Rock Hudson and AIDS Activism

Hello, dear listeners. Before we dive into our main episode today on Giant, I want to remind you that I got the opportunity to host the Vampirelat A Dark, the official companion show for the Vampireless Stat, which is of course, the third season of Interview withith the Vampire on AC I had the best time talking to the cast and crew of the show, which by the way is absolutely amazing. and this season blew me away. It is bonkers, You're not ready for it Episodes air every Sunday night on AMC and AMC pllus and make sure you watch the Vampire List at afterfter Dark on AMC plus to dive deeper into every episode. Lastly, thank you all for listening. You're the reason I got such an amazing opportunity like this. And now on with the show. and welcome back to another episode of What W went Wrong, Your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them let alone a good one, let alone Maybe one of the most secretly queer movies ever made in terms of casting at least. We are talking about a very fun pseudo Western. pererhaps the movie Taylor Sheridan watched and said that Yes, but way more densely plotted. As always, I'm Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co host, Lizzie Bassett Lizzie. what do you have in store for us today? Chris, we have a giant episode because we are talking about giant, which I can't wait to get into this. There's a lot. I wanted to cover this because we have not really met either Rock Hudson or James Dean on the podcast yet. We have not. And both are really fascinating. I personally did not know a ton about either of them prior to this, and I'm really excited to get into it with you. So what was your experience with this movie prior to today and also also with the stars of it? because these are such big names, but I don't, you know, I don't know what your experience was Really quickly, before I dive into that, I do want to do a quick disclaimer. ourur air conditioning broke over the weekend and they sent in somebody to replace it that showed up an hour ago. And so if you hear the occasional drilling screwing may or may not be the Air conditioning repair Let's get into my thoughts. Giant. I think I saw giant when I was young. I definitely saw it in film school. Oh o. It was one of the films we covered in or portions at least in a cinematography portion of a class. And I didn't appreciate it for a whole host of reasons. Here's my big picture. I really love the first hour and a half or so of this movie, like first hour forty minutes, I think is incredibly strong And it feels impeccably cast Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hutson, James Dean, as you mentioned, and then also just a number of the supporting characters as well that we'll get into. And then we do a big time jump in this film. So the movie basically follows Elizabeth Taylor, Leslie is this kind of reformed Virginian or Marylander, whereere is she from exactly at the beginning So in the book, Leslie is from Virginia, but my understanding is that the real person that they based Bick Benedict on, who we're going to talk about in just a little bit, he also married a lady from Virginia. So they wanted to differentiate the character in the film from the real person a little bit more. And that's why she's from Maryland in the film and Virginia in the book. Yeah She grew up close to the capitol, I spent time in the capitol, and she's much more progressive than this Texas world that she's entering into when she mares Rock Hudson. She's like arguably progressive for today. Yeah, I would say That's interesting. She's woke. Yeah. And so she marries Bick Benedict, the incredibly handsome and imposing Rock Hudson. Yes. So Carmela was like, I don't think I've really seen a Rock Hudson movie before. And I said, Ohh, well get ready. Yeah. And he's gorgeous. He's extremely appealing. Eormous.. He's a giant. She shows up in Texas and we are exposed to a world that is very segregated between the Huatz and the Mexicans. And as well as within the Huatz, you have the lower class folks embodied by Jet Rink, played by James Dean, who's a cowhand basically on the ranch, Riatta, run by Bick Benedict and his sister Lz And you kind of think the movie's going it's kind of like dealing with some race relation stuff that's very interesting and Bick Benedict is very bigoted and he comes from a line of prejudice Yeah. and he's very proud man. But it kind of feels like the movie's angling toward something like there will be blood, right for like an hour and a half or so. whereere it's like o it's going to be like the H himn Jet Rick thing. But Leslie's more the protagonist for like the first hour and forty minutes. I thought it was going to be a thing She would like realize the error of her ways with Bick and she would go realize that she was in love with Jet Rink. Yeah, which is fascinating because that's not what happens at all. we'll talk about the book., which I haven't read. But no, of course it's not what happens at all. And in fact, much of the movie actually ends up in the movie at least becoming a bit about the redemption or the reformation of Bick Benedict. the slow and I would argue very realistic. I agree. Reformation of Bick Benedict. Actually I think this movie handles race relations Really fascinating way for the nineteen fifties. I think it's pretty incredible. I mean, you said your cavaret should be shown in schools. I think this should be shown in schools. Totally. And so for me just narratively, the movie gets a little wobbly about an hour and forty minutes in when we do a pretty big time jump. We jump fifteen, twenty years into the future and all of a sudden, Bick and Leslie's children are grown. It does give a great opportunity for Denis to join. He's really good in this. He's really good And you know he's marrying a Mexican woman and this is a big deal, obviously to his father. He's also becoming a doctor, not a ranchand, God forbid It' so funny. You want to be a doctor? Yeah. You kind of think it's gonna build towards a long simmering confrontation between Bick Benedict and Jet Rancoup has since become an incredibly rich man due to striking it rich on oil that he technically inherited through Bick's sister. Right. And that is kind of a faux climax, but then the movie really climaxes with Bick Benedict finally standing up for his grandson who's mixed race, half Mexican, half white in a diner. Yeah. and getting his ass kicked by like a line cook actually finally becoming the hero that Leslie has wanted him to be his entire life And it's peppered with the back half, even though I don't like it as much as the front half had actually a couple of my favorite sequences, in particular, the funeral of Anheel., the son of Polo, which is like kind of one of the lead workers on the ranch setet up and in a subtle way, I would argue maybe too subtle as the son that Bick Benedict wished he' had. And then Bick Benedict attends his funeral after he has returned from World War two in a casket. And it's an incredibly well shot, very moving scene. very again, very subtle. So I think it's like, I love this movie. I think it's really interesting. I think it's incredibly fascinating given the time that it was made, as you said, Lizzie I think it deals with race relations in a more nuanced way than most Hollywood movies made now. Yes, I agree. But I do think the movie is kind of uneven at the same time, narratively, where it feels like there's so much. Well, it is because it's so long. Exactly, and it's so sprawling. I know, but I wasn't bored at all. No, never. O course. The cinematography is great. cematography is The production design is incredible. We're gonna to talk more about the production design than we are about the cinematography. Well, you can see the influences on like badlandands, right? with like the big gothic style house in the middle of nowhere Dallas would come later Taylor Sheridan's movies. Exactly. Yellowstone. Yellowstone is the big one. I mean, one hundred percent, Taylor Sheridan watched this and said, let me do it slightly worse. And I have enjoyed parts of Yellowstone. I would say let me do it slightly less nuanced. That's right. Let me hit you over the head with this a little harder. Yeah, I think this movie is Really remarkable. I think my opinions on it will become clear as we go through this and we have a lot to get through. so I think we should dive into it. But I had more of an idea of James Dean and his acting than I did of Rock Hudson. And I gotta say, I think James Dean is fantastic in this movie. I think This is Rock Hudson's movie. God, he's really good. He's really good. I also watched the Rock Hudson documentary, which is streaming on HBO Max. It's called All that Heaven Allowed. Yeah. It's really good. It's very worth watching. We're going focus a lot on him and James Dean and then we'll do a little bit on Elizabeth Tayor at the end because we've already covered her. But she's also very good in this movie. She's fantastic But the thing with Rock Hudson, he never really got an opportunity like this again. I know. He went into like he did like the Doris dayay p. did all the pill stuff. Yeah. Yeah. it's weird 'cause I was like, oh, he's like a jock, but he's got the sensitivity as well. No he really blew me away in this movie. And I also thought even at the end, you know He's looking at his grandson and he says, you know, basically it pisses me off that he doesn't look like me, but he's also able to understand that like that's still my grandson and I love him. And I just think it's incredibly well done. Getz feels honest to who that character would be. Yes. It's too deep, you know what I mean? in him, but he did show the capacity to change. and Rock Hudson commits to playing a pretty unlikable guy for most of this movie, whichich I think is really unusual for him, which let's get into it. Can I say who he reminds me of? Sure or who reminds me of him? Yeah that you watched recently on the show, Beef Oh I think Charles Melon has total Rock Hudson vibes. Yeah, I can see that. And I think he's a wonderful actor. Wonderful actor, can maybe you'd be like, oh like Doofy is the wrong word, but you know what I mean? Like, he's a big, slow, you May December, he turned in a performance that was very soft. Yes. May December. exxactly. Yeah He's great. All right, so the details as always Giant was directed by George Stevens. Screplay is written by Fred Gle and Ivan Moffatt. It is adapted from the novel by Edna Ferber. It had a wide release in November of nineteen fifty six, and it starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carol Baker, Jane Withers, Mercedes McCambridge, Dennis Hopper, Sal