You're right as usual, Gil. It was called just James Dean, was shown in 2001, and Franco won a Golden GLobe and Screen Actors Guild award for his performance! I'll have to seek that one out.
Meanwhile, there's a movie coming out this year about Dean's hidden gay life, I understand.
You know every time one of these movies come out so many years after the death of a person. I wonder about them. So much is
said, or intimated, and gossiped about in Hollywood. Then as now much of it untruth and some of course well known. It is always hard
for me to take this stuff totally on face value. I think lots of these things are revisionist life stories. I am not saying one way or the other
about this one in particular. I am just saying, I am always rather suspect of the reasons and intents behind them...
If a story is well known by intimates, and close friends. They then tell about it after the person is gone. I think that is probably a true thing. Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift were very very close. She always knew of his sexual orientation. So did many others. They had starred together in their first big hollywood movie as adults. A Place in the Sun.. So it was not a shock when the truth was revealed. However I was a huge fan of James Dean, and as most teenagers did and still do. Kept up with everything about him. I heard about his love affair with a young Italian actress, named Pier Angeli, who had moved here right after the war. I know he and she were together some of the time. He may or may not have had gay lovers as well. Some mentioned Sal Mineo, who was gay, and
was killed. They were very close, but no one knew if it was because of a friendship that developed when working on Revel Without a Cause, or if there was more to it. Then He and Clift were also very close. He worked on Giant also, with Elizabeth, and coincidentally Rock Hudson, who was also gay.
All I am saying is that there has been speculation in many quarters about lots of famous actors, who may have been gay. They may have been bi, or straight. No one can say now. It is too late, and most of the people are gone, and lots of the people that would relate such things are suspect themselves, because of the money they may make as a result of telling their own vision of history or as I choose to call it. Revisionist history.
Maybe it is all because I am such a cynic about such things? I don't know. All I am saying, is that you have to view most of these kinds of things with a jaundiced eye. They may be true and one hundred percent factual. However they may be entirely made up.
I do still love James Franco. Even if his professor does say he sleeps in class.
