Writing About James Dean
After the death of Dean in an automobile accident in 1955, Bast chronicled his five year relationship with the actor in James Dean: a Biography. After moving to London, Bast wrote The Myth Makers for Granada Television, a fictionalized drama inspired by Dean's funeral, which Bast perceived as grotesque and publicity-driven, with a shattering effect on Dean's rural-American family and his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. In the United States, the script was produced again by NBC's Dupont Show of the Month and aired under the title The Movie Star.
In 1975, Bast produced and scripted James Dean: Portrait of a Friend for NBC, a movie for television based upon his first James Dean biography.
In 2006, Barricade Books (USA) published Surviving James Dean, a second, more candid book by Bast about his relationship with Dean; which featured material that Bast did not include in his earlier account due to personal trepidations and social mores of the 1950s. In Surviving James Dean Bast describes Dean in a compassionate light; how they met at UCLA, shared an apartment in Santa Monica, dated the same woman, and also had a sexual relationship. He also describes the events that happened to him after Dean's death, largely as a result of having written his first book.
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