William Bast
| William Bast | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 3, 1931 Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Died | May 4, 2015 (aged 84) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, screenwriter |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Wauwatosa High School |
| Alma mater |
University of Wisconsin–Madison UCLA |
| Partner | Paul Huson |
| Website | |
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William Bast (April 3, 1931 – May 4, 2015) was an American screenwriter and author. In addition to writing scripts for motion pictures and television, he was the author of two biographies of the screen actor James Dean. He often worked with his lover, Paul Huson.
Bast was born in Wauwatosa, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, the son of Gilbert Bast and Bernice Fleischmann. He began his early education in Milwaukee, transferring to Kenosha when his family moved there. Moving back to Milwaukee, he subsequently graduated from Wauwatosa High school, then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When his family moved to Los Angeles, he transferred to the UCLA, where he majored in Theater Arts, rooming with a fellow Theater Arts student from Indiana named James Dean. In 1952 he moved to New York to join Dean and pursue a career in radio and television. There, he initially worked in the Press Relations department at CBS and subsequently, in 1953, wrote his first scripts for the NBC television sitcom The Aldrich Family.
After the death of Dean in an automobile accident in September 1955, Bast chronicled his five-year relationship with the actor in James Dean: a Biography. After moving to London, Bast wrote The Myth Makers for Granada Television, a fictionalized drama inspired by Dean's funeral, which Bast perceived as grotesque and publicity-driven, with a shattering effect on Dean's rural-American family and his hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. In the United States, the script was produced again by NBC's Dupont Show of the Month and aired under the title The Movie Star.
In 1975, Bast produced and scripted James Dean: Portrait of a Friend for NBC, a movie for television based upon his first James Dean biography.
In 2006, Barricade Books (USA) published Surviving James Dean, a second, more candid book by Bast about his relationship with Dean; which featured material that Bast did not include in his earlier account due to personal trepidations and social mores of the 1950s. In Surviving James Dean, Bast describes Dean in a compassionate light; how they met at UCLA, shared an apartment in Santa Monica, dated the same woman, and also had a sexual relationship. He also describes the events that happened to him after Dean's death, largely as a result of having written his first book.
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