Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure - Hardcover

Patrick McGilligan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060731370 ISBN 13: 9780060731373

Publisher: Igniter, 2011

Synopsis

The visionary filmmaker Nicholas Ray spent the glory years of his career creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish. Notoriously self-destructive, even in his youth, Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood - the alcohol, drugs, and rage that ate away at his core translated into characters with unrivaled depth on-screen. Beloved by critics, peers, and audiences alike, Ray created a vision of the modern teenage experience with "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) and reinvented the western with "Johnny Guitar" (1954). Yet, in one of the most dramatic Hollywood stories on record, Ray's meteoric rise to fame was rivaled only by his dramatic fall from grace. Now, in time to mark Ray's 100th birthday, preeminent American film biographer Patrick McGilligan offers the first comprehensive, full-length biography of Nicholas Ray - a man whose troubled life was punctuated by moments of creative genius. Meticulously detailed, yet compulsively readable, "Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director" delves into Ray's fascinating life story in and out of the spotlight - from his small-town roots in Galesville, Wisconsin, to his four marriages, drug and alcohol addictions, his intimate relationships with actors (including both James Dean and Natalie Wood), and his ultimate banishment from the Hollywood community that helped foster his growth as a director. Thirty-one years after his death, Nicolas Ray's body of work remains as a celebrated testament to the troubled director's struggle to create meaning from an otherwise shattered existence. In this unparalleled look into the dark moments of Ray's history and secrets of his creative process, Patrick McGilligan tells the full captivating story of an American film great.

About this title

Review:

McGilligan is certainly fastidious. It's unlikely that youll find a more detailed account of Ray's professional life, or the broader practice of filmmaking in Fifties Hollywood, with all its depressing concessions to the whims of studio moguls, spoilt stars and the perceived morality of the era. --The Independent, 31st July 2011

From the Back Cover:

From award-winning biographer Patrick McGilligan comes an eye-opening life of the troubled filmmaker behind Rebel Without a Cause

Nicholas Ray spent the glory years of his career creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish—from his career-defining debut, They Live by Night (1948), to his enduring masterwork, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); from the noir thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), pairing his second wife, the blond bombshell Gloria Grahame, with Humphrey Bogart, to cult pictures like Johnny Guitar (1954) and Bigger Than Life (1956). Yet his work on-screen is more than matched by the passions and struggles of his personal story—one of the most dramatic lives of any major Hollywood filmmaker.

In Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, Patrick McGilligan offers a revelatory biography of Ray, a man whose troubled life was marked by creative peaks and valleys alike. As a young man, Ray personified the rambling spirit of twentieth-century America, learning from luminaries like Thornton Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright; mingling with future legends like Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, and John Houseman; and carousing with musicians like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Notoriously self-destructive but irresistibly alluring—to men and women alike—Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood, a talent that allowed him to create characters of true complexity on-screen.

His youthful association with radical politics nearly killed his nascent film career—until a secret agreement to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities saved him. His tumultuous second marriage, to Grahame, was shattered after Ray found her in bed with his teenage son from his first marriage. He romanced stars and starlets, including Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford, and the teenage Natalie Wood, but never enjoyed a stable home life.

The triumph of Rebel Without a Cause, his masterpiece of teenage angst, led to a burgeoning partnership with James Dean, but Dean’s untimely death devastated the filmmaker, who fell into a spiral of drinking and drug addiction. Less than a decade later, Ray’s career was effectively over . . . until the adoration of European critics, and a frantic last-ditch burst of creativity, nearly restored him to glory before his tragic early death in 1979.

Meticulously detailed and compulsively readable, this new biography reconstructs the tortuous journey of one of the most enduringly fascinating figures in American film.

About this edition

• Publisher: Igniter
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0060731370
• ISBN 13: 9780060731373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 560