WHAT WENT WRONG - Giant (1956)

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

‘Giant’ may be remembered as James Dean’s final film, but there is so much more to the story. Chris and Lizzie dive into the making of the classic 1956 film, why James Dean and Rock Hudson couldn’t stand each other, and how Elizabeth Taylor found herself caught between the two. Find out how homophobia tore Rock Hudson’s life apart, why director George Stevens constantly fought with James Dean, and how Dean’s untimely death prior to the end of production set the film on a totally different course. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Vampire Lastat After Dark, the official companion show for the vampire listat, which is, of course, the third season of interview with the vampire on AMC. I had the best time talking to the cast and crew of this 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 Plus, and make sure you watch the Vampire List at After 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. Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What 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, perhaps the movie Taylor Sheridan watched and said that.

Yes. But way more densely plotted. As always, I am 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. Yeah. 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 with the stars of it, because these are such big names, but I don't know what your experience was.

Really quickly, before I dive into that, I do want to do a quick disclaimer. Our 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, that 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, okay. It was one of the films we covered in a 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, 40 minutes. I think is incredibly strong. And it feels impeccably cast Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, 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 Virginia or Marylander. Where 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.

So she grew up close to the Capitol. spent time in the Capitol, and she's much more progressive than this Texas world that she's entering into when she marries Rock Hudson. She's, like, arguably progressive for today. Yeah, I would say, yes. Which is interesting. She's woke. Yeah. She is. 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, oh, well, get ready. Yeah, he's gorgeous. He's extremely appealing. Yeah. And he's enormous. He's a giant. She shows up in Texas, and we are exposed to a world that is very segregated between the hwats and the Mexicans. And as well as within

the hwats, you have the lower class folks embodied by Jet Rink, played by James Dean, who's a cowhand basically on the ranch. Rihatta, run by Bick Benedict and his sister, Luz. And you kind of think the movie's going to, it's kind of like dealing with some race-relation stuff that's very interesting. And Biggedy-Bed and he comes from a line of prejudice. 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, where it's like, oh, is it going to be like the hem, JetRink thing? But Leslie's more the protagonist for like the first hour and 40 minutes. I thought it was going to be a thing where she would like realize the error of her ways with Bick and she would go realize that she was in love

with JetRink, which is fascinating because that's not what happens at all. Oh, we'll talk about the book, yeah, 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 in a really fascinating way for the 1950s. I think it's pretty incredible. I mean, you said cabaret 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 40 minutes in when we do a pretty big time jump.

We jump 15, 20 years into the future, and all of the sudden Bick and Leslie's children are grown. It does give a great opportunity for Dennis Hobbes. 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 ranch hand, God forbid. Which is so funny. You want to be a doctor?

Yeah. You kind of think it's going to build towards a long simmering confrontation between Big Benedict and Jet Rancu. Who 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. And getting his ass kicked by like a line cook and 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 Unheld, the son of Polo, which is like kind of one of the lead workers on the ranch,

who's set up, and in a subtle way, I would argue maybe too subtle, as the son that Big Benedict wished he'd had. And then Big Benedict attends his funeral after he has returned from World War II in a casket. And it's 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's kind of uneven at the same time, narratively, where it feels like it'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. Of course. The cinematography is great. The cinematography is incredible. The production design is incredible. We're going to talk more about the production design than we are about the cinematography.

Well, you can see the influences on like Badlands, right? With like the big Gothic style house in the middle of nowhere, like Dallas would come later. Taylor Sheridan's movies. Exactly. Yellowstone. Yellowstone is the big one. I mean, 100% Taylor shared and watched this and said, let me do it slightly worse.

But, 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 got to 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 so good. I also watched the Rock Hudson documentary, which is streaming on HBO Max. It's called All That Heaven Allow. Yeah. It's really good. It's very worth watching. We're going to focus a lot on him and James Dean, and then we'll do a little bit on Elizabeth Taylor 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 Day pictures and stuff. He did all the pillow talk stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's weird because I was like, oh, he's like, he's like, he's

like a jock, but he's got the sensitivity as well. I know. 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. It 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. Which I think is really unusual for him.

