credit as the exclusive source. I was astonished. I'd never even seen "Blind Run," but I knew exactly what he'd contributed to my creation of the story for the screenplay. So we had a meeting, and he made all kinds of false claims which I disputed, but he remained firm. Then all at once, he said, "If you want me to give you co-credit on the story, then I want co-credit on the script." And I said, "But you didn't write a word of it, Nick. There was no story until I wrote the screenplay, so I won't give you co-credit." But he wouldn't relent, and finally I got fed up and said, "If you insist on taking story credit, then I insist that you give Irving Shulman adaptation credit, because it will at least recognize, in some way, that there was another contribution I used beside the one you're claiming." So he agreed, and that was that.

baer: But, in truth, Irving Shulman should never have been given any credit.

stern: That's right.

baer: So, in the end, the film reads, "Screen Play by Stewart Stern," "Adaptation by Irving Shulman," "From a story by Nicholas Ray." And since the Academy nominated the story and not the screenplay, the only one nominated for a writing award was Nick Ray.

stern: That's right. It was exactly what I was afraid of, and it was outrageous.

baer: It certainly was. What about the Writers Guild? Nowadays, the Guild has arbitration. Did you pursue anything along those lines?

stern: No. It was only my second movie, and I'd just become a member of the Guild, and I didn't realize that the Guild would help me. I remember Nick saying, "I don't give a damn if you go to the Guild; it won't make any difference. I've got an agreement with Warner Brothers. I sold them this thing, and they'll guarantee that I get the credit." So I gave up, and I never went to either Warners or the Guild.

baer: Tell me about La fureur de vivre.

stern: Ironically, I was on my way to visit Nick in Paris when I first saw the book, a French novelization of Rebel "written by Nicholas Ray"! Nick was sick at the time, and I discovered the book when I'd stopped on the way to the hospital to buy him a gift. I was stunned and hurt. My screenplay shanghaied by Nick Ray! When I asked him about it, he denied any blame, "I had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with it at all. I had no control over it."

baer: Unfortunately the problem persists because some of Ray's enthusiasts have continued to perpetuate the myth of Nick Ray as the "author" of Rebel. John Francis Kreidl, in his book on Ray, even claims that the director gave James Dean "carte blanche" to improvise on the set.

stern: Jimmy didn't improvise. Where did he improvise? He improvised, "See the monkey." That's it.

baer: But that's the claim. Kreidl says that there was a "constant process of rescripting" on the set. Yet when one reads your final, preproduction script, dated March 25th, 1955, it's perfectly clear that, except for the opening, the director and performers stayed very close to the script—with only the natural cuttings and adjustments that happen on every film. All the great scenes are in your script, and all the famous lines: "You're tearing me apart!" "If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused and ashamed of everything—or I felt I belonged some place." "I got the bullets!" "You did everything a man could." And so on. So what's the matter with these people?

stern: I don't know. It's all lies, and it was all encouraged by Nick Ray. He couldn't be satisfied with being the director of a successful picture; he had to pretend that he wrote it as well. It's very unfortunate.

baer: Now I'd like to shift back to your relationship with James Dean. Unfortunately, he never saw the completed film, dying as he did in a highway accident on the way to participate in a car race at Salinas Speedway. How did you learn about the death of your close friend?

stern: I was staying at my cousin Arthur Loew's house, and the phone rang. It was the producer Henry Ginsberg, and he asked for Arthur. When I told him Arthur was out at a restaurant having dinner, Henry said, "Well, I have some bad news. The kid's dead." So I said, "What kid?" and he said, "Jimmy. Jimmy was just killed in an accident." In a state of shock, I went out to the car and began driving to the restaurant to tell Arthur. On the way, I turned on the radio to see if anything was on the news since I really couldn't believe it. Eventually, I got to the restaurant, told Arthur, and then I drove around Hollywood by myself. I remember driving by Googie's where Jimmy used to hang out. I went to see if there was any reaction on the faces of the people there, but there wasn't. Finally, at some point that night, there was an announcement on the radio, and I saw people pulling off to the side of the road. It was as if there'd been an earthquake, and the people were afraid their cars would fall through the sidewalk. Many people pulled over and parked, and they began to get out of their cars. They were stunned. I'll never forget it.

baer: It's truly amazing since he'd only had, up to that point, one released film, Eastof Eden.

