I am the daughter of the film director, Nicholas Ray, best known for directing James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. I know there are those things inherent in me that come from him. I am of my father: not him, yet forever entwined. My legacy is not to take from him or to be him, it is to share and introduce his work so that he is not forgotten.
Excerpt from Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray, Three Rooms Press © All Rights Reserved.
“Nicca Ray is film director Nick Ray’s daughter and as her marvelous memoir unspools, she could be a genetically engineered female protagonist of an imaginary Nick Ray picture.”
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“In this intimate blend of memoir and biography, (Nicholas Ray’s) daughter, Nicca, a filmmaker and writer, explores her father’s complex life and artistic legacy as well as their own complicated relationship and his impact on her life...This contemplative, deeply personal portrait of both Rays will appeal to readers interested in mid-century Hollywood.”
Ray by Ray is a culmination of over a decades worth of research including interviews with people who had known and worked with Nicholas Ray from his days working in the leftist theaters on New York’s Lower East Side during the 1930s and up until his death in 1979, when I was 17. There are anecdotes and introspections about his work in the theater, with the musicologist Alan Lomax, and as one of the most important film directors of the 20th century that did not make it into the book. I’m going to share some of them here. Also, in keeping with the personal spirit of Ray by Ray I’ll be including tales about my journey discovering how my father impacted film history.
“Nicholas Ray was born at a time when nobody knew what a film director was...We knew what a novelist was. We knew what a composer was. A painter. And now in the middle of the 20th Century we discovered what a film director was. And for good or ill, Nicholas Ray is one of the most dramatic and self-dramatizing American film directors.. ”
“Wim Wenders said that when he thought of Nick he pictured “that one eye that was like an eagle’s eye. One seeing eye that could see through everything.””