So 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 Milton has total Rock Hudson vibes. Yeah. I can see that. I think he's a wonderful actor. Wonderful actor. Maybe

you'd be like, oh, like, doofy is the wrong word. But you know what I mean? Like, oh, he's a big, slow... May December, he turned in a performance that was very soft. Yes, May December. Exactly. Yeah, he's great. All right. So the details, as always, Giant was directed by George Stevens. Screenplay is written by Fred Giehl and Ivan Moffitt. It is adapted from the novel by Edna Ferber. It had a wide release in November of 1956, and it starred Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carol Baker, Jane Withers, Mercedes,

Mercedes MacCambridge, Dennis Hopper, Sal Minio, Elsa Cardanias, who plays Dennis Hopper's wife, who I think is really incredible and also, good Lord, she's beautiful in this movie. And as always, the IMDB logline 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 Ferber, and the making of a legendary American film. Julie Gilbert's giant love. 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 have allowed as well. All right, so let's start where Giant began, which is with its author, Edna Ferber. She was born in 1885 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 Atumwa, Iowa, very small town, population of about 20,000 people. Just for reference, West Hollywood has a population of about 33,000. And she spent seven years in Atamwa, 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 because 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 1909, 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 Pulitzer Prize for her 1924 novel so big and was hailed as the greatest American woman novelist. She's also a heavily adapted author. Ten out of her 12 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 a no knock on her. I think it's considered one of the least deserving best picture winners, isn't it? Cimarone. Oh, there's that one, yes, but also Showboat.

Oh, yeah, showboat, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in 1939, she took her first trip to Texas, and she was gobsmacked, 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 undeluted, 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 preformed 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. Claiburg, who was the president of the King Ranch in Texas, which spans about 960,000 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 wore and upswept Stetson over his cool piercing eyes. Mr. Claiburg was an individualist of formidable proportions. So who is this?

Well, I mean, I guess it's Big Benedict. It's Big Benedict, yes. But, like, also, that kind of sounds a little like JetRink 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 rags to riches, Texas oil man who dropped out of college with $1.50 in his pocket and two years later struck oil by 1949.

He was worth $200 million. But to be clear, a $1.50 back then was actually. $200,000. I'm just kidding. Yeah. He was actually rich. It was upper middle class. Ferber spent 13 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 1952, she published Giant and it was a critical and commercial success selling upwards of three million copies. Whoa. Yeah, three millie. Three Milly would be like a great number of copies of a book to sell today.

And as we know, there were 10 people around in 1952. And there are 10 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 members. Spent a lot of time there. They all live in Dallas.

Anywho, 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 Texas' actual name? And everyone was like, fuck, I don't know. 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 40s and 50s. One critic, Carl Victor Little of the Houston press, went so far as to say that Edna Ferber should be lynched.

your 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 god what i don't know they also called her a carpetbagger 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 90s and early 2000s 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 1930, he got his big break when he helped Hal Roach solve a problem. Roach couldn't figure out how to photograph the super light blue eyes of comedian Stan Laurel. So Stevens 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. Started to hit his stride around 1935 with Alice Adams starring Catherine 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. Yeah, that's what happened. And next he hit it big with what movie that came up during Temple of Doom? Gungadine. Gungadine, that's right, which was a grueling location shoot that, of course, ran very long. All shot 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 a 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. But the Atlantic Hills, they're gorgeous.

If you guys ever get a chance to go up there. Cool. Eventually, he got an Oscar nomination in 1942 for the More the Marrier, and then he was drafted into the Army during World War II. But General Eisenhower had a very particular task for him. do you know what George Stevens did during World War II? Did he work in documentary like Capra and Co?

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 Stevens' footage. Wow. He brought together a team of filmmakers,

including John Ford and Samuel Fuller. They filmed the camps. They interviewed survivors. In a 1984 documentary on Stevens produced and narrated by his son, George Stevens Jr., who of course would go on to found AFI, Stevens spoke about his experience walking through the gates at Dachau, 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 at the concentration camps. He also shot footage of D-Day 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 crimes. Oh, yeah, because they knew. 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 Remember Mama, a film about a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Next up was a place in the sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, which won six Oscars, including a Best Director Award 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 gunslinger.