Mino, Elsa Cardanius, who plays Denis Hopper's wife, who I think is really incredible Good Lord, she's beautiful in this movie. And as always, the IMDB loogline is sprawling epic covering the life of a Texas cattle rancher and his family and associates Yeah, that's about as vague as you could get, but that's fine. Our main sources for today are Don Graham's book Giant, Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Fber and the making of a legendary American film Julie Gilbert's Giant loveo, Edna Ferber, her best selling novel of Texas and the making of an American classic film, and Gilbert by the way, is Ferber's great niece, The making of Giant documentary, and also the Rock Hudson documentary All that Heaven Allowed as well. All right, so let's start where Giant began, which is with its author, Edna Ferber. She was born in eighteen eighty five in Kalamazoo, Michigan into a Jewish family. and her father was a dry goods merchant Business did not go well for them. They had to move around all the time, and eventually they settled in Ottumwa, Iowa, very small town, population of about twenty thousand people, just for reference. West Hollywood has a population of about thirty three thousand. And she spent seven years in Ottumwa, and she would later write that her time there quote, must be held accountable for anything in me that is hostile toward the world. And that's The people there were horrible to her and her family. Adult men would openly mock her with very exaggerated Yiddish accents. They also would apparently spit on her as she walked by. and again, she's a child Her family could not afford to send her to college, so she started working as a reporter. and she pretty quickly made it all the way to the Chicago Tribune And by nineteen oh nine, she had to stop daily reporting because she collapsed from anemia on the job, and this is when she pivoted to fiction writing Which it turns out, she was pretty damn good at. She won the Puitzer Prize for her nineteen twenty four novel So Big and was hailed as the greatest American woman novelist. She's also a heavily adapted author. ten out of her twelve works would end up being adapted into films, including obviously Giant, but do you know what the other most famous one is? It's considered, I believe, this is no knock on her. I think it's considered one of the least deserving best picture winners, isn't it? Simarone? Oh, there's that one, yes, but also showhboat Oh yeah, showboat too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in nineteen thirty nine, she took her first trip to Texas and she was gosmacked, as she put it, by the scale of everything She found it so overwhelming that she figured she had no business writing about it, saying, quote, It was larger than life, too big, too massively male, too ruthless and galvanic and overpaced, too blatant, too undiluted, too rich, too poor. This novel of Texas is not a book for a woman to write. It would kill you But she changed her mind when she couldn't stop thinking about it. And I love this, she said, My rejection of Texas on that initial visit had not been on the grounds of preformformed opinion or inexplicable emotion. On the contrary, I had been vastly interested, astounded, confused, and startled, repelled, and attracted So she starts digging into Texas, and eventually she centered all of her research on two real people. One is Robert J. Clayberg, who was the president of the King Ranch in Texas, which spans about nine hundred sixty thousand acres of cattle and oil land. That is around the same size as the entire state of Rhode Island. According to his obituary, he was described as, quote, a hard riding, handsome man who habitually woren upswept stetss in over his cool, piercing eyes. mister Clayberg was an individualist of formidable proportions So who is this? Well, I mean, I guess it's Bick Benedict. It's Bick Benedict. Yes. But also that kind of sounds a little like jet Rink to me. Like in the way that he's played. Yes, but that's very different from the characterization in the book. Okay, fair. So Glenn McCarthy was a raagst to Riches Texas oil manan who dropped out of college with a dollar fifty c in his pocket and two years later struck oil By nineteen forty nine, he was worth two hundred million dollars. But to be clear, a dollar fifty back then was actually two hundred thousand dollars. I'm justidd. It was actually rich. It was upper middle class. Ferber spent thirteen years researching and writing giant. And actually, this was interesting. It was all while she was building her own mansion in Connecticut. She had a lot of guilt about her own house and her own wealth and ended up actually selling it in favor of a smaller New York City apartment But in nineteen fifty two, she published Giant and it was a critical and commercial success, selling upwards of three million copies. Whoa. Yeah, three million. Three million would be like a great number of copies of a book to sell today. And as we know, there were ten people in America in nineteen. times as many people now right as there were that or five times as many. But if you had to guess, what's one group of people that maybe wasn't so happy about this novel. Texans. Texans. I have Texan family As do I. I spend a lot of time there. They all live in Dallas.? I'll leave it there or San Antonio too. It's up Uncle Robert. Fun fact, my great grandmother went by the name Tex, by the way. And at a recent family reunion, we all sat around and someone said, what was Tex' actual name? and everyone was like No. And it took like two hours of calling people to figure out what it was. It was Francis, I believe So, they were especially pissed that Ferber had the audacity to depict the way that Mexicans were being treated in Texas in the forties and fifties. One critic, Carl Victor Little of the Houston Press, went so far as to say that Edna Ferber should be lynched. You're uh proven her point there, bud. He also dismissed Ferber's quote brand of fiction as steeped in backstairs gossip and what girl novelists call local color. What? I don't know. They also called her a carpet bagger. I'm sure you're familiar with what that term means. And if anybody doesn't know, it refers literally to northerners who relocated to the south during reconstruction after the Civil War for political or financial game, not for a true love of the South as it were. And I can confirm that people still used this term as of the nineties and early two thousands in Virginia, where I grew up To refer to someone from the North that just doesn't fit in Now, later when it was announced that Giant was to be turned into a movie, one Hollywood columnist said, If you make and show that damn picture, we'll shoot the screen full of holes Again, deserved. Okay. I have bad news for that guy. Before Giant was even published, it got a lot of attention in Hollywood. An advanced copy of the novel landed on many desks around town, one of which belonged to director George Stevens. Now he was a third generation theater kid who had moved with his whole family to Los Angeles when his parents realized film was taking all the acting jobs. And he dropped out of high school, became an assistant cameraman at Hal Roach Studios, and he said of this time in Hollywood that quote, there were no unions, so it was possible to become an assistant cameraman if you happened to find out just when they were starting a picture There was no organization. If a cameraman didn't have an assistant, he didn't know where to find one So you could literally just walk into Los Angeles. Opportunity abounds. Yeah, it's crazy. He worked with Laurel and Hardy on a series of Short Westerns, but in nineteen thirty, he got his big break when he helped tell Roach solve a problem. Roach couldn't figure out how to photograph the super light blue eyes of comedian Stan Lurel. So Stehven swooped in and had panchromatic film brought in from Chicago Roach gave him his first directing gig based on this. And from here, Stevens really rose through the ranks at RKO directing a ton of movies. startarted to hit his stride around nineteen thirty five with Alice Adams starring Katherine Hepburn, who after their initial meeting said she thought he was, quote, the dumbest man she'd ever met. She did walk that back later She met someone dumber, to be clear. That's what happened. And next, he hit it big with what movie that came up during Temple of Doom? Gungadin. Gungadin, that's right which was a grueling location shoot that of course, ran very long. All shut up in the Alabama Hills, which are not in Alabama, They're just outside of Lone Pine, California. If you guys are not aware, named after Confederate Civil War ship, I learned. There were sympathizers to the Confederacy working in that area. So they named the Alabama Hills after that ship And then when that ship was sunk by a different ship that I can't remember the name, all the union sympathizers named everything else after the union ship that sunk the Alabama. The Alahan Hills, they're gorgeous. If you guys ever get a chance to go up there. Cool. Eventually, he got an Oscar nomination in nineteen forty two for the More The Marrier, and then he was drafted into the Army during World War two. But General Eisenhower had a very particular task for him. Chris, do you know what George Stevens did during World War two Did he work in documentary like Capra and C? Yes. So he was ordered to document the concentration camps. Oh wow. So that footage that you have seen, the footage that played during the Nuremberg trials, That is George Stevenenss footage Wow. He brought together a team of filmmakers, including John Ford and Sanuel Fuller. They filmed the camps, they interviewed survivors In a nineteen eighty four documentary on Stevens produced a narrative by his son, George Stevenens Jr, who of course will go on to found AFI, Steven spoke about his experience walking through the gates at Daku. and he said, quote, When a poor man, hungry and unseeing because his eyesight is failing grabs me and starts begging, I feel the Nazi because I abhor him. I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I want him to keep his hands off me is because I see myself capable of arrogance and brutality to keep him off me That's a fierce thing to discover within yourself, that which you despise the most in others And he did not just capture footage of the concentration camps. He also shot footage of D D and the entire Allied push into Europe. It is incredible. You can see a lot of it on YouTube. It has been restored and colorized. It's I mean, there's no other footage like it. Well, and there was a big concern that people were not going to