Inside Rebel: Part Two

In the second part of Matt Black's exposé, artist-actor James Franco talks through the tangled mythology of Rebel Without a Cause and how it shaped his art-film mash-up at MOCA. Featuring the likes of Paul and Damon McCarthy, Aaron Young, Harmony Korine, Ed Rusha, Terry Richardson and Douglas Gordon, REBEL explores the legends embroiling Nicholas Ray’s 1955 epoch defining tale of teenage rebellion within a twisted replica of the film's spiritual home, Chateau Marmont. Ray was living at the cult LA hotel when he first encountered James Dean—who turned up un-introduced, unannounced and accompanied by gothic starlet Vampira to perform two full backflip somersaults as an impromptu audition for the role that would immortalize him as a teen icon. “It became about creating the Chateau Marmont, for the artists and for Franco himself. Everything was set up to see all the films play in that same world,” explains Black. “When you see it all together, using the Chateau at the center, it takes on a different energy.” Riffing off the movie’s intrigues, Paul and Damon McCarthy replicated Ray’s Bungalow to re-enact his and Wood’s affair, while Aaron Young smashed a 1950 Ford Custom Tudor Coupe onto the desert floor from 80 feet up to mark Dean’s death in a fatal car crash barely a month before the film was released.

See James Franco explaining the genesis of REBEL in Part One of Inside Rebel, here.