Yeah, Shane's the one I knew growing up the most with Shane. And I loved the book, Shane, stars Alan Ladd, father of Alan Ladd, Jr. 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 instead of fake angles. But it's a really amazing movie. That's the 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 15 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-war 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, Edna Ferber was saying no to everyone. and 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 10 years. So this was an incredibly good deal. In December of 1953, Giant Productions nabbed a deal with Warner Brothers for a budget of around, $2.7 million. And Jack Warner held a press conference announcing the film in which he 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 enormous movie. I'd have to imagine even $2.7 million is too low for this movie. Yeah, this movie is insane. The scale of this movie is crazy. I think Shane was more than $2.7 million, and Shane's a smaller movie than this movie by a lot. And it went way over schedule. He was known for taking forever. Yeah, and this movie's almost like anti-gone 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 447 pages long. As you mentioned, it covers multiple decades, and 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 Furber'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 screenwriters, Fred Giehl and Ivan Moffat to adapt the novel, and they made some pretty major changes,

one of the biggest being the ending. Now, in Ferber's novel, you see what is unfortunately, perhaps more realistic, but more depressing. There is no fight in the diner. Bick Benedict does not see the error of his ways, and instead you watch plenty of discrimination without much resolution. Bick's character arcing 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 slur at the very end of the film. He sure does to a baby. Which, 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 Vashti and Pinky on their way to JetRank's big party, and then you see the Benedict's 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 over-explaining everything, making it too novelistic, and that all the dialogue was a little too Elmer Fudd 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 Brothers. 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 are leads. Yes. 30 years. Yes. In which they said, what if their hair turned titanium? I am Tatinae. Yeah. But at the time, Hollywood was in the habit of very much casting older actors and then dressing

them up younger. Thank Jimmy Stewart. And it's a wonderful life. World's oldest high school students. What are we going to do, children? What are we going to do? When do we go to college next year? You're 45.

But Stevens realized this is dumb. And it would be a lot easier to age a younger actor up. It's the right decision. Yes. Even 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, to the end. And they do, like, Dennis Hopper feels so young, but Hudson can still feel like his father to me. Oh, totally. And also, like, the first hour and change of this, they're supposed to be young and hot. So let's have them be young and hot. Exactly. So they rejected a few stars right away for being too old. Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, William Holden, Robert Mitchum, Sterling Hayden. Hayden actually made it farther than most, but Stephen said no. Gary Cooper is the one that I was wondering about, only because, like, you know, he had done high noon, for example, which is kind of an anti-Western in some ways. He is a little, he's older. Yeah. He's probably at least in his 40s at this point. Charlton Heston, Errol Flynn, and he said no to everybody.

Yeah, Charlton Heston also is an interesting choice. But didn't he do the Ten Commandments the same year, basically? Wasn't that 56? Yeah, again, he's substantially older. Two 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. in 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 that Rock Hudson has. He's so imposing that he really can sell the immovable object of his beliefs, right? Because to me, the arc of this movie is Bick Benedict needs to stop defending his family lineage and start defending his family. Right?

That's what his arc is. Very good. And I just, I don't know, it's like such 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 Stephen's eye for Bick Benedict, and that was, of course, Rock Hudson. Hudson had broken out in a huge way with Douglas Cirque's Magnific. It was an obsession in 1954, but it was a movie he had made before that that caught Stephen's eye. It was a Western called The Lawless Breed from 1952. Stephen's secretary 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 got to say, of all the age makeup in Giant. I think Rock Hudson's is maybe second most successful. I think James Deans is the best, because there's the least of it. James Deans is the best. James Deans is the closest to Brando and the Godfather. I agree. And they do a good job with the receding hair line on him. Yep. And I agree Rock Hudson's second best. Elizabeth Taylor looks nuts. But Polo, Anheel's father. Oh, yeah. 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 Shearer, Jr. in 1925 in Winnetka, 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 II 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. Selsnik 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 40s and 50s by plucking young actors from obscurity and transforming them.

It was a pretty open secret that he was. 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 marriages and absent fathers and take them on his clients. He was a tormented gay man who prayed 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. Oh, yeah. Who Simon Baker ends up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Spoiler dead with that character. What I was going to mention, did he have anything to do with Errol Flynn? No, I think that would have been a little early. Okay, yeah, because Errol Flynn, 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, which. with Charlton Heston, for example,

and Kirk Douglas and Spartacus and stuff like that. I think it has more to do with the transition in America from... Because if you look at silent film actors... It's like all post-World War II. Exactly. 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 II, you want to see the strong American soldier coming home. You know, you were asking about Aero 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 Hardin. 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 38 takes to say the line, you've got to buy a bigger blackboard in the 1948 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. He also did these weird publicity stunts 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 Man style paint. Yeah, the Tin Man, exactly. Yeah. It reminds me of Alden-Earon Wright's character in Hell Caesar. Yes, totally. Would it be so simple? 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, Stephen wanted someone we just talked about in breakfast at Tiffany'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 Edna Ferber kept pushing Stevens to look at Patricia Neal, Chris's favorite.