believe what was going on in the concentration camps That is why they sent him in there And the Nazis had gone to great lengths to hide their crime. Oh yeah, because they knew. they Oh they knew. They knew. Yeah So he returned to Hollywood, I think, very understandably, a changed man. He had no interest in churning out broad studio comedies anymore. He wanted to cover more serious topics. That began with I rememember Mama, a film about a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Next up was a place in the suun, starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clififft, which won six Oscars includluding a Best Director awward for Stevens. Then there was something to live for about an alcoholic who has an affair with a married member of her AA group, followed by Shane, which was a Western about a retired gunsinger. Yeah, Shane's the one I knew growing up. Okay the most with Shane. And I loved the book, Shane stars Alan Ladd. Yes, father of Alan Lad Junior. and it's almost an anti Violence film in a way. And Alan Ladd was really uncomfortable with guns, I believe, and they had to do a ton of takes of him firing the guns and he would never point them at the other actor.peally fith Dils. but it's really amazing movie. That's movie of his that I knew the most growing up with Shane. Well, and the production of it was a nightmare, particularly the post production. It took fifteen months just to edit it, but Stevens did have a real affection for the Wild West and Western films And he was looking for his next big project, giant, effectively, I would say, an emotional Western, then looked very appealing. He saw the potential in it to expose some of the hypocrisies in post warar America through this microcosm of Texas. So he loved the book, and he told his secretary, Go give Edna Ferber a call She did, and it turns out, Ena Ferber was saying no to everyone. She had no interest in selling the book's rights. So Stevens and producer Henry Ginsburg cooked up a workaround. Instead of approaching Ferber as a studio licensing her novel or, you know, buying the rights, they offered to make her a stakeholder in the film, and together the three partners formed giant productions with equal shares in the film's profits Plus, film rights would revert back to Ferber in ten years. So this was an incredibly good deal In December of nineteen fifty three, Giant Productions nabbed a deal with Warner Brothers for a budget of around two point seven million dollars. And Jack Warner held a press conference announcing the film, in which she closed with this little joke. I want to thank you all for coming. I hope we will all meet again when the picture's over in the not too long distant future. And everyone laughed because they knew there was no way in hell George Stevens was going to stay on schedule. I mean, this is an enormous movie. I'd have to imagine even two point seven million dollars is too low for this movie. Yeah, this movie is insane. The scale of this movie is crazy. I think Shane was more than two point seven million dollars and Shane's a smaller movie than this movie B a lot. And it went way over schedule. He was known for taking forever. Yeah and this movie's almost like antigone with the Wind, I think in many ways, which is an enormous movie. Yeah, yes. So the press actually started waging bets about how far behind the schedule that they would get because they knew. But step one was to get a working screenplay, and that was no small task because the novel is a sprawling four hundred forty seven pages long. As you mentioned, it covers multiple decades and generations of this family And right away, Stevens had to make a decision. Would he soften the novel that had pissed off every quiet person in Texas or would he remain faithful to Ferber's work? And he was adamant that they stay faithful to the spirit of her novel. In particular, quote, the conditions that many Texans themselves are so sensitive about He basically was like, I'm not doing a puff piece. I actually don't think they're going to respect that. I think that we need to tell the story. Shoot out the movie screens, if you must. However, he did hire two screenwiters, Fred Giol and Ivan Moffitt to adapt the novel, and they made some pretty major changes, One of the biggest being the ending. In Ferber's novel, you see what is unfortunately perhaps more realistic, but more depressing. There is no fight in the diner. Vick Benedict does not see the error of his ways and instead, you watch plenty of discrimination without much resolution Big's character arcking towards goodness in this very specific way is really a construct of the movie. I loved it. I think you have to do that in order for this to pay off. I think it'd be too bleak. I also think they do a good job of he does not fully arc towards an unbigoted position. He calls his grandson a slurk. Yes at the very end of the film. He sure does to a baby. Wh again though To me as an audience, I appreciated it because it felt true to the character. Yeah He was doing the best that he could. Was it perfect? No, but I agree. They also do change the beginning. The beginning of the novel actually starts with Vashtai and Pinky on their way to Jet Rink's bigig party, and then you see the Benedicts heading to the party. And of course, that's now one of the climaxes of the film Ferber did do some work on the screenplay, but nobody liked it. To be fair, she'd never written a screenplay before. They felt that she was ove explaining everything, making it too novelistic and that all the dialogue was a little too ellmerfud for their taste. I stand by it novelist Dialogue is not their forte. It's just a very different medium George Stevens apparently wrote a note in the margin of one of her drafts, Let the picture say this, do all our jokes need explaining Ouch According to his son, his father had a level of creative control that was pretty unprecedented at Warner Brrosers. He said, quote, When you think of Giant, which was probably the most expensive film made that year, certainly the most ambitious, it was just so unusual for at the very center of it, there to be this question of identity All right, so right away the casting department had a major challenge in front of them for the film. It has to do with makeup Oh, aging our leads. Yes. thirty years. Jish they said, what if their hair turned titanium? I am titan Yeah, so ye. But at the time, Hollywood was in the habit of very much casting older actors and then dressing them up younger. Thankink Jimmy Stewart and it's a wonderful life. worldors school.oy What are we gonna do? Whatren? What are we gonna do? What we go to college next year? You're forty five But Stevens realized this is dumb and it would be a lot easier to age a younger actor up. It's the right decision. Yeah. evenven though Elizabeth Taylor. She looks nuts. At the end of the movie look like they have been sent through a metallic spray paint factory. I know. I still like I prefer that feel, you know, And they do like Dennis Hopper feels so young Hudson can still feel like his father to me. Oh, totally. And also like the first hour in change of this, they're supposed to be young and hot. So let's be young and hot. Exactly. So they rejected a few stars right away for being too old, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, William Holden, Robert Mitcham, Sterling Hayden, Hayden actually made it farther than most, but Stehven said no. Gary Cooper's the one that I was wondering about only because like, you know, he had done High noon, for example, which kind of an anti Western in some ways. He is a little he's older. Yeah. He's probably at least in his forties at this point Charlton Heston, Arl Flynn, and he said no to everybody. Yeah, Charlton Heston also is an interesting choice. you know, but didn't he do the tenen commommandments the same year basically? Wasn't that fifty six? Yeah, again, he's substantially older. Tw years, a year and a half. Really? Yeah, they're very close in age. Okay, well, he looked a lot older. I agree. He does look older. Now Warner Brothers also put forth their own list of their top choices and at the top of the list was somebody who has come up on this podcast before for being a real asshole He doesn't love Native Americans. Oh, John Wayne. John Wayne. Yeah. Yeah, the only context clue you need. I was thinking about John Wayne actually because again, this is like the anti John Wayne arc in this movie. T so many ways. Yeah, he would never have done this, but they said no to him as well. Jimmy Stewart. Jimmy Stewart, to me, that one, I feel, I wouldn't buy him as Bick Benedict for the first half of it, I don't think. I know. I think Rock Hudson, there's a physicality he's so big Rock Hudson has. He's so imposing. Yeah that he really can sell the immovable object of his beliefs.ight? Be to me, the arc of this movie is Bick Benedict needs to stop defending his family lineage and start defending his family. Right? Like that's what his arc is. Very good. And I just I don't know, it's like a hard Jimmy Stewart is an amazing actor, but like you said, yeah, I don't buy him as much in the first half. You need to be able to buy a certain meanness and Rock Hudson is able to sell that while still being attractive. Yes, and that this guy can like wrestle a bowl to the ground. Absolutely. But there was one actor who caught Stehven's eye for Bick Benedict, and that was of course, Rock Hudson Hudson had broken out in a huge way with Douglas Sirke's magnificent obsession in nineteen fifty four, but it was a movie he had made before that that caught Stehven's eye. It was a western called The laawless brereed from nineteen fifty two Stehven's seecretary, Joan McTavish, later his wife, urged him to screen it. and when he did, there was Bick Benedict because the film opens with Hudson playing a much older version of his character and then transitioning back into his younger self. And this was the big thing is that Rock Hudson was believable as both the older character and the younger one. And I gotta say of all the age makeup in Giant I think Rock Hudson's is maybe second most successful. I think James Dean's is the best because there's the least of it. James Dean's is the best. James Dean's is the closest to Brando and the Godfather. I agree. And they do a good job with the receding hairline on him. Y. And I agree, Rock Hudson's second best. Elizabeth Taylor looks nuts.hayl looks nuts Polo, on Heel's father Oh yeah. who they're just like, what if he became Albert Einstein when he got older? That one is insane. Yes. But yes, I do think the makeup team did an exceptional job on James Dean. I also think James Dean sells