House, previously used in the film Sunset Boulevard (1950). It was demolished just two years after filming. Irving Shulman, who adapted Nicholas Ray's initial film story into the screenplay, had considered changing the name of James Dean's character to Herman Deville, according to Jurgen Muller's Movies of the '50s. He originally had written a number of scenes that were shot and later cut from the final version of the film. According to an AFI interview with Stewart Stern, with whom Shulman worked on the screenplay, one of the scenes was thought to be too emotionally provocative to be included in the final print of the film. It portrayed the character of Jim Stark inebriated to the point of belligerence screaming at a car in the parking lot "It's a little jeep jeep! Little jeep, jeep!" The scene was considered unproductive to the story's progression by head editor William H. Ziegler and ultimately was cut. In 2006, members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center petitioned to have the scene printed and archived for historical preservation. Sal Mineo would later note in a 1972 interview that the character of Plato Crawford was intended to have been gay. Speaking to Boze Hadleigh, he said, "[It m]akes sense [that Plato was killed off]: he was, in a way, the first gay teenager in films. You watch it now, you know he had the hots for James Dean. You watch it now, and everyone knows about Jimmy['s bisexuality], so it's like he had the hots for Natalie [Wood] and me. Ergo, I had to be bumped off, out of the way." The film was in production from March 28 to May 26, 1955. When production began, Warner Bros. considered it a B-movie project, and Ray used black-and-white film stock. When Jack L. Warner realized James Dean was a rising star and a hot property, filming was switched to color stock, and many scenes had to be reshot in color. It was shot in the widescreen CinemaScope format, which had been introduced two years previously. With its densely expressive images, the film has been called a "landmark ... a quantum leap forward in the artistic and technical evolution of a format." The 1949 Mercury two-door sedan James Dean drove in the movie is part of the permanent collection at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. Reception Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Nicholas Ray were