I was going to ask about Patricia Neal. 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. Yeah. But it was Elizabeth Taylor who nabbed the part due to sheer willpower.

In 1967, Stevens 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 going to be able to work four weeks? I mean, she did it, which is insane.

No, I mean, she's feeding him lines on the other side of the phone, obviously. It's in great shape. Yeah. 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 23 years old with a two-year-old and a baby in tow, by the way. She's 23. She's 23. She's crazy. She's 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 1955, 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 23 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 Stephen's office dressed in outfits he thought JetRink would wear and made it clear this was his part. Stevens would later say physically and temperamentally, Jimmy Dean was wrong for the part. Jet 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 JetRank, that's me. That's me because I can convince myself that it will be me, really me. In March of 1955, Stevens took a chance on him and said, okay. Now James Dean, not unlike Rock Hudson, was born in the Midwest, Mary in Indiana in 1931, 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 apparently started 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's studio in New York City. At this point, the studio focused on the Stanislavski method, which I pulled 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, who of course would go on to play Loz 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's 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. But in 195, he got his major break with

Alia Kazan's East of Eden, which he would get an Oscar nomination for. That same year, he filmed Rebel Without a Cause opposite Natalie Wood and Salminio, who also appears briefly in Giant. Yeah, he plays Un Hell when he's going to war. He does. I got to say, I think this is my favorite performance of James Dean. I know Rebel Without 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's larger in life. And Carmel and my wife was a huge James Dean head growing up shit, a big cardboard cut out of James Dean 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. great job in this movie. He's really convincing. Yeah, 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. Well, you have James Dean to thank for that. So he was actually in a pretty bad mood, though, because of Rebel Without a Cause. He was supposed to have gotten a break between that movie's production and Giant, but Rebel Without a Cause had run way over. And so he was doing costume fittings and, you know, make up 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 too. I know it's different. I know what you're saying. It's about authenticity. No, no, no. I want to be careful. Yeah. It's, 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 Stanislavski 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 him about his race car. And he said, look, 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 break a leg, 300 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, Stevens rounded out the cast with an Academy Award winner, Mercedes-McCampr, playing Les 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 1955 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 Wilding, and Taylor and Hudson stayed up drinking until about

4 a.m. and then realized they had to be on set at 6 a.m. 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. To be To be clear, it's not their wedding, right? This is your sister's wedding when you've come back for Thanksgiving. And they probably also thought like, well, they look a little rough. This is when they're older. Okay, that's fine. They look a bit green. Good, good. Yeah, that's fine. After only about a month in LA, production then moved to Marfa, Texas. So that insane house at the center of Rihata Ranch was built for the film on Evans Ranch, also sometimes called Ryan Ranch, about 21 miles outside of Marfa. They paid $20,000 all in for the use of the land, which included the cattle and the horses.

Great scope. And that would be about $250,000 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've 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, according 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, Jomey. The Ruins of Rihata. Yep. It's cool. It looks like what now would exist behind a very elaborate stage production, for example. Yeah. So Marfa was established in 1883 as a railway water stop. And by 1955, when they were filming this, it was a tiny cattle town with a population of about 3,600 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 partiers did love that. There was also basically no existing infrastructure to support a movie productions. 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 old 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 120 degrees in the shade. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. It got so hot one day that

Mercedes MacCambridge, her makeup melted into her face and caused a serious infection that permanently scarred her. Jesus. Coupled that with the fact that by June 24th, they were eight days behind schedule and more than $200,000 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 39-person cast would gather at the El Paisano Hotel at 5 a.m. And then get shuttled to Ryan Ranch by 8 a.m. where they would stay until about 6 p.m. Then it was back to Marfa to eat dinner, watch dailies, and drink until Yvom. Yeah. I don't know how people did this.

I don't know either. It blows my mind. 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 syrup, and Kalua. Oh, God. How does she look like that? How does she look like that? Well, everything that's going in is coming out.

