During the 1940s, Warner Brothers bought the rights to Robert Lindner’s book, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath, and began turning it into a film. A partial script was written, and a 23-year old Marlon Brando was asked to do a five-minute screen test in 1947. For whatever reason, the studio abandoned the original project, and eventually revived it eight years later with a new script and a new actor — James Dean, of course. Dean’s own screen test for Rebel Without a Cause appears here.
Down the road, you can find the Brando clip in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons, which features great thinkers and artists appearing in original video & audio. Tolstoy, Salvador Dali, Georgia O’Keeffe, they’re all part of the mix.
Related Content:
The Godfather Without Brando?: It Almost Happened
The James Dean Story by Robert Altman (Complete Film)
Paul Newman and James Dean Screentest for East of Eden
Brando certainly was a beauty, wasn’t he.
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Marlon Brando should have died like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain or James Dean – in the tornado like blitzkrieg of a dazzling genius. Stamping the world with one’s unique talent and changing it forever. Then leaving the world letting romance of death to create an unending portrait in popular iconography. But that was not to be.
http://modernartists.blogspot.com/2011/10/marlon-brando-lessons-in-degradation.html