Real James Dean by Peter Winkler

Author:Peter Winkler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

* A Hatful of Rain, a drama about the travails of a Korean War veteran addicted to morphine, opened at the Lyceum Theater in New York on November 9, 1955, and ran for 390 performances. The play starred Ben Gazzara and was directed by Frank Corsaro.

18

Bottle, Bottle, Who’s Got the Bottle?

HUME CRONYN

On Sunday, October 4, 1953, CBS television broadcast a live ninety-minute production of playwright William Inge’s original teleplay Glory in the Flower on their anthology series, Omnibus. The cast included a rising young actor, James Dean, who played a self-pitying teenage delinquent named Bronco. Out on bail for possession of marijuana, he bedevils the owner of a roadside diner (played by veteran character actor Hume Cronyn) when he spikes his Coke with liquor from a clandestine bottle.

In the early days of television, shows were broadcast live as they were performed, with no opportunities for retakes or editing. Rehearsals and broadcasts were run on the clock, carefully timed to make sure the action didn’t come up short, leaving dead air, or continue past an allotted time slot. “There is room for experimentation and improvisation during rehearsals,” Cronyn explains in his 1991 memoir, A Terrible Liar, “but once the action, interpretations and the camera moves are set, woe betide you if some member of the company takes off and does his own thing. The brilliant last-minute inspiration of an actor who decides to change the blocking, to take a series of long, indulgent pauses or, conversely, to race through a passage or try an arbitrary cut can throw his fellow actors into panic and drive directors and camera crews to madness.”

In this excerpt from his memoir, Cronyn recalls how Dean exasperated him during rehearsals for Glory in the Flower. —Ed.

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