But she's 23. 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 120 degrees. Why do you need everyone standing around outside in costume all day? Stevens 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 JetRink 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'll call it a squinty 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. And the prosthetics are distracting, like on Elizabeth Taylor in particular. Yeah, I agree. 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 McKenzie and Junebug. And there's like a cruzian 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. Totally. Because 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 MacCambridge 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 James Dean in front of the entire casting crew for that and then walked off. the set and told the AD you direct his scenes, I'm not doing it. But George Stevens 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 asked 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. So let'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 Elizabeth 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 4 a.m. 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 O'Sallisnick special. They're just all getting, it's that episode of Mad Men where they're all getting the amphetamine shots in the ass. And he's like, it'll give you a little extra pep at your step. But you don't have a heart condition, right? Yeah, Jesus. And then Rodgers 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, wear 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 going to 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 it demands a close-up. And Rock Hudson is coming from, I think, an era of acting where it's, no, fill the frame, right? 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, you know, the straightest man alive seemed to really wrangle James Dean, possibly 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 11 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 and 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 tension. 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 peeing 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 secretary Phyllis 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 29-year-old Hudson to get married or explain why not. Explain yourself. I just keep having sex with too many women. Men. 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 Vash-Ey-Snith. 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, a little town where the film's Mexican Village was built and reportedly handed out Coca-Cola's 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. All to say, he was as comfortable with the townsfolk as he was deeply uncomfortable with his Hollywood peers. By July 9, 1955, filming in Texas, rapped 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 Stephen'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 pharyngeitis 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 Noreen 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 Stevens kept saying, This script cost a lot of money. I want to hear those words. He mumbles a lot.

He's a mumbler. Let him mumble. I turned the subtitles on. Chris's team, George Stevens. I'm Team Rock Hudson, I think. I turned the subtitles on. And then guys that were, I guess, I rented. on Apple, but let's get an updated

subtitles with Spanish subtitles, because every time they speak Spanish, it just says foreign language in parentheses. I know. Thanks, guys. So we know what language it is. No, no. Spanish. Also, Dean was still pissed at Stevens because he kept calling everyone to set and makeup and costume, whether they were needed or not. So

on July 23rd, 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 Brothers 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 16 times between June 29th and August 1st. 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 is three out of four days. You're late.

Also, he's being paid for all the days, even the ones he's not showing up for. So, yes. Then on July 31st, 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 was she doing this? She was deeply ill underneath the beautiful exterior. Yeah, I mean, she'd do it again in Cleopatra. I know. Yeah, geez, Louise.

So Stevens had to move things around again and find different locations to film in L.A. that didn't require Taylor. In September of 1955, while James Dean was still working on Giant. Jack Warner's son-in-law and execate 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, of course, that hadn't come out yet, but would feature essentially drag racing. Fair enough. So William Orr, this executive, said, quote, listen to me, you little son of a bitch, you are going to 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 going to 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, you, Guy. We asked Jimmy over today because he's a racing man himself, a real one, not a crazy one. Incidentally, I think I should explain that Jimmy just stepped over from the set of Giant. Indeed, I 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. No, Jim races in the tradition, you might say. Real racing cars, real tracks. How fast were your car go? Oh, an honest miles an hour. Clock to run about 106, 7.

You've won a few races, haven't you? Oh, one or two. Where? Well, I was sure pretty good at... Springs. I ran a baker's steel. Jimmy, we probably have a great many young people watching our show tonight, and for their benefit, I'd like your opinion about fast driving on the highway. Do you think it's a good idea? A good point. 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. Because 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 speed on the highway. 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. 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 27th, he wrapped up his principal photographer. 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 MacCambridge was the first person to ride in it with him. And according to George Stevens Jr., quote, dad said the last conversation he had with Jimmy was, I know you're going up there, you're going to 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 going to 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 30th, they headed out on the road at about 5.45 p.m. Two hours later, Dean did receive a speeding ticket around

Bakersfield, and then at the junction of Highway 466 and 41 around Colang, California, a 23-year-old Cal Polytechnic State student named Donald Turnip Seed was driving home from school in his 1950 Ford tutor when he turned left directly into James Dean's path colliding head on. Dean's last words to his mechanic where that guy's got to stop, he'll see us, but Turnip Seed did not. No one knows if it was the extremely low profile of the car or the fact that it was silver, but Turnip Seed had no clue that they were coming. James Dean died at 24 years old from a broken neck and massive internal injuries. Both his passenger and Turnip Seed did survive the crash.

I didn't know that this accident was not his fault at all. I always thought, oh, 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 dailies 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, nobody 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 one.