it very well. Hold that thought about James Dean's makeup. So let's talk about Rock Hudson because we have never met him on the podcast before He was born Roy Harold Shecharer, junior in nineteen twenty five in Winetca, Illinois. You will also see his name listed as Roy Fitzgerald. That's because his father abandoned the family at an early age and his mother's second husband, Wallace Fitzgerald adopted him. Now, Roy always knew he was different from the other corn fed Illinois boys, he knew he wanted to be an actor, but that wasn't exactly something a corn fed Illinois boy was supposed to aspire to at the time He served in the Navy during World War twoo and afterward decided to shoot his shot and moved to Los Angeles to live with his father. Now his dad made him get a job as a vacuum salesman, which he was terrible at. He never sold a single one. One could say he sucked . His biological father. His biological father, yes. Okay, got it So he kicked around some odd jobs until he finally got a good tip. Get some photos taken and get them into the hands of Henry Wilson, the head of talent at David O. Selznick Productions. Now Henry Wilson deserves his own bonus episode because this guy was deeply sinister and weird. He basically engineered the whole beefcake phenomenon of the forties and fifties by plucking young actors from obscurity and transforming them. It was a pretty open secret that he was gay, and seemed to expect sexual favors from the men that he represented. Ryan Murphy said it best when describing Wilson, who, by the way, Jim Parsons plays in Murphy's Netflix series Hollywood. He said, quote, he would find these young guys and almost all came from horrible situations With broken marages and absent fathers and take them on his clients. He was a tormented gay man who preyed on tormented gay men. He would be their manager and make them sexually service him. Weirdly, he was actually an okay manager. He was friends with everyone so could get clients in the room with power brokers. I feel like there's a character in LA Confidential. He's actually a politician, I think in LA Confidential, but I think he's maybe loosely tied to Henry Wilson and then Oh yeah Simon Baker ends up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spoiler dead with that character But I was going to mention, didid he have anything to do with Arl Flynn No, I think that would have been a little early. Okay, Yeah, because Arl Flyn, I remember kind of like his physique as like the follow up to Douglas Fairbanks was like, oh, this is going to be the next you know generation of Thick swashbuckler. and that kind of leads into like you're mentioning the beefcake era with Charlton Heston, for example and Kirt Douglas and Spartacus and stuff like that. I think it has more to do with the transition in America from BeCacause if you look at silent film actors all post World War two, exxactly, It's like the returning GI. Right. If you look at silent film actors, they're very effeminate. They're wearing a lot of makeup. They tended to be very beautiful. And then, yes, after World War two, you wan to see the strong American soldier coming home You know, you were asking about Arryl Flynn I said maybe a little bit early, That's because Henry Wilson's like cash cow was Roy Fitzgerald or should we say Rock Hudson because Henry Wilson changed his name for him Wilson said, I tried to think of something strong and big, Rock of Gibraltar. Hudson came from the Hudson River for no reason. And he renamed all of these guys Tab Hunter, Guy Madison, Ty Harden. These were all personas dreamt up by Wilson for these young actors Don Graham wrote Roy Fitzgerald was an awkward, culturally illiterate Midwestern bumpkin when he slouched his six five frame into Wilson's presence. He sort of stooped to hide his height, he had bad teeth, he was shy, and he was largely uneducated. His voice was high pitched and squeaky and he had zero acting talent, but he was handsome, and Wilson had an eye for comely young men Wilson was literally known for saying the acting can be added later. And in fact, Hudson's rise to the top was not meteoric. He famously took thirty eight takes to say the line, You've got to buy a bigger blackboard in the nineteen forty eight movie Fighter Squadron. But Wilson did not give up. He would instruct Hudson on how to sit, talk, eat in restaurants, how to become basically an entirely different person. did these weird licity stus with him, one where he painted him entirely in like metallic gold paint and put him in like a little tiny bathing suit to go to the Oscars wearing that. I think it actually made Rock Hudson sick because it was like the Tin manan style paint. Yeah, the Tin manan, exactly. Yeah. It reminds me of Alden Earrenright's character in Helle Caesar. Yes, totally. W we in Singple And Wilson most tragically instructed Hudson on how to convincingly lead a double life as a closeted gay man Now, while Wilson flaunted his own sexuality and used it to control and oppress his wards, he was adamant that Hudson could never live as openly gay. And given the time they were living in, he was probably right, Hudson would never have been the movie star that he became had he not hidden his sexuality. At one point, when Wilson discovered Rock living with another man, he forced him to end it immediately, which Hudson did And he laid down three rules to live by. One, never let a man park his car in your driveway overnight Two, never sit down at a restaurant with another man without a young lady present And three, never live with another man. Hudson hated his new name, but he kept it until the day he died, and he followed those rules Now more on Rock Hudson in just a little bit. For the role of Leslie, Steven wanted someone we just talked about in breakfast at Tiffanyy's He wanted Audrey Hepburn. And he wanted her so badly that he actually sent her Ivan Moffitt's character sketches and traveled to New York to try and convince her, but she said, no, thank you Up next was Grace Kelly, but MGM refused to loan her out because they were pissed at her for turning down some of their own projects. She also would leave Hollywood, the same year Giant came out to become the Princess of Monaco. And Ena Ferber kept pushing Stevens to look at Patricia Neil, Chris's favorite. I was gonna ask about Patricia Neil. She's always in the mix. She's my favorite. I know. She's about to come up in another thing we're about to record. Oh It was Elizabeth Taylor who nabbed the part due to sheer willpower. In nineteen sixty seven, Stehven said, Liz Taylor cast herself in giant. She wanted to play that part. She called me to talk about it, but she was about to have a baby So her doctor called me and said she was in great shape obstetrically, and she'd be able to work four weeks after the baby was born. What does great shape obstetrically mean? And how would you know she's gonna be able to work four wee? I mean, she did it, which is insane. No, mean, she's feeding him lines on the other side. on his ph obviously. It's in great shape That was her second child, by the way. And besides, Stevens had already directed her in a place in the sun, so he knew what she could do. And she was a big star at this point, despite being only twenty three years old with a two year old and a baby in tow, by the way. She's twenty three. She's twenty three. That's crazy. I assume she and Rock Hudson were closer in age that they were both around thirty. That's nuts. She's the same age as James Dean. Oh wow. She has a very She feels older. Yes to me.. She feels older and she's also so done up a lot of the time and so gorgeous, but she has an older looking face Now if you want more on Elizabeth Taylor and her rise to prominence, we did cover her quite a bit in Cleopatra. But by late January of nineteen fifty five, the part of Leslie was officially hers, and another actor who really gunned for their role was James Dean They had initially been discussing Montgomery Clift for this part, and Dean was a little bit of a tough sell. He was really young. He was twenty three at this point. He didn't really look like the part. The part was supposed to be tall and imposing, and he's more slender and a little bit smaller. But he showed up at Stehven's office dressed in outfits he thought Jet Rink would wear and made it clear this was his part Stevens would later say, physically and temperamentally, Jimmy Dean was wrong for the part. Jett was a tall, powerful, extroverted character. There were a dozen actors who seemed more likely choices, and we felt that the part needed an extremely good actor. So we gave the script to Jimmy to read At the top of his copy of the script, James Dean wrote over the name Jet Rink, That's me. That's me because I can convince myself that it will be me, really me In March of nineteen fifty five, Stehvens took a chance on him and said, okay. Now James Dean, not unlike Rock Hudson, was born in the Midwest, Mary in Indiana in nineteen thirty one. Though his family moved to California when he was young He had a very loving childhood until his mother died of cancer when he was just nine years old, at which point his father shipped him back to Indiana, by some accounts on the same train as his mother's coffin Just like Rock Hudson, when Dean graduated high school, he headed back to California to try and reconnect with his father. But his father and his new stepmother made it pretty clear that they didn't really want him there. So he headed off to UCLA initially as a theater minor and a pre law major. He apparentlyar in a production of Macbeth there and got scathing reviews Everyone said this guy is going nowhere. but he of course did go somewhere. He went to study at the actor' studio in New York City. At this point, the studio focused on the Stanislavsky method, which I polled some of my friends who are professional working actors because I could not remember this even though we had studied it in acting school. And so I think the simplest way to explain this is that it's very focused on being truthful in an imaginary circumstance. So there's no acting. You are the character. How are you going to react truthfully in this specific but imaginary situation. It's very driven by authenticity. You let the character's choices drive your actions And it's here that James Dean really hones his approach to acting, and he also pissed absolutely everyone he worked with off. But while many would label him as difficult Carol Baker, of course would go on to play L' Benedict II in Giant, explained it a little differently. She said, quote, I knew Jimmy for several years, but he was not an easy person to know. The kids at the actor studio