Giant at 70: The Oil-Truck Name That Links James Dean’s Film to AFI’s Founder
The name on an oil truck in Giant has an unexpectedly personal history. George Stevens Jr. says he suggested Jetexas while his father and the writers were developing the film. Seventy years after the 1956 release, AFI’s November 1 catalogue spotlight uses his recollections to connect a Hollywood epic with the future founding director of the institute.
James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson are the familiar names attached to Giant. Stevens Jr. was working much further down the production ladder. AFI identifies the film as his first on-screen credit, as a production assistant. The anniversary account looks at what he learned before he helped establish an institution for other filmmakers.
A production assistant in a famous company
George Stevens Sr. directed the adaptation of Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel. According to the son’s account, he spent ten months attending screenplay discussions with his father, Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat. The source for those memories is explicit: AFI draws on his 2022 autobiography, My Place in the Sun, alongside a 2026 interview it conducted with him.
That distinction matters when reading a colourful production story. These are attributed recollections of the work, presented by the institute, rather than a newly discovered recording or an interview conducted by this publication.
The adaptation also involved scale before a camera started rolling. AFI reproduces the elder Stevens’ recollection of a 370-page script being reduced to around 240 pages. His son separately remembers the typing and margin adjustments involved in getting the document into shape. Those accounts describe the difficulty of the writing process; a page count on its own does not establish a film’s running time.
The small detail that remained on screen
Amid that large undertaking, the truck name is a modest contribution to remember. Stevens Jr. describes Jetexas as the visual trace of his suggestion that remained in the finished film. It connects the oil business within the story to a practical naming problem in the room where the screenplay was being assembled.
He later joined the production on leave from military service in May 1955, according to AFI, working with his father in Virginia and Marfa, Texas. The spotlight includes an archival location photograph with the two Stevenses, Taylor and Dean. It is a production image from 1955, not a photograph of an anniversary reunion.
An anniversary, not a new production
AFI’s November feature marks the film’s seventieth anniversary and combines archive material with present-day reflection. The institute notes Giant’s ten Academy Award nominations and George Stevens’ directing win. It does not announce a remake, a new cast or a worldwide streaming release.
Our Steel Magnolias report followed another family connection behind a familiar cast list. With Giant, the link runs from a director’s working room to his son’s later role in film education and preservation. The stars make the old location photograph recognisable; the oil-truck name supplies a much smaller detail to look for when returning to the film.