2. ‘Rex Newman’

The Big Story — 1953

What It’s About: Rex Newman is a reporter who happens to witness a robbery orchestrated by three children. Years later, he again runs into the thieves, who are now teenagers — and when other robberies start to happen, Rex tries to figure out what the dynamic of the trio is, and how he can disrupt it in order to ensure that justice is served.

Why It’s Worth Watching: There’s a sequence toward the end involving a jailbreak that’s classic James Dean — even though no scene like it appears in any of his movies. Clad in a leather jacket — a quintessential Dean outfit in the popular imagination, even though he doesn’t wear one in his films — he and his girl try to break their friend out of jail, and as he’s holding a gun on the jail clerk, you can see every emotion that flickers across the face of his youthful face… bravado, uncertainty, rage, frustration, despair. There’s nothing in the script that necessarily indicates these emotions are necessary — it would be easy enough to play this juvenile delinquent how he’s written, as a violent non-character meant to scare adults — but Dean’s performance brings the thief to life, makes him a human being, a scared kid trying to figure out what honor and loyalty mean to him.

“I promised! He knows I’m coming… where is he?!”

Also, this episode as it’s available on YouTube right now provides an interesting case study for the way that old media survives, mutates, and finds a new life in our current digital landscape. Count the different levels between us, now, in 2015, and the actual teleplay that James Dean filmed in 1953. First, there’s the fact that this is actually a re-airing of the original broadcast — The Big Story realized after his death that they had a James Dean episode in the archives, and so they rebroadcast his episode so his fans could watch it again. Even more interesting: the teleplay is introduced by Big Story host Ben Grauer as a story about James Dean, rather than as a tale of a reporter and a trio of thieves. He says:

Tonight, Big Story turns to its Features Page, in order to bring you one of the strangest and most talked about stories in the country. It’s a story about a movie star, an actor who receives more fan mail each week than anyone in Hollywood. Long after his death, James Dean still holds an iron grip on the minds of millions, many of whom refuse to believe he is dead. Here now is a film made by James Dean for The Big Story just a few short years ago. In it he plays a role that we believe will provide a clue to the tremendous fascination that James Dean holds for many of our youngsters today.

So, audiences are primed just after Dean’s death to watch this as one piece of the James Dean puzzle, a way to figure out what it was about Dean that mattered so much to them. But then, there’s another layer to this video — we’re actually seeing a re-rebroadcast, as this is actually taped from a mid-1990s TVLand special about James Dean’s television work. “This episode was considered lost for several decades,” says the host, “but thanks to the combined efforts of Nick at Nite’s TVLand, and the Museum of Television and Radio, and our joint preservation efforts, it has been rediscovered, and we are now delighted to present a truly historic television artifact.”

Just like the rebroadcast in the 1950s, this TVLand rebroadcast primes the audience to view this as an important, historically significant contribution to the mythology of James Dean, ensuring that viewers will be thinking about Dean’s legend (and, necessarily, his untimely death) as they watch.

And then there’s the fact that we’re not watching this on TVLand in the mid-90s; instead, it’s 2015, and it’s come to us on YouTube from user corradogirli under the word-jumble of a title “James Dean Rare TV Show The Big Story Rex Newman.” corradogirli is performing the same function that TVLand and The Big Story did in bringing the footage to a new generation, if perhaps not quite as eloquently. So, this particular video, in this particular form, is a great illustration of the enduring power of James Dean’s work — three different methods were used to bring it to a new audience, encouraging three successive generations to view it as a testament to the James Dean legend.