used to get together maybe once a week and sit around and listen to classical music. Jimmy used to come to these parties late, never said hello to anyone, and after a while, you'd look around and he was gone without ever saying goodbye He didn't talk to anybody, he was, I think, desperately shy. So as I say, he was not easy to know One thing I love about my husband, David is that this man cannot pass up a good deal. As soon as he sees a yard sale, it's like a tractor beam is pulling him in and he cannot resist. And his deal hunting obsession has rubbed off on me, except I'm not pulling my way through cobweb covever yard sals, I'm on whatnot Whatnot is the number one live shopping app in the US where shopping happens in real time with real people, real conversations, and incredible deals. Seriously, I cannot emphasize enough how great the deals are. You almost never pay full price on name brand perfume, clothes, makeup, handbags, jewelry, and so much more. Plus, it's fun. You're connecting with sellers and other shoppers. It's like hanging out and shopping with friends I just got an amazing Goodfellass t shirt from Treasure Chest TX for nine dollars that I can't wait to wear and a vintage Gucci cross body bag from the Don's luxury that I picked up for like half the price of other retailers. I am obsessed with it. Everything arrived so quickly and in excellent condition. Download What Not today and get twenty dollars off and free shipping on your first purchase Search What notot W H A T N OT in the App store, sign up and start finding the best deals on the products you love with twenty dollars off and free shipping on your first purchase. But in nineteen fifty five, he got his major break with Allia Kazan's East of Eden, which he would get an Oscar nomination for That same year, he filmed Rebel Without a caause opposite Natalie Wood and Sal Mino, who also appears briefly in Giant. Yeah plays on Hell when he's going to war. He does I gott to say, I think this is my favorite performance of James Dean I know Rebel Dout a Cause is the most iconic, but yeah, I like this one. I'm not a huge James Dean guy to be fair. I think he's great in this. I think he's really good in this, but there's a mythos around him, you know that' larger than life. And Carmela, my wife was a huge James Dean head gr. She had a big cardboard cut out of James Dean wow in her room And so I understand the appeal, but my point is I was not a huge fan of his. I think I appreciated his work, but I think he does a great job in this movie. He's really conved. this is my favorite. Yeah. And I think the physical contrast between him and Rock Hudson is a real asset to the movie as well You have James Dean to thank for that. So he was actually in a pretty bad mood though, because of Rebel Without a Cuse. He was supposed to have gotten a break between that movie's production and Giant, but Rebel Without a Cuse had run way over. And so he was doing costume fittings and you know, makeup tests for Giant during the production of Rebel Without a Cause. Wow. So he's starting the marathon giant shoot already pretty exhausted Well, and if he's doing method effectively, right? If he's trying to embody the character, but he's having to embody two. I know it's different. I know what you're saying It's aboututhentic I want to be careful. Yeahah, it is about authenticity. And when people think of, you know, Daniel Day Lewis running through the woods with a musket being method acting, yes. and that grew out of this initial Stanis Llavsky method, but they're not one in the same. I know. I was talking to a friend about this and she said, you know, I think it comes from maybe not being able to identify boundaries in terms of how you start to push into what we now think of as quote unquote method acting. But yes, very focused on authenticity He also just really wanted to have fun, which for James Dean involved driving very fast cars very fast. He actually raced semi professionally and he was pretty good at it. But according to George Stevens Jr., when Dad decided that Jimmy would play the part and they sat down to talk about it, Dad talked to him about his race car and he said, lookook, I know you love driving. We've got a lot of people involved in this picture and if something happens to you, if you break your arm or break a leg, three hundred people's work is going to be stopped. So I want to ask you while this picture is being made not to drive that car. And Jimmy looked at him and said, all right And throughout the shooting, he never drove the car Now Stehvens rounded out the cast with an Academy Award winner, Mercedes Mc Cambridge, playing Lz Benedict, as well as, we said, a very young Dennis Hopper, and absolutely gorgeous Mexican actress Elsa Cardenas as his wife. Fun fact, she actually married a Texas oil man one year after Giant came out, though the marriage didn't last Filming kicked off in May of nineteen fifty five in Los Angeles and the first scenes they shot were Bick showing up in Maryland at Leslie's house. But the night before the first day on set, Elizabeth Taylor invited Rock Hudson over to her house with her then husband, Michael Welding. And Taylor and Hudson stayed up drinking until about four AM and then realized they had to be on set at six AM The first scene they shot was the wedding scene, which thankfully had no dialogue because Hudson and Taylor could not remember any lines and would have to run outside between takes to vomit in the bushes. The good old days. To be clear, it's not their wedding, right?. sister's wedding. Yeah He's come back for Thanksgiving. And they probably also have like, well, they look a little. They're old This is when they're older.y, that's fine. They look a bit green Good good. yeah, that's f After only about a month in LA, production then moved to Marfa, Texas. So that insane house at the center of Riota Ranch was built for the film on Evans Ranch, also sometimes called Ryan Ranch, about twenty one miles outside of Marfa. They paid twenty thousand dollars all in for the use of the land, which included the cattle and the horses. G scope hundred fifty thousand dollars today. So that's a pretty good deal. Yeah for what you're getting I mean, it's incredible scope. Yes. All look up what Taylor Sheridan charges or used to charge paramount to shoot on his ranch in Texas. Yeah, how he rents his own ranch out. I mean he's very smart businessman. I know, you got to respect it. Now as for the house, it was just a facade with no actual interior or roof. It was tied to a bunch of telephone poles. All the materials had to be transported on six train cars from California And after the movie wrapped, the whole thing just got accidentally left behind. It was an oversight, acccording to art director Boris Levin, it became a tourist attraction. And though it's mostly fallen over, the skeleton remains, would you like to see it? Yeah, Joy The Ruins of Riata. Y. It's cool. It looks like what now would exist behind a very elaborate stage production, for example. Yeah So Marfa was established in eighteen eighty three as a railway water stop. and by nineteen fifty five, when they were filming this, it was a tiny cattle town with a population of about three thousand six hundred people. It was not super different from what you see in Giant. Mexican American communities were heavily segregated and impoverished, all of which is to say There was not a lot to do around town, and the cast full of Hollywood partyers did love that There was also basically no existing infrastructure to support a movie productions, so the team had to get creative. George Stevens had an old movie theater called The Palace, which had been boarded up and shut down, reopened, and turned into his own private screening room to watch dailies. And he did something really smart He knew that Texans were not too pleased about this movie. So after the first day of filming in Marfa, he invited all of the locals into the theater to watch the dailies with him He treated the town of Marfa like collaborators and it paid off. They very much welcomed the cast and crew with open arms. And then Marfa, of course, would become something of a Hollywood town after Giant. There will be Blood is filmed there. No Country for oldld men, famously at the same time. Marfa Girl and many others. But not everyone was having such a great time on set, especially because they were filming in June in West Texas and it was one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade Yep. It actually ye Y. It got so hot one day that Mercedes McCambridge, her makeup melted into her face and caused a serious infection that permanently scarred her. Jesus Couple that with the fact that by june twenty fourth, they were eight days behind schedule and more than two hundred thousand dollars over budget. George Stevens also wanted everyone in costume and makeup on location all day, even when they weren't shooting. This meant the entire thirty nine person cast would gather at the El Pzano hotel at five AM and then get shuttled to Ryan Ranch by eight AM where they would stay until about six PM. Then it was back to Marfa to eat dinner, watch dailies, and drink until you vom Yeah, I don't know how people did this. I don't know I my m. It's crazy. Yeah. Rock Hudson hosted nightly parties at his house, which he and Elizabeth Taylor apparently created their own cocktail for, the chocolate martini, which was just vodka, Hershey's syrup and kalua Oh God. does she look like that? How does she look like that? Well, everything that's going in is coming out. but she's twenty three. That's true. That helps. When you're that age, your body can just handle being poisoned every day, apparently. Well, she was putting it through the ringer. And pretty much everyone was in attendance at these parties except for James Dean, who was not super happy about any of this. He's tired, he wants a break, he's hot, He does not want a chocolate martini He seemed to want to do his work and get out of there. George Stevens Jr. described him as a young man in a hurry who frequently got impatient with the pace of things, and this immediately put him at odds with George Stevens. As we'll see, James Dean does seem like a bit of a pain in the ass, but I am on his side here. It's one hundred twenty degrees. Why do you need everyone standing around outside in costume all day Stehven said, As Jimmy accuses me of interfering with his work, I can only say that I feel he is jeopardizing my work, and I am the one running the show, not Dean It seems like a big part of the problem was that Dean wanted Jet Rink to be the center of the film and got very frustrated when focus was cast