With the 50th anniversary of the actor's death approaching, film crews from around the world are traveling to California, New York and Fairmount to capture the people and places that were important to the Grant County native and the legacy he left behind.

On Tuesday, a crew from French television network Canal (or Channel) Plus were at the James Dean Gallery  filming the collection and talking with owner David Loehr for a documentary tentatively titled East of Fairmount that will air across Europe. They were joined by a reporter and photographer from a French newsmagazine that is planning a story on Dean for a September issue.

"We want to do something personal on who he was, what was the real man," Michel Calvetti, executive producer, said. "This year especially, there are a lot of documentaries on James Dean and we want to have a different angle, do something no one else is doing."

The French crew is the first of three documentary teams planning to visit the James Dean Gallery in the coming weeks. A crew from the British Broadcasting Company is coming in a week for a documentary that will focus on Dean's fatal car accident and his infamous Porsche Spyder, Loehr said. A German crew plans to film footage for a production focused on Dean's hometown of Fairmount, his friends and classmates.

"All of them are getting a different perspective," Loehr said.

Marion's airport will be the site of the American premiere of another documentary on Dean. James Dean: Forever Young will be shown, along with Dean's three movies, on a 90 to 100-foot wide digital screen during the June 3-5 James Dean Fest.

In addition to filming at the James Dean Gallery, the French crew also talked to friends of the actor and visited the farm where he spent his childhood. They spent the weekend at a Dean film festival in Arkansas and left Monday afternoon to film Dean-related sites in California.

"He's a real American icon," Calvetti said. "It was 50 years ago, but he's still an American icon today. So of course the older generation in Europe and France know him, but even the young generation, he's made a real impression on them, his attitude, his look. He was cool."

French fans also feel a connection to Dean because of his part in the Broadway play The Immoralist, a dramatization of a novel by French author Andre Gide, documentary producer Cyril Viguier said. He said the crew visited the James Dean Gallery because of Loehr's extensive knowledge of the actor.

"This looks like a presidential library," Viguier said as he stood in a room full of items from Dean's childhood and pre-movie life. "For all the people that we met, (Loehr) is the one who knows absolutely everything."

Trailed by a cameraman, Loehr took the visitors on a tour of the gallery, showing paintings by Dean, an East of Eden poster from France and pieces of the "Rebel alley" fence from Rebel Without a Cause. Viguier motioned for the camera to move in closer to a few pieces and asked Loehr some questions.

Pausing in front of a pair of jeans Dean wore during the filming of Giant, Viguier asked "Did you ever wear these jeans?"

"Yeah I tried them on," Loehr said. "But I didn't want to move around too much."