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William Bast is a screen and television writer and author currently living in Los Angeles. In addition to writing scripts for motion pictures and television, he is the author of two seminal biographies of the screen actor James Dean.

Bast was born on April 3, 1931 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gilbert Bast and Bernice Fleischmann. He began his early education in Milwaukee, transferring to Kenosha when his family moved there. Moving back to Milwaukee, he subsequently graduated from Wauwatosa High school, then enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. When his family moved to Los Angeles, he transferred to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he majored in Theater Arts, rooming with a fellow Theater Arts student from Indiana named James Dean. In 1952 he moved to New York to join Dean and pursue a career in radio and television. There, he initially worked in the Press Relations department at CBS and subsequently, in 1953, wrote his first scripts for the NBC television sitcom The Aldrich Family.

After the untimely death of Dean in an automobile accident in 1955, Bast chronicled his five year relationship with the actor (James Dean: a Biography) ^[1]. After moving to London, he wrote the The Myth Makers^[2] for Granada Television,a fictionalized drama inspired by what he perceived as Dean's grotesque, publicity-driven funeral and its shattering effect on his rural American family and hometown, Fairmount, Indiana. In the States the script was subsequently produced again by NBC's Dupont Show of the Month and aired under the title The Movie Star. In the meantime Bast had adapted Jean Giraudoux's Tiger at the Gates for Granada Television, and written scripts for the BBC and Independent Television, including episodes of the classic series The Prisoner. Back in the States he wrote episodes for Combat, Perry Mason, Ben Casey, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Honey West, and Dr. Kildare, among other series.

In 1975 Bast produced and scripted James Dean: Portrait of a Friend for NBC, a movie for television based upon his first James Dean biography. In 1976 he received the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for his television movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden with Elizabeth Montgomery in the title role. In 1977 his adaptation of Alexandre Dumas, père's The Man in the Iron Mask starring Richard Chamberlain in a dual role picked up two Emmy nominations for Bast's script and Olga Lehmann's costume designs. His script for The Scarlet Pimpernel with Anthony Andrews and Ian McKellen was honored with a Christopher Award in 1982, and his The First Modern Olympics won him the Writers Guild of America Outstanding Script for Television Longform Series for 1984.

From 1985 through 1987 Bast wrote and produced The Colbys, a spin-off from the popular series Dynasty, with his parter Paul Huson; The Colbys won the 1986 People's Choice Award. He also collaborated with Huson writing and producing a variety of television movies and series, including Tucker's Witch, The Hamptons, Pursuit, The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake, Power and Beauty, and The Fury Within.

Bast's motion picture credits include the script for Ray Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi, Hammerhead, and an adaptation of Harold Robbins' The Betsy starring Laurence Olivier and Tommy Lee Jones.

In 2006 Barricade Books (USA) published Surviving James Dean ^[3], Bast's second, more candid book about his relationship with Dean, which included everything that the social mores of the fifties and his own trepidations didn't allow him to commit to print in his earlier account.

1. ^ James Dean: a Biography, New York: Ballantine Books, 1956
2. ^ The Myth Makers by William Bast, in Six Granada Plays, London: Faber and Faber, ND
3. ^ Surviving James Dean, New York: Barricade Books, 2006, ISBN 1-56980-298-X

• William Bast website
• IMDb William Bast
• William Bast recalls the making of The Betsy.