elsewhere. He also refused most of the old age makeup and would only allow some graying at his temples and a few wrinkles He's right, his looks the best. Yeah. his absolutely looks the best. Well, he has a I call like a squintinty look to begin with and so he doesn't need as much work, you know, I don't think. And he gets through a lot of it with just his physicality, you know, as well. Well, and the prosthetics are distracting, like on Elizabeth Taylor in particular. Yeah. And I think the fact that he doesn't have any on him, it looks way better Yeah. it's funny. His character is so interesting the history of that character type. you know, I was even thinking of someone like, you know, Ben Mackenzie and June Bg and there there's like a Cruiseian quality to James Dean or you know, obviously like River Phoenix later and whatnot. But I think one of the reasons his character does work well in this movie is that we don't see too much of him he feels pretty exaggerated to me and you get just enough that that's okay. And I would imagine if there was more, he might become too much of a caricature because he's kind of a cartoonish villain by the end, you know, in a lot of ways. Yes. He also arrived late to set frequently One time he did so and left Mercedes McCambridge waiting around even though she had actually gone to the hospital for stitches due to a fall the night before And Stevens was so pissed that he actually reamed Jameseeen in front of the entire cast and crew for that and then walked off the set and told the AD, you direct his scenes, I'm not doing it. But George Stehvens was not the one that James Dean butted heads with the most. That honor went to Rock Hudson I think part of the reason this movie works so well is that these two fucking hated each other in real life. Even later on when they ask Rock Hudson when he's much older, what he thought about James Dean, he literally is like, I don't think I should say anything because he's dead. Yeah. Like hated him s talk about why. Problem number one James Dean looked down on Rock Hudson because he didn't have the same kind of training. He wasn't a real actor in James Dean's eyes. Problem number two, They both wanted to be besties with Eizabeth Taylor, and were constantly competing for her attention. Taylor apparently didn't sleep for long portions of this shoot because she would stay up until four AM talking to one of them, and then spend the rest of the night talking to the other, and then head straight to set What was in the water. What drugs are you on to do this? It's incredible. It's the David Oelstick special. They're just all getting It's that episode of Madmen where they're all getting the amphetamine shots ges. And he's like, it'll give you a little extra pep in your step. L a heart condition, right? Yeah. She says. M Rog was like, I had a heart attack last year. You should be fine. Oh my God Problem number three is that James Dean was a scene stealer. and not just because of his acting ability, he's obviously a very good actor, but he also was really fidgety. and Hudson sensed that Dean was on a quest to get the most screen time and the most publicity out of anybody on set And he was probably right. More production stills are taken of James Dean than anyone else in the movie, including Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. At one point, James Dean even flipped Elizabeth Taylor upside down in a dress, exposing her underwear in front of press photographers, which she was pretty pissed about, but unlike Hudson, she forgave James Dean pretty quickly Take after take, he would mumble his lines, fiddle with his hat, for his rope or hitch himself slightly off center. And it's so interesting because I think Rock Hudson was used to being able to use his size to dominate a scene, and James Dean was not gonna let him do that, which in the end result works well. It does, but he's also like He's so obviously angling for close ups. Yes. Like that's why you do that is because demands a close up. And Rock Hudson is coming from, I think, an era of acting where it's no, fill the frame. Eactly. And James Dean's doing the opposite. Yes. And then problem number four, James Dean was well aware of the rumors about Rock Hudson's sexuality and by many accounts, was very put off by what he considered the hypocrisy of Hudson's private life versus public life The fact that Hudson was in his eyes masquerading as, the straightest man alive seemed to really rankle James Dean posossibly because Dean is widely considered to have been bisexual himself. He all but confirmed this, saying to a reporter, quote, No, I'm not homosexual, but I'm also not going through life with one hand tied behind my back. And there's something else. Though Hudson and Dean were constantly at odds, he did of course grow very close to Elizabeth Taylor throughout filming and confessed things to her, including details of his earliest sexual encounter. Taylor later said that quote, When Jimmy was eleven and his mother passed away, he began to be molested by his minister. I think that haunted him the rest of his life. In fact, I know it did. We talked about it a lot During Giant, we'd stay up nights and talk and talk, and that was one of the things he confessed to me Now there is a rumor. you will see reported quite a bit that Rock Hudson made a pass at James Dean, and that this is why the two hated each other that it even forced James Dean to move out of the house they'd both been staying in into the hotel in town I will say it was almost impossible to substantiate this in terms of the research. But there is one story that came from Dennis Hopper, and this one I'm more inclined to believe. So one day, Dennis Hopper and James Dean were walking by Rock Hudson's trailer. Rock Hudson came out and suddenly James Dean jumped on him and French kissed him in front of everyone To me, this does not indicate sexual attention. This reads as a power play, especially if he knew Hudson was gay, which he almost certainly did. Everybody knew This was like a dare to see if he would out himself. Dean also had a habit of whipping his dick out and pee in the desert in front of everyone during takes. It just it all feels very much like a test. So I am more inclined to believe that Dean, who was younger and less straight laced, was angered by Hudson's double life more than anything else because it read as inauthentic to him Understandably, Rock Hudson put in quite a few calls to his now agent, Henry Wilson about how much he could not stand James Dean. And Wilson was concerned about this because this was supposed to be Rock Hudson's serious acting debut, and he expected Hudson to be grateful, not calling at all hours complaining So Wilson sent his seecretary Pyllis Gates out to Marfa to calm Hudson down, or perhaps remind him who he worked for. But he also had ulterior motives. The press had been after Hudson for years at this point with Life magazine even saying, quote, fans are urging twenty nine year old Hudson to get married or explain why not Explain yourself. I just keep having sex with too many women Then, Wilson had been cooking up a quote unquote romance between Gates and Hudson to try and assuage the rumors. He'd taken them both out to dinner when Hudson got the role, and so sending Phyllis out to Marfa was another part of this ruse. But though Dean and Hudson did not get along, James Dean did not have the same problem with his castmates. As we've already said, he and Elizabeth Taylor were quite close He also developed a very close friendship with Jane Withers, who plays Vashi Snythe. She would wash his shirt every day and he would pick it up in the morning. He also apparently had a habit of climbing in through her bedroom window and falling asleep in her bed, to which she nailed her window shut and was like, please use the front door, my friend. Unlike both Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, James Dean did actually befriend the people of Marfa as well He would hang out with the real cowboys, learned how to rope, how to shoot. He visited the Mexican American children in Valentine, the little town where the film's Mexican village was built, and reportedly handed out Coca Colas to them with his dialect coach. He actually spent so much time with them that the girls in Valentine formed a softball team that they called the Dizzy Deans in his honor He would entertain the townspeople with an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin, impersonating Marlon Brando Al say he was as comfortable with the townsfolk as he was deeply uncomfortable with his Hollywood peers By july ninth, nineteen fifty five, filming in Texas wrapped and the production moved back to the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank. and everyone thought that surely heading back to Hollywood would be good for all of the tension. But they thought, wrong, because Texas had given them some physical space to spread out and get away from each other, and now they were all trapped together on a studio lot Add to this the fact that Warner Brothers was now physically breathing down Stehven's neck about budget and delays, and everyone was miserable Also, Elizabeth Taylor's nightlife caught up to her and she got sick with both pharyngitis and cystitis, and she was told by the doctors you need to stop And lay down now otherwise things could get really bad and delay things further, so she did, which left tensions between James Dean and George Stevens to simmer even more Actress Nori Nash, who played a Rancher's wife, joined the cast in L.A and said, quote, By the time I got on the picture, director George Stevens and James Dean were at each other. Dean did his usual mumbling and Stehvens kept saying This script costs a lot of money. I want to hear those words He mumbles a lot. He's a mumbla. Let him mumble. I turned the subtitles on Chris Tam, George Stevens. I'm Team Rock Hudson, I think. I have subtitles on. And then guys that Iess I rented it on Apple, but let's get an updated subtitles with Spanish subtitles. 