stern: That's right, but he'd made a huge impact. At Warners, they flew the flag at half mast, and they even wondered whether they should release the picture. They said, "It'll look like we're riding on the coattails of his death, and we certainly don't want that." They got very virtuous for a while. Then Henry Ginsberg and I flew out to the funeral.

baer: In Fairmont, Indiana?

stern: Yes. We stayed with his family, the Winslows. We stayed on their farm, and then went to the funeral with them—Marcus, Ortense, and Markie.

baer: Not long after his death, you reluctantly agreed to write the script for The JamesDean Story, a peculiar documentary co-directed by Robert Altman.

stern: Yes, but I never wanted to do it because of misgivings about some of the effects Rebel had had—and about what Jimmy had come to represent. At first, I wasn't aware of what was happening, but not long after Rebel came out, I was on a cross-country flight. I was thumbing through my Rebel script for some reason, and the guy next to me said, "Oh, is that what a screenplay looks like?" And when I said yes, he asked what film it was, and I said, "It's a picture called Rebel Without a Cause." Then he told me that he hated the picture, and I asked him why. But first, I explained that I was the author of the script, and I asked him to be honest with me, and he was. He told me that he was a scout leader, and that many of the kids who'd fallen for Jimmy Dean were out of control. He said there'd been knife fights all over the schools since the movie came out, and I was shocked. That was exactly the opposite of what my purpose had been—and Jimmy's purpose too—we wanted to show that violence and leather boots and all that stuff didn't make a man. And that people needed to find each other's essential goodness and to reach out to each other and form families that really worked. Needless to say, I was extremely upset by what this honest man told me. So when Abby Greshler contacted me about making a documentary about Jimmy, I said no. I explained that I didn't want to add to the legend of violence, because it wasn't true, and Greshler abandoned his project. Then George W. George, a partner of Robert Altman, called me about their project and said, "Stewart, you've got to do this documentary because we're going to make it anyway, and I think you should be a part of it." So I met with Altman, looked over the photos and stock footage of Jimmy, and studied the interviews they'd already filmed. Finally, I decided to do it if I could present Jimmy as I knew he would have wanted to be presented—as a man of peace, as a man who understood loneliness and the difficult things that can happen to people. I felt that his beautiful letter to Markie explained his feelings best.

baer: His young cousin?

stern: Yes. Markie had sent him some drawings of soldiers and tanks and bombers, and Jimmy, very tactfully, told him that those things were easy to draw. He said that animals, and plants, and the earth itself were even harder to draw because they're harder to grow, and he asked Markie to draw those things. And that's what I wanted in the film.

baer: So what went wrong?

stern: Two things. One was my over-ripe writing—I got carried away with the poetic aspect of the script—and this was compounded by the second problem: Martin Gabel's narration. I pleaded with George to get Dennis Hopper to do the narration. Dennis had played one of the gang members in Rebel, he knew Jimmy pretty well, and he had the voice of youth. But they got Martin Gabel, who sounded like Rabbi Magnin. Everything was a pronouncement. He'd been beautifully trained in the old school, and he had this incredible voice, but it was too much—way too dramatic. So the images weren't allowed to just "be there," and neither were the interviews, and it was all underscored by Martin Gabel's incantation of my already purple script.

baer: In the end, the documentary comes off as quite depressing.

stern: It is depressing. And I didn't want that. I wanted it to be a tribute to Jimmy's talents and aspirations. I wanted it to challenge what was happening out there—this bizarre legend—with all these people pouring into Fairmont and chipping away at his headstone, and creating crazy myths about Jimmy still being alive and mutilated. I saw these things as a desire to hang onto the violence in some way, and that's what I wanted to crush.

baer: Another of your close friends, Marlon Brando, apparently felt very uneasy around Dean and supposedly avoided him, believing that he was a deeply disturbed young man who desperately needed psychiatric help. Is that appraisal excessive?

stern: Marlon may have felt that way about Jimmy, but it wouldn't have kept him away. Marlon doesn't stay away from people who need help—because Marlon knows what it's like to need help. He's one of the most emotionally naked people I've ever met, and the most willing to reach out to help other people. As for Jimmy, he was in therapy, which he'd begun not very long before he died. In fact, Nick had gotten him a therapist, and Jimmy was very happy about it. He felt that he was beginning to make strides, and that things were improving.

baer: So you weren't overly concerned about him back then?