Warner Brothers? 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 Stevens had over 800,000 feet of film to edit, and his already obsessive nature was turned up to 11 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 Stevens 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 Jet enters the house as a party is being thrown and pours himself a drink of Bix 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 Bix 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 a attack from the oil industry. They wanted that scene where the Benedicts discussed 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 1956 and released wide on November 24th. It garnered both critical and commercial success, as well as Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes MacCambridge, Adapted Screenplay, Score, Art Direction, Cost,

costume design and editing. And best actor, by the way, was for both Dean and Hudson. So interesting. I think Dean should be nominated and supporting. I agree. That's nothing against his performance. No, he's in at last. Performance is great. Yeah, exactly. It's a supporting turn. But yes, Mercedes-McCamridge is great as his asshole sister. I think she's interesting. She is interesting, but I'm mad at her fore 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's 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 Phyllis 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 operandi, 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 vile agent Henry Wilson in 1966, at which point Wilson allegedly threatened to throw acid in Hudson's face as retaliation. But in July of 1985,

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 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 AIDS. 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 deathbed. Although I did hear that that did impact the Reagan's long term. Someone else did as well, who were about to talk about. Okay. Someone else put the pressure on the Reagan's. Hmm. Rock Hudson died on October 2nd, 1985, but just two weeks earlier on September 19th, Elizabeth Taylor hosted the first major fundraiser for AIDS Project Los Angeles, an organization she had begun working with earlier that year. She raised $1.3 million at this dinner

for AIDS patient care. Rock Hudson donated $10,000 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 her as the national chairman. She actually refused the title chairwoman. In 1987, she spoke about her decision to become an activist at the National Press Club in D.C. 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. Instead of sitting there getting angry, do something. And she did. In addition to raising and donating millions of dollars for treatment and patient care, she also visited hundreds of patients in hospice. 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 1980. 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. Of course. She was a crazy person. Yeah, and it is funny.

But she was a good person also. And she didn't do this for publicity. She really like... No, she was in Twilight of a career. at that point. You know, like this was just, she had a friendship, she cared about people. And like you said, 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 all, everybody just realized, wow, I have 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 do 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. The parallels are kind of amazing. They are. 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. Because did he ever, come out completely? No.

He never got to live his life openly, and that was a choice, and, you know, he did make it. But 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 just enough right at the end of his life. Yeah. And in the same way,

the Reagan's eventually come around a little bit because they start to realize, maybe through public pressure. Elizabeth Taylor would not leave them alone. Yeah, but I do think in part, it's, oh, this is something that is impacting. Yeah.

Not just this othered 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. Interesting. Very interesting. Well, that wraps up our coverage of Giant, Chris. So what went right? Well, thank you so much, Lizzie, for bringing us through this story. I would like to give my what went there could go to any number of people. James Dean is obviously great in this movie.

His last film, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, George Stevens did a great job directing this movie. I think the cinematography is great. You know, one of my favorite shots is shot of the house and profile. 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 Bick's 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 Haggis 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, people can change, but they don't change that much. Yeah, 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 going to give mine to Rock Hudson. Sure. I think he'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 crazy. But, of course, that's not how it's remembered. And when you see the poster on the rental, I 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 is, if anything, if it's not

going to be Rock Hudson, it should be Elizabeth Taylor. I know. Who's the protagonist for the first hour and a half? Yeah. 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. And then he just turns to the real fluff, like pillow talk and all the Doris Day movies. Maybe we'll cover those because also who knows what Henry Wilson was steering him toward, you

There's so many things we don't know yet about that period. So we'll have to dive more into his life. 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 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. me in this movie of like Sylvester Stallone and Copeland. I don't know if you've seen that movie. It's a really good movie. It's a good movie. Sylvester Stallone's a good actor. Well, he is, but I mean, he's great in first blood, obviously. And he's good and Rocky. He's great in Rocky. He has this hulking. He'd really beefed up by the time of Copeland. 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't live in New York City. Anyway, they're all corrupt. And it's like, how do you police the police? And he's going up in Caitel and De Niro and Rayliota. Anyway, I know Stallone's six inches shorter than Rock Hudson, but in Copland, 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 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 why what went right. I loved 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 scratch the surface here. But yeah, Rebel Without a Cause, I think we'll probably get into.

And East of Eden because they're doing an adaptation with Florence coming this fall. Yes. It's a mini-series, so we'll have to cover that as well. All right. Great. All right. Chris, if people would like to support this podcast, how could they do that? Just a few easy ways.

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We are coming in hot with War of the Worlds. Blazers! Blasers! Tom Cruise! She's not involved. But Timmy Cruz is. Timmy Cruz is. And that means Timmy Creeze.

We are going to be doing an extra little episode as a bit of a primer, Primer for War of the Worlds, which Chris is going to be walking us through Scientology and its impact on Hollywood. So I'm very excited for that. So come for that on Friday and then stay for War of the Worlds on Monday. We will talk to you guys then. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupsaw. So,