'cause every time they speak Spanish, it just says foreign language. I know parentheses. I know. Thank. Do we know what language it is? No, no. Spanish Also, Dean was still pissed at Stehvens because he kept calling everyone to set and makeup and costume, whether they were needed or not. So on july twenty third, after he had been called in and not used for three days straight, James Dean was like, fuck this and decided not to show up at all Warner Bothers sent out everyone they had to figure out where he was and what was going on. Eventually, a second AD got a hold of him, and Dean simply said he was too tired to work. So Stevens presented Dean with a pretty damning log of every time Dean had been late to set, which included at least sixteen times between june twenty ninth and august first. The message was very clear And after that, James Dean started showing up on time and stopped complaining. Also that would mean every other day. Literally. If you were filming every day. Yeah. So what that really means it's three out of four days You're late. Also he's being paid for all the days. Yeah, even the ones he's not showing up for. So Yes.. Then on july thirty first, because pharyngitis and cystitis weren't enough, Elizabeth Taylor got a leg infection and was knocked out for a week, I guess this answers the question of how How was she doing this? She was deeply ill underneath the beautiful exterior. Yeah, be I mean, she'd do it again in Cleopatra like I know. Yeah, sheeez, Louise. So Stevens had to move things around again and find different locations to film in LA that didn't require Taylor In September of nineteen fifty five, while James Dean was still working on Giant, Jack Warner's son in law and execut Warner Brothers asked him to do a National Safety Council interview or PSA about safe driving. And James Dean was like, No, I'm tired. Also, why would you have James Dean do that? Because they know that he drives race cars, because he's this cool and you know, rebel without a cause, off course that hadn't come out yet, but would feature essentially drag racing Fair enough So William Or, this executive, said, quote, listen to me, you little son of a bitch, you are gonna do it. You've been nasty to a lot of people around here, but you're not going to be nasty to the whole country. You're gonna go down and make this damned public service announcement or I'll stand here until you do So Chris, James Dean did it, and I would like to play it for you in its entirety Hi, Jimmy Hi again We asked Jimmy over today because he's a racing van himself Re real one not a crazy one Incidentally, I think I should explain that Jimmy just stepped over from the set of giants need to add he plays a Texan Speaking of racing, have you ever been in a drag race Are you kidding me? I just thought I'd ask Now gym races in the tradition, you might say, Re racing cars, real tracks. How fast will your car go Oh and honest miles an hour clock did runab hundred and sixty seven. You've won a few races, haven't you Oh one oram Wh? Well, I show pretty good at Balm Springs I ran a baky st you. Jimmy We probably have a great many young people watching on our shower tonight, and for their benefit, I'd like your opinion about fast driving on the highway Do you think it's a good idea? Good for Oh I used to fly around quite a bit, I took a lot of unnecessary chances on the highways And I started racing and Now I drive on the highways, I'm Extra cautious Bea no one knows what they're doing half the time. You don't know what this guy's gonna do with that one. On a track, there are a lot of men who spend a lot of time developing rules and ways of safety. And I find myself being very cautious on the highway. I don't have the urge to to speed on the highland. People say racing is dangerous But I'll take my chances on the track any day than on a highway Well, Gig, I think I'd better take off. Oh wait a minute, Jimmy, One more question Do you have any special advice for the young people who drive Take it easy driving and the life you might save might be mine, That last line was actually supposed to be drive safely, the life you save may be your own. but as we heard, he changed it to take it easy driving, The life you save might be mine On september twenty seventh, he wrapped up his principal photography on Giant, and he had his brand new car, a Porsche spider that he nicknamed Little Bastard delivered to the set, because he was finally free to have some fun. All he had left was some dialogue looping, essentially Mercedes McCambridge was the first person to ride in it with him and And according to George Steven, Jr., quote, Dad said the last conversation he had with Jimmy was, I know you're going up there. You're gonna put the car on a truck and truck it up and then drive it at the track. And Jimmy said, Yep, that's what I'm gonna do And initially that is what he had planned to truck the car out to the Salinas Road race where he was going to compete, But his mechanic convinced him to drive the car out himself to break in the engine. So on september thirtieth, they headed out on the road at about five forty five PM Two hours later, Dean did receive a speeding ticket around Bakersfield, and then at the junction of highighway four hundred and sixty six and forty one around Colane California A twenty three year old cal poolytechnic state student named Donald Turnipseeed was driving home from school in his nineteen fifty Ford tutor when he turned left directly into James Dean's path colliding head on Dean's last words to his mechanic were that guy's gota stop, he'll see us. But Turnipsed did not No one knows if it was the extremely low profile of the car or the fact that it was silver But Turnipseed had no clue that they were coming. James Dean died at twenty four years old from a broken neck and massive internal injuries. Both his passenger and Turnipseed did survive the crash. I didn't know that this accident was not his fault at all. I always thought, o, he must have been driving super recklessly Not the case I actually think what he said in that PSA was probably true, that he did play it safer on the highways than he did on the racetrack because he knew people weren't paying attention Back on the set of Giants, Stevens and the cast and crew were watching daies when Stevens received a call The lights went on in the theater and everyone knew that something was wrong According to Carol Baker who again plays the younger Les Benedict in the movie, George took a couple deep breaths. There was not a sound in that projection room, and after a while, he said in a very level voice, Jimmy Dean has just died in an automobile accident, and that's all he said. We all sat there stunned, Nobody cried, noody shouted I don't think we were able to move. Rock Hudson said George left and I followed him. We walked down through the sound stages through Warner Brothers and I lost him. I couldn't find him. I don't know where he went, except to guess that he just wanted to be by himself Rebel Without a Cause premiered less than one month after Dean's death, and James Dean hysteria went into full swing. People refused to believe that he had died. They thought it must be a publicity stunt by Warner Bothers George Stevens actually received death threats from people insisting that he not cut a single moment of Dean's performance in Giant And one comment that Stevens received at a preview of the film read, I don't know how possible it is, but the studio almost owes its audience as much of James Dean as can be squeezed in But the fact was, George Stehvens had over eight hundred thousand feet of film to edit, and his already obsessive nature was turned up to eleven following Dean's death. At one point, George Jr. told his father, Dad, you have a great picture. Why don't you lock it up And George Stevens said, When you think about how many man hours people will spend watching this picture, don't you think it's worth a little more of our time to make it as good as we can? It took Stehvens an entire year to edit the film. He ended up using Dean's friend, Nick Adams to dub the few remaining lines that Dean had left, which actually were almost all of his lines in the banquet scene when he's drunk because you could not understand what he had said on set. So that is not James Dean. And as Stevens watched the footage over and over, he realized that James Dean had actually been right about a lot. One scene in particular stood out There's one where Jett enters the house as the party is being thrown and pours himself a drink of Bick's whiskey. Dean had been emphatic that he should have just pulled out his own flask, but Stevens shut him down. In watching it back, Stevens realized Rink would have been too proud to take Bick's whiskey He said, quote, His idea was too damn smart and he didn't explain it to me, so I didn't get it then But he really knew that character, and that's the best tribute I can pay to his talent as an artist Stevens was also under attack from the oil industry. They wanted that scene where the Benedicts discuss the tax break, and Leslie criticizes it cut from the film. Jack Warner put the heat on Stevens to get rid of it, but Stevens exhausted stood his ground, saying, Jack, you just have to tell him, I can't do it Giant premiered in October of nineteen fifty six and released wide on november twenty fourth. It garnered both critical and commercial success as well as Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge, Adapted screenplay, score, arrt direction, costume design, and editing. and Best Actor, by the way, was for both Dean and Hudson So interesting. I think Dean should be nominated in supporting. I agree. That's nothing against his performance. No, he's in it last.erformance is great. yeah, exactly It's a supporting turn. But yes, Mercedes McCabbridge is great as his asshole sister. I think she's interesting. She is interesting, but I'm mad at her before she does that horse. Okay. But only one person took home an Academy Award that night, George Stevens for Best director Now, as for Rock Hudson, he married his agent secretary Phyllis Gates shortly after Giant had wrapped filming in what many believed to be a marriage arranged by Henry Wilson. Wilson even booked their whole honeymoon in Jamaica Now they divorced three years later. According to Phllis in a later memoir, she said she had no clue that Hudson was gay and by her account, he became abusive towards the end of their relationship. We don't know. I'll be honest. I find it a little hard to believe that she didn't know given she was Henry Wilson's secretary. and this was his entire modus operndi, but who knows? She said she didn't Hudson never came out publicly about his sexuality despite constant rumors in the press, although he was finally able to fire vial agent Henry Wilson in nineteen sixty six, at which point, Wilson allegedly threatened to throw acid in Hudson's face as retaliation But in July of nineteen eighty five, Rock Hudson did break the news that he had AIDS, and this was a huge deal. It really cannot be overstated how big a deal this announcement was. And he could absolutely have kept his diagnosis under wraps until he died, perhaps even beyond that point, but he chose to publicly own his diagnosis. And the press were not kind to him He had been