stern: Not really. We mostly had a wonderful time together—lots of laughs. He was terribly funny, and terribly mischievous, and childlike, and magical. Off the set, you couldn't depend on him for two seconds, but the connections we had were always joyous.

baer: That's missing in the documentary.

stern: Yes, it is.

baer: During your long and distinguished career, you had the opportunity to work with three of the most talented performers of the last fifty years—James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman—and you also became good friends with all three men. Having written films for each of them, how would you characterize the uniqueness of their individual talents?

stern: Well, Jimmy was extraordinarily intuitive and inventive, and he had an immediate connection with his whole emotional being. He was extremely quick to absorb things, and he was always hungry for information. He could also practicalize things which stayed impractical for other performers, things about the method, for example, which he was able to simplify for himself. He understood the concept that "acting is doing," and he never worried about excessive emotional preparation. He might, for example, prepare by doing multiplication tables. By sixteens, say. How much is 16 times 16? How much is 16 times 17? Something that would force him to be intensely focused on a specific problem which might have absolutely nothing to do with his character's problems but which would give him the results he wanted without straining for the result.

baer: The Dean "intensity."

stern: Yes. He was always doing imaginative things that would get him where he wanted to be. He wasn't orthodox, and he never believed that things had to be done only one way. He did whatever worked. So did Marlon. But Marlon, of course, spent much more time studying with the best teachers, whereas Jimmy was in and out of the Actors Studio in maybe five sessions. I think he only did one scene there. So he picked up things here and there, and he read a lot of stuff, although he didn't read very deeply. One of the things he picked up from Marlon was how to invest inanimate objects with meaning, and how to reveal character by the way you physically pick up something. Jimmy was a wildly gifted actor—a work still in progress.

baer: Marlon Brando?

stern: Marlon is prodigious. He's Mount Rushmore on a skateboard! There's no more monumental talent than Marlon's, or a more brilliant mind. It's a mind that comes out of watchfulness. He is the most mistrustful man I've ever met, and the most watchful. He can "read" anything. He comprehends the subtext of everything, whether it's an animal, a book, or a human being. He has a kind of insight that would paralyze me if I had it. It would hurt me to have it. He's hyper-sensitive, closely in touch with his emotional being. I won't talk about all the failings of Marlon, and all the flaws, which are gigantic. They're epic, epic. And deeply wounded. He's Job, authentically Job.

baer: Are you talking personally or professionally?

stern: Personally. He's a tyrant, a lover, and the most sensitive friend—the most helpful person in the world—and one of the funniest men I've ever encountered.

baer: And Paul Newman?

stern: Paul is the most complex of them all, and the most endearing and moving. He used to say that he was "too cerebral" as an actor, and he called himself an "emotional Republican." He felt that the other two guys—Brando and Dean—could do it without working for it. They could easily find their emotions, and he couldn't—the only way he could cry, he claimed, was to stare at a light bulb without blinking. So he bashed himself for not being what they were, or what he thought they were. But then he'd say, "the old fox has something they don't have: tenacity. I'm the tortoise, and they're the hares. I can keep going." And he was right. He also has a wonderful mind. A legal mind, very analytical. He was never readily swept into any kind of hyperbolic emotional state. He was careful and watchful, and he had to be, because he was a very tiny child. I think he was 5'3" when he went into the Navy, and he did most of his growing while he was overseas. So he was patient. He always accused himself of being too objective and linear, and he always accused me of being too baroque, and he concluded that these differences were the reason we worked so well together. Another thing about Paul is that he always abhorred celebrity—right from the beginning—and he was repulsed by theatrical behavior. He has, of course, a natural vanity and ego, but he has less of it than anybody in that position that I've ever come across except for Joanne [Woodward]. Even when he was younger, the world was always more important to Paul Newman than Paul Newman himself—as shown by his involvement with the civil rights movement, and the work he's silently done for a thousand other causes over the years, and often in the most personal ways. He's one of the most elegant human beings that I've ever come across. They both are. Paul and Joanne, as people and artists. I trust them absolutely—in a way that it's hard to trust anyone. As actors, directors, professionals, and people, they're a different breed, from a much, much different time.

baer: In your career as a screenwriter, you were nominated for Academy Awards for Teresa and Rachel, Rachel; you wrote an Oscar-winning documentary, Benjy; and youwrote such renowned works as Rebel Without a Cause, The Ugly American, Sybil, and others. But, eventually, you found yourself burned out as a writer. What happened?

