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Editorial Review:
The revolutionary film Rebel Without a Cause has had a profound impact on both moviemaking and youth culture -- not only upon its 1955 release but on generations since. In Live Fast, Die Young, the complete story behind this groundbreaking film is revealed, vividly evoking the cataclysmic meeting of actors James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo and director Nicholas Ray -- all at crucial points in their careers as they grappled with fame, burgeoning sexuality, and increasingly reckless behavior.
Through interviews with surviving members of the cast and crew and firsthand access to both personal and studio archives, Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel depict the explosive making of Rebel Without a Cause, complete with never-before-seen photos by famed Dean photographer Dennis Stock. A fascinating look behind the scenes of an unforgettable American film, Live Fast, Die Young tells a story that is as provocative as the film itself.
Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause Reviews:
i learned alot about the movie 
2008-08-05 - from reading this book i've learned alot about the movie Rebal without a cause! i feel like an expert on the movie... there are alot of secrets and i really liked reading this book!
Very well written book
2008-06-16 - An excellent book. Very detailed and the result of a lot of research. I know because I was in Rebel as an extra and even had a small scene with James Dean which was cut. I was Sal Mineo's photographic double on long distance shots because he was under 18 and had to have schooling while on the set. I talked to Dean. He was quite withdrawn and quiet but the camera loved him. Mineo was very jumpy and nervous. The description of the scene at Griffith Park was extremely detailed and to the best of my memory quite accurate. We were up there for quite a while. They started shooting in black and white and after a few days they decided to reshoot the scenes in color as the book describes. In the stills you just see the gang, Dennis Hopper, etc. but there were extras like myself in the background but we were never seen. At any rate, it's a well written and I can vouch for it's accuracy, from what I know and I highly recommend it.
Rebel, Rebel
2007-07-18 -
Wrangling teen idols to make a classic movie
If you're into movies, and classics, or more specifically, misunderstood classics, and you have any interest in James Dean, then Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel's Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause is required reading.
Of course, as a reformed "Deaner" who's read every biography about the icon, much of the information about 1950s film star James Dean, whose died in a car accident only days after completing his third movie, isn't new.
Yet when woven with biographical accounts of Rebel co-stars Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and director Nicholas Ray, Live Fast, Die Young becomes compelling reading, mostly through its swift and meticulously researched details (shown in 50 pages of bibliographical notes) that take us sequentially through the pre-production, daily shooting schedule, ups and downs and sometimes lurid behind the scenes drama that took place through the making of a pivotal film that defined the "teenager" in pop culture, and established post-war adolescent angst as a social phenomenon.
Dean, known for his moody temperament, over-the-top method acting, and palpable inferiority complex to contemporary Marlon Brando, gets his now-famous behaviors contextualized. But what has been forgotten among the piles of gossip magazines through the decades, is how Dean, working closely with director Ray, helped shape Rebel into its unique teen-focused originality.
Commentary from surviving actors like Corey Allen, who played Buzz, the gang nemesis of Jim Stark, Dean's character, offers a grounded perspective to the mythologized stories of Dean, Wood, and Mineo, who all died under tragic circumstances. Allen recounts the competitive atmosphere for camera time (Nick Adams being the biggest ham), and the choreography of the opening knife fight (originally shot in black and white, studio executives pushed to move to the then-new color Cinemascope after watching a rough cut. The entire first scene was re-shot).
The three main character's lives reflected strongly on their private lives at the time. Judy's (Wood) advanced sexuality, Jim Stark's (Dean) longing to befriend Buzz rather than fight him, and Plato's (Mineo) adoration of Stark.
Authors Frascella and Weisel, who both thank their male partners in the book's acknowledgements, are therefore presumably gay. But they show a restrained tone in laying proof to the bisexuality of star Dean, focusing on the actual events surrounding the film's subtle successes at revealing the eroticism lurking under the surface of malcontent violent kids.
It's Sal Mineo who shines when he realizes he is, in effect, cinema's first gay teenager. Never exactly in the closet, Mineo's Plato becomes an icon of shy sensitivity and undefined sexuality.
As the book winds through the travails of filming a revolutionary film under the pressures of studio executives, director Ray's own complex personal problems are no less dramatic, ranging from alcoholism to the shame of enduring an affair between his second wife, who seduced his son from his first marriage, to his illegal affair with a teenage Natalie Wood (who was also having a sexual affair with co-star Dennis Hopper).
That the film ever managed to become the classic it was lies largely to this rare collaborative process that Ray nurtured in a time when Hollywood -barely over the dread of McCarthyism and its related blacklist- was anything but collaborative.
While often times abusive and erratic, and even boastful - years later he would take credit for scenes and ideas proposed by screenwriters and actors- Ray is shown as a maverick who made his mark, despite his eventual downfall, by having created more than a great film, but a document of a culture at a pivotal moment. Frascella and Weisel's thorough work shows readers how it happened.
The definitive book on the film.
2006-12-12 - Rebel Without a Cause almost defined what teenagers were supposed to be when it appeared in the middle 1950. Here was the complete antithesis of the Father Knows Best type of show. It featured three young starts that seemed destined for greatness: Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and James Dean. Strangely enough, all three of them died, quite young, and not by natural causes.
This book is about the making of that movie. It features interviews with the surviving members of the cast and crew and the authors had firsthand access to both personal and studio archives.
This is a rather remarkable book in that it was written so long after the film. It reads like the authors knew and were involved with the people making the movie it tells an extraordinary story. It's very well done, so far as I am concerned, the definitive film on the movie.
The Definitive Rebel Book, Now and Forever 
2006-05-25 - I want to start my review out by saying that I seriously doubt that there will ever be another book like this on Rebel Without A Cause. There certainly hasn't been anything like it in the past.This classic film deserves a book like this and I'm surprised that one was so long in coming.This book is exhaustively researched. Every detail of Rebel from its conception to its filming to its release to its cultural impact is detailed. New interviews with surviving cast and crew members added depth and perspective.The films 3 main stars-James, Natalie and Sal , And Director Nick Ray's experiences making the film are also recounted along with a Chapter each about their lives and fates after Rebel, but the portraits of them are not super deep with perhaps the exception being Nick Ray. The book is more about the evolution and the ultimate impact of Rebel than about the Actors themselves.
The one complaint I have about this book is that at times I think it relied too much on unproven sensationalism about James Dean. Particularly a passage in which an Actor claims that James and Jack Simmons were hitting on him, but what sounded like a perfect innocent invitation to visit the house they were living in to me.
But this is a book that should be on any Rebel fans bookshelf.
