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Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of "The Cult of Alien Gods"

10/31/2025

My first and most influential book, The Cult of Alien Gods: H. P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, was published twenty years ago this coming week. If I felt old when I heard music from my college years playing in on the local “oldies” station, I feel doubly old realizing that I wrote my first book half a lifetime ago. I started writing it two years before its publication, when I was half as old as I am today. Soon enough, I will have been an author longer than I was not, and that still strikes me as absurd. Has so much time passed? It was so long ago that I sent out manuscripts on paper and received page proofs in a cardboard box marked up with a proofreader’s red pen!

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Marking the 70th Anniversary of James Dean's Death: His Final Days

9/30/2025

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In commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of James Dean’s death, I am publishing an excerpt from my biography of James Dean, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean (Applause, 2024) on the final days of the Hollywood legend.

The last picture of James Dean, taken on the morning of his death.

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Actor Brandon Flynn to Play James Dean in New Movie About Gay Romance

6/24/2025

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Actor Brandon Flynn will take on the role of James Dean in a new film exploring the rocky and sometimes romantic friendship between Dean and his best friend William Bast, according to the film’s director, Guy Guido. Willie and Jimmy Dean is based on Bast’s 2006 memoir, Surviving James Dean, a revision of his 1956 biography James Dean, in which Bast restored sections on Dean’s same-sex relationships and Bast’s own homosexuality that he self-censored in the first book.

Actor Brandon Flynn in a Calvin Klein campaign.

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Review of "The Occult Elvis" by Miguel Connor

4/11/2025

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Elvis Presley deeply admired James Dean to the point that he modeled much of his persona as a singer and an actor on Dean’s, especially in the early years of his career. The two men had much in common, and it is unsurprising that Elvis (I’ll use the mononym here, in deference to the subject) and Dean also shared both voluntary and involuntary associations with the occult. As I discuss in my book, Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, Dean came out of a somewhat mystical Christian background (encouraged by his friend, the Rev. James DeWeerd) and believed himself supernaturally destined for greatness, despite believing himself to be cursed with an inner evil. He studied books of ancient wisdom and Eastern mysticism and developed a rather Gnostic view that reality was itself an illusion. After his untimely death, he became a cult idol, spiritual guide, and psychopomp—and the subject of countless conspiracy theories. Many claimed to see his ghost, or that he had never died, or would return in glory, and one young woman even claimed his angelic form had supernaturally impregnated her virgin womb. Such stories presaged suspiciously similar anecdotes that swirled around Elvis decades later.

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A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

12/27/2024

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Each year, it’s a little more difficult to write a seemingly lighthearted review of the year in weird. This year was both personally and professionally a bit of a struggle as A.I. continues to eat away at my day job and the closure or collapse of a number of media outlets has made it more difficult place stories in paying publications. I lost my gig as a CNN Opinion columnist right when it was starting because CNN shuttered the entire division. As the year came to an end, about one-third of my income for the year remains outstanding from businesses that are dragging their feet on payments and have been since early fall. That has made it difficult to devote too much energy to caring about whatever old claims the usual cadre of kooks and weirdos are recycling on any given day.

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“The Best Possible Denial”: Vogue Tries to Rescue James Dean from Homosexuality

2/11/2024

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This week, various editions of Vogue magazine published a lengthy piece on the failed romance of James Dean and Pier Angeli, born Anna Maria Pierangeli. The original Italian article by journalist Giacomo Aricò, published on Wednesday, and the truncated English adaptation published on Friday contain a number of misrepresentations and errors that came from the telephone game of repetition and PR that passes for “celebrity” coverage in our media. But the broader purpose of the piece, as the author writes in Italian, is to deny that Dean was either homosexual or bisexual, a remarkable claim for a major magazine in 2024. Let’s take a look at some of the ways the Vogue pieces went wrong.

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Review of "Opposable Thumbs" by Matt Singer

10/30/2023

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Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert spent so long reviewing movies on television that, when Siskel died in 1999, I could not remember a time when I hadn’t watched them. They started their first review program six years before I was born (I’m 42), and as far back as I can remember, I can still picture my parents tuning in to hear about the newest movies—movies that, for the most part, they would only see on rented VHS tapes, months later. I tended to prefer Ebert to Siskel, not for any dramatic reason except that my local paper carried Ebert’s print reviews but not Siskel’s, so I felt like I understood his thinking more. Even when I was a teenager, Siskel & Ebert was still appointment viewing, and I recall setting extra time on the VCR to record the show when the local ABC affiliate’s sports coverage pushed it to odd hours of afternoon or overnight and we weren’t sure exactly when it would start.

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Remembering "Eerie, Indiana," the "Center of Weirdness" for Kids' TV

10/10/2023

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Note: This essay is cross-posted in my Substack newsletter.

This past weekend, Tom DeLonge, the punk rocker and UFO media entrepreneur, released his first feature film, Monsters of California, direct to streaming. DeLonge served as both director and co-writer of the film, which follows a teenage boy and his friends as they investigate conspiracies about aliens and the paranormal around San Diego only for the hero to achieve New Age enlightenment through realizing his place in the cosmos. Indifferently acted and roughly written, the movie is an amateurish production all the way around, the New Age equivalent of those Christian “movies” that badly approximate a Hollywood production. Like those evangelical films, Monsters also has a spiritual message, that all is consciousness, we are but specks a pantheistic tapestry, and that “advanced” aliens are our teachers and guides toward enlightenment.

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Long-Secret James Dean Files Offer Some Shocking Surprises

5/10/2023

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Note: This article is cross-posted from my Substack because Twitter is limiting links to Substack. I think you'll find the historical content interesting.

Nearly seven decades after James Dean died, I would have thought that everything that could be known about him was known. All but a small handful of people who knew him in life are now dead, and those left alive have had nothing new to say in decades. The magazine and newspaper articles have been raked through many times, and the scraps of archival materials picked clean. Then, to my amazement, Nate D. Sanders Auctions announced the sale later this month of more than 500 pages of James Dean’s business, legal, and personal correspondence and papers from the estate of his New York talent agent, Jane Deacy, who died in 2008. These papers, never before seen, are, frankly, astounding in what they reveal.

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James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

2/18/2023

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Last this week, we learned that Donald Spoto, the celebrity biographer, died at the age of 81. Spoto produced many well-regarded biographies, including Rebel, about James Dean. I found that book particularly useful in writing my own manuscript for my James Dean book. Spoto was kind enough to read an early draft of my book before his death and offered both useful critical notes and a blurb as endorsement: “His new book The Rebel and the Fear is sure to evoke spirited debate, not least when he addresses the lure and lore still attached to that hapless young actor, James Dean (1931-1955).” Spoto will be missed.

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<<Previous

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of "The Cult of Alien Gods"

Marking the 70th Anniversary of James Dean's Death: His Final Days

Actor Brandon Flynn to Play James Dean in New Movie About Gay Romance

Review of "The Occult Elvis" by Miguel Connor

A Dull Slog: 2024 in Review

“The Best Possible Denial”: Vogue Tries to Rescue James Dean from Homosexuality

Review of "Opposable Thumbs" by Matt Singer

Remembering "Eerie, Indiana," the "Center of Weirdness" for Kids' TV

Long-Secret James Dean Files Offer Some Shocking Surprises

James Dean Biographer Donald Spoto Dies at 81

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