Why bringing James Dean back from the dead through CGI is proof of the diminishing allure of today’s stars

More than six decades after his death, the ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ actor is making his big-screen return in Vietnam-era action drama ‘Finding Jack’. As Hollywood trashes his memory, it’s obvious no star is sacred, says Geoffrey Macnab

James Dean has been ‘cast’ posthumously in a new film using CGI... will it make him seem mediocre? (Getty)

It was hard to avoid a sense of absolute dismay last week when little known filmmakers Anton Ernst and Tati Golykh announced through trade paper The Hollywood Reporter they had cast James Dean in their new film. The Rebel Without a Cause star, who died in a car crash in 1955, is to be resuscitated through CGI by visual effects companies in Canada and South Africa to play one of the roles in their Vietnam war drama, Finding Jack. Dean’s family granted the filmmakers the right to use his image.

“We never intended for this to be a marketing gimmick,” Ernst commented after the news of Dean’s digital rebirth was greeted with fury by many observers. Showing extraordinary naivety, the director expressed surprise that so many people were so upset. It somehow eluded Ernst that Dean’s short career (which ran to only three movies) had been based around an absolute refusal to compromise or cheapen his image to keep the studio bosses (“those bastards at Warners”) happy.

“To work with Jimmy meant exploring his nature; without that his powers of expression were frozen,” said Nicholas Ray, who directed him in Rebel Without a Cause. Ray pointed to the actor’s “urgent, probing curiosity … every day he threw himself upon the world like a starved animal after a scrap of food”.