William Bast

William Bast, the Edgar-winning TV screenwriter, was the first biographer of cinema icon James Dean, his close friend and lover. Bast and Dean met and became friends and roommates while drama students at U.C.L.A., and later roomed together in New York City. Bast first wrote about Dean a year after his death, in "James Dean: A Biography", which was published in 1956. The biography was the basis of the 1976 TV movie James Dean (1976), produced and written by Bast, which portrayed Dean as a straight-skewed bisexual. In the TV movie, Bast -- a character in the teleplay who narrates the movie -- says that Dean's closest relationship had been with a woman, Liz Sheridan. Thirty years later, Bast published a franker memoir of his relationship with cinema's iconic teenage rebel, "Surviving James Dean", in which he portrayed the late actor as a homosexual who likely would have entered into a committed, gay relationship with Bast if he had not been killed in a car crash on September 30, 1955. Bast refuted "Dizzy" Sheridan's contention that the couple were in love and briefly engaged, claiming he himself helped make up the myths of Dean as a bicurious straight due to the uptight 1950s. The 1976 telefilm has Dean encouraging Bast to go cruising for gay sex in the bar of New York's Astor Hotel in the name of gaining experience. In addition to his 1956 biography, 2006 memoir and the 1976 TV movie, Bast also wrote a screenplay based on Dean's funeral for a 1958 British TV teleplay, "The Myth Makers" (1958). "The Myth Makers" was later adapted for American television as "The Movie Star" (1962).