stern: A number of things. The fear of writing became overwhelming—especially the fear of not being able to write as well as I had in the past. This happened each time I started a new project, and there were long periods when I couldn't write. As time went by, the acclaim made it even harder. Every time a film was successfully finished, when everybody else was celebrating, I'd be worried if I could do it again. I'd find myself back at the beginning, helpless and terrified. It felt as if there'd been no achievement at all, and it wore me down.

baer: Because you were back to square one?

stern: Yes. Regardless of what everyone said, despite all their encouragement: "Well, this should be a breeze for you. Look what you've just finished."

baer: That's what most people would expect. But you always put tremendous pressure on yourself.

stern: Yes, it's killing. Another problem was that almost all my work has been very autobiographical and dealt with questions that I had about my own personal life at the time. My main character, my protagonist, would go out as a scout into the minefield and survive somehow, whereas, in real life, I could never really do things that way. Then, through therapy and life and living, I found myself with a changed life, and my earlier themes, whatever those themes might have been, were absorbed and integrated, and I couldn't go back to them. I couldn't write Rebel now, for example. I couldn't remember what I'd need to know. Also, somewhere along the line, I became acutely aware of the brevity of life, the fact that you have a limited amount of time left. In the past, I'd always try to find a metaphor for my screenplays that had some social application. So whether it was The Ugly American, or Sybil, or Rebel, or The Outsider, or whatever it was, there was always some kind of social issue that related to my own private quest as an individual. I had the belief that if enough people saw The Ugly American, then we wouldn't make the same kind of political mistakes that we're still making. Or that if enough people saw Sybil and understood that the abuse which children suffer can cause them to disintegrate into different aspects of themselves in order to stay sane, then public awareness would be raised and something good would come from it. But in almost every case, the limitations of the power of film to influence people came home to me—very strongly. Its power is limited. You really can't change the world with film. You can change a few things, but not much.

So I began to reconsider where I should focus my remaining energies. As you know, I'm very involved in the efforts to save the dwindling lowland gorillas still surviving in what remains of the rainforest in the Congo and Cameroon. There's an estimated 50,000 lowland gorillas left in the world. So what do you do about that? Do you make a movie about it? Or do you get involved with the people who are really doing something more immediate? Gorillas in the Mist let people know that gorillas are accessible beings, so everything helps in some way, I suppose, but eventually you get impatient with it all. You're not willing to go through three years writing a script which may or may not be made as a movie, and which, even if it's made, probably won't make the slightest difference. So I prefer to give my time to movements like Poachers-into-Protectors. It's a race against time, and even though I don't think it's going to be won, I think you have to go down swinging. That doesn't mean that I would never write about it, and maybe all of this is a cop-out, but I grew sick to death of talking about nothing but movies and being part of a community where film was more important than anything else in life—and where the movies became more and more about other movies and less and less about real life. The happiest times in my life have been the periods when I wasn't living that way. I was happier in the Army than I was in Hollywood, and I'm happier here in Seattle because I'm involved in real things, like my work at the zoo helping the gorillas. Does that answer your question?

baer: Yes, but I also thought that you lost your confidence as a writer because so many people were forcing you to see things from their points of view that you started to feel as if you were writing what they wanted you to write, rather than what you wanted to write?

stern: That's true. I began to lose confidence in my own ability to make choices. It was a kind of attrition. People were so eager to make contributions before you were ready for them that you began to automatically assume that they were right about things and that you were not. But I don't blame Hollywood. I had the best ride of any writer I know. Not necessarily financially, but I was always welcome on the set of every picture that I chose to be on, and, in many cases I was there from the first casting interviews to the final cut. Only a few people in Hollywood had such opportunities, and I'm very grateful. But I did burn out in the end. There's no doubt about that.

baer: And despite all of your Hollywood difficulties, you've always avoided falling into bitterness, and have always considered yourself very fortunate, even privileged. When you look back now, especially at your work on Rebel Without a Cause, what stands out among your most pleasurable recollections?

stern: Being with Jimmy at Arthur's, night after night. Horsing around. Breaking his glasses the night before he shot his first scene. Jimmy picking me up to go to the studio on his motorcycle. Sweet young Natalie. Young Dennis. Memories like that. Things I'll never forget.