guest starring on Dynasty at the time and had had a kissing scene with co star Linda Evans, and the tabloids ran with this. They called it the kiss of death, had he given her aIids. Later, she said she always wondered why he'd kissed her so timidly with a closed mouth, and she realized later it was his way of protecting her because they really didn't know how it spread at that point He was the first major celebrity to contract the disease and suddenly people were forced to really confront the reality of it because if Rock Hudson could get it, so could anyone His announcement did help garner more donations to research funds, though his own friend, Nancy Reagan still declined to help relocate him to a better medical center when he was on his death bed. Although I did hear that that did impact the Reagans long term. Someone else did as well, who we're about to talk about. Okay. Someone else put the pressure on the Reagans. Rock Hudson died on october second, nineteen eighty five But just two weeks earlier, on september nineteenth, Elizabeth Taylor hosted the first major fundraiser for AIDS Project Los Angeles, an organization she had begun working with earlier that year She raised one point three million dollars at this dinner for AIDS patient care. Rock Hudson donated ten thousand dollars but was too ill to attend, instead sending this message. I am not happy that I am sick, I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if this is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth This dinner led to the creation of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, which Elizabeth Taylor continued to work tirelessly for as the National chairman. She actually refused the title Chairwoman. In nineteen eighty seven, she spoke about her decision to become an activist at the National Press Club in DC, saying, quote, I became so incensed and personally frustrated at the rejection I was receiving by just trying to get people's attention. I was made so aware of the silence, this huge loud silence regarding AIDS how no one wanted to talk about it and no one wanted to become involved. Certainly no one wanted to give money or support. And it so angered me that I finally thought to myself, bitch, do something yourself inststead of sitting there getting angry, do something. and she did In addition to raising and donating millions of dollars for treatment in patient care, she also visited hundreds of patients in hospals. dressed to the Nines with diamonds and full hair and makeup because she wanted them to see her as they had imagined her. She also personally put an enormous amount of pressure on Nancy and Ronald Reagan, and it is thought that she actually led directly to Reagan's first major speech about AIDS, which didn't come until I think, like nineteen eighty seven But just like Leslie Benedict, she did not let cultural stigma get in the way of caring for her friends. She did the right thing I don't know why I'm getting so upset about this. I just when researching this, I didn't know how much she did and it's really remarkable. I think she's an easy target for some movies, right? and some of the behind the scenes stories, like on Cleopatra, which we talked about which is she was a crazy person. Yeah, and it is funny. But she was a good person also like And she didn't do this for publicity. She really likek she was in the twwilight of her career at that point. you know, this was just she had a friendship, she cared about people. And like you said, it's there's such a meta quality to this and the movie giant, which of course What really Giant explores is how the one thing that gives me hope about humans is how prejudices do, I think, very often break down when put up against people we know. Yeah, right? And that really what a lot of people say, I think, turn the tide on gay marriage was just as more and more people started coming out, we just everybody just realized, wow, I family that is gay. Just statistically, it's likely. And with AIDS, it was the same thing where it's like if we just ignore it, if you take the Benedict family approach of like, they live over there, we don't talk to them, you know, blah, blah That's how this festers. but the parallels are kind of amazing not only her, obviously, like she was truly, truly pioneering and like is a big part of the reason why AIDS research had enough money to even begin, you know, dealing with this, but also Rock Hudson Yeah. becausecause did he ever come out completely? No. No. He never got to live his life openly and that was a choice. and you know, he did make it In the end, he did what he could, which was to be honest about the diagnosis before he died. Yeah, like Bick Benedict, he changed exact enough, right at the end of his life. Yeah. And in the same way, The Reagans eventually come around a little bit because they start to realize maybe through public pressure Elizabeth Taylor would not leave them. But ye I do think in part it's, oh, this is something that is impacting Yeah not just this otherered group over there that I you know am going to not care about because I don't interact with them. It's people I know It's both sad that that has to be the case, but it always makes me optimistic for change because exposure therapy works, you know, with so many things. Interestingly, she said that as soon as she started to become aware of this, she immediately was like, what are we doing? Like what are you know, how do we get help for this? And she said that in particular, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson refused to give any assistance or help Initially. interestnteresting. veryy interesting Well, that wraps up our coverage of giant, Chris. So what went right? Well, thank you so much, Lizzie, for bringing us through the story. I would like to give my want winner there could go to any number of people. James Dean is obviously great in this movie his last film Rroock Hudson Elizabeth Taylor, George Steven did a great job directing this movie. I think the cinematography' great. You know, One of my favorite shots is Shot of the House in while as War Wins returns without Luz on his back and tells the story I would like to give mine to the screenwriters who didn't get a lot of talk in this episode, but I agree with you. I think the way that they rewrote character is it as acerbic and satirical as Edna would have wanted? No, I'm sure it was not. But I think it's a lovely change and it's an optimistic change, but I think they did it in a way that doesn't feel mockish and unrealistic to me, as I mentioned. Yeah. To me, I think they really struck a nice balance. They didn't Paul Hagis it No, they did not. Who will also come up on something we're about to discuss. I know. No, I think they did, you know what they said, peopleople can change, but they don't change that much. But they changed just enough. And I appreciated it and I respected that they were able to find that's a tough needle to thread. Yeah I'm gonna to give mine to Rock Hudson. Sure. I think's great. He is incredible in this movie and, you know, obviously it was a difficult production for him. It was an enormous challenge, but he rose to the challenge and it makes me very sad that we didn't get to see him do this again. And I wonder if it's because this was such an unpleasant experience and then James Dean died and you know, it just became What was supposed to be his movie, really Which when you watch it, it is Rock Hudson's movie. No, but it's correct. O of course that's not how it's remembered. And when you see the poster, its on the right know. James Dean's the biggest head on the poster I know. And then it's Rock Hudson and then it's Elizabeth Taylor, which ye if anything, if it's not going to be Rock Hudson, it's Elizabeth Taylor. I know. Wh's the protagonist for the first hour and a half. Yeah And I just wonder if, you know, the whole experience kind of scared him off and then coupled that with the fact that he was still, you know, so required to remain closeted, then he just turns to the real fluff, like pillow talkal and all the Doris Day movies. and maybe we'll cover those because also who knows what Henry Wilson was steering him towards? You know there's so many things we don't know yet about that period. So we have to dive more into his life Yeah I think despite what his beginnings may have been, despite the fact that he didn't have the same training as James Dean, he is a great actor. And he turns in such a nuanced performance that it's so interesting because, you know, James Dean is the trained actor and he does a great job. He is a great actor But the one who's turning in a much more subtle and in many ways, I think more human performance is Rock Hudson. Yeah, you know, he reminds me in this movie of like Sylvester Stallone in Cop land. I don't know if you've seen that movie. It's a really good movie. Don't about it. It's a good movie. Slvester Stallone's a good actor. Well, he is, but I mean he's great in first blood obviously. and he's good in Rocky. He's great in Rocky He has this whole thing, he'd really beefed up by the time of cop land. And he basically he plays a police officer who's a police officer in a neighborhood of cops, right? It's like the cops who police New York City but don'tve New Yorkity anyway they're all corrupt and it's like how you police the police? And he's going against Kaitel and De Niro and Rayiota Anyway, I know Stillone's six inches shorter than Rock Hudson, but in Copplland, he's doing really nice subtle things with his whole body, the way he holds himself and stands And that's what I think Rock Hudson does so well in this movie. I do too. But the funny thing is I think he actually needed James Dean because I agree James Dean forced him to not be able to just rely on his size and you know dominating the wide shots. And because of that, you get a really remarkable performance out of Rock Hudson that I don't think you would get otherwise. So that's my what went right. I love this movie I really loved learning more about all of this. and I would like to know more about James Dean. I mean, you know we kind of scratched the surface here, but yeah, Rebel without a Cause, I think we'll probably get into East to Eden because they're doing an adaptation with Faorence coming this fall. Y. It's a miniis series, so we'll have to cover that as well. All right, great. All If people would like to support this podcast, how could they do that? Just a few easy ways tellell a family member or a friend what went wrong. Give it a look, give it a listen. Leave us a rating review on whatever podcatchter you are listening to us on. 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