Producer of Controversy

Stanley Kramer, Hollywood Liberalism, and the Cold War

Jennifer Frost

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780700624966, 9780700624966
• eBook ISBN: 9780700624973
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

With films ranging from High Noon to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Stanley Kramer (1913–2001) was one of the most successful and prolific director-producers of his day. But even as critics praised his courage in taking on such issues as nuclear war, racism, fascism, and the battle between science and religion, others condemned his work as “emptily pretentious” and “hollow, falsely sentimental, overproduced.” Whether Kramer was “one of the great filmmakers of all time” (Kevin Spacey at the Golden Globe Awards) or “one of Hollywood’s worst directors” (preeminent film critic Andrew Sarris in The Village Voice), he had a strong and undeniable influence on American culture during the Cold War. Producer of Controversy is the first book to take a close-up look at Kramer’s career, films, and liberal politics in an effort to explain his contributions and historical significance.

Kramer learned filmmaking within the old studio system, but over a career spanning forty years he did much to shape the independent moviemaking that emerged after World War II. Jennifer Frost pays particular attention to four of his key “message movies”—The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg—to show how Kramer’s controversial films opened up public debate about the most important issues of his time—among average filmgoers as well as professional critics, political commentators, and public figures. In this context, she for the first time fully documents the Hollywood Right’s attacks on Kramer in the 1950s; details his resistance to the anticommunist Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist; exposes his role as a cultural diplomat with the Soviet Union; and reveals his important contribution to the liberal and radical politics of the 1960s. Her book is at once an absorbing work of cultural history and a thoroughgoing reassessment of Stanley Kramer’s place in the pantheon of American filmmakers.

1	A Hollywood Independent

Stanley Kramer began his career as a Hollywood independent in his mid-thirties at a volatile time in the US motion picture industry. By 1947, the year Kramer formed Screen Plays, Inc., the company that would produce his first film, Hollywood was reeling from a series of post–World War II shocks. Labor unions in the movie industry participated in the great postwar strike wave, and a series of violent strikes and conflicts occurred over 1945 and 1946. Box-office receipts began to decline from a wartime peak as Americans moved to the suburbs, bought televisions, and stayed home. The US government’s antitrust case against the big Hollywood studios and their control of movie production, distribution, and exhibition was wending its way to the Supreme Court; the case would result in the 1948 Paramount decision divesting the studios of their theater chains. And in October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) would hold its first post–World War II hearings to investigate communist “subversion” in the motion picture industry. These hearings would feature the Hollywood Ten and lead to the establishment of the Hollywood blacklist. That the old Hollywood studio system was under increasing pressure created opportunities for Kramer and a new postwar generation of independent producers. But it also meant that Kramer and his fellow independents needed to make their way within a highly unstable and unpredictable industrial and political context.

For the decade starting in the late 1940s, Kramer met these conflicts and challenges through a series of negotiations and compromises in an effort to maintain both his producing career and his political commitments. As an independent producer, he still needed institutional support for financing, studio facilities, and distribution. Given this fact, he often qualified his status as “laughingly called an independent.” “Independence was, in this equation, never more than comparative and highly circumscribed,” argues scholar Denise Mann.¹ But Kramer’s ability to successfully manage his early career in these new and difficult conditions earned him a reputation as a “boy wonder” and a “genius.”² As to politics in the blacklist era, Kramer’s liberalism meant he sought a middle path between the Hollywood Left and Right. In the process, he earned compliments and criticisms from liberals and leftists. But of most consequence he became a target of conservative anticommunists. Missed or understated in earlier assessments of Kramer’s career, relentless attacks from the Right shaped the commercial and political environments in which he operated. The producer-director was never able to act without a hostile reaction from conservative forces in the movie capital, who accused him of “coddling Reds and pinkos.”³ Instead, Kramer constantly needed to defend his commitments to civil liberties, social welfare, and liberal internationalism throughout these years and later.

Kramer’s liberal politics and independent position in the industry contributed to his selection of subjects for his early movies. He gravitated toward social problems, although not exclusively, and made the genre his own. He produced his first significant and successful social problem films—Champion (1949), Home of the Brave (1949), and The Men (1950)—and parlayed this achievement into an unprecedented $25 million deal with Columbia Pictures in 1951. Social problem films ideally reflected his social conscience and fulfilled his commercial strategy. The reality of the resulting movies, however, did not always achieve this ideal. Kramer soon determined that to preserve his vision of his productions, he needed more control over his pictures. By 1955 he had decided to start directing. Unique among the Hollywood independents, he moved from production into direction, “rather than the other way around,” as Mann points out.⁴ The first decade of Kramer’s career and films matched the volatility of the motion picture industry, veering between successes and setbacks.

Crafting a Career’s Start

At the end of World War II, Kramer left the Army Signal Corps as a first lieutenant, briefly married radio and theatrical actress Marilyn Erskine—their marriage was annulled—and returned to Hollywood. “I found the whole town waiting to ignore me,” he recalled. “I scurried and scrounged for some kind of job until I finally decided if I wanted one, I’d have to invent it myself. That’s when I decided to declare myself a producer.”⁵ His new career direction fit with the transformation of the production system then occurring in Hollywood. Eight big companies still dominated the industry: five “majors” that owned theaters (Loew’s/MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century-Fox, and RKO) and three “minors” that did not own theaters (Universal, Columbia, and United Artists). But the old studio system, a factorylike system of mass production that required ongoing investments in personnel, facilities, and equipment, was no longer economically efficient or profitable in the new postwar environment. Instead, the “package-unit system” used by independent producers such as Kramer worked better. The producer made one film at a time, bringing together the necessary elements for that particular production and then disbanding. This new system of production allowed for greater flexibility, creativity, and cost saving.⁶ Kramer became adept at this new mode of filmmaking and rose to the top rank of the Hollywood independents.

But Kramer first needed a production company. He already had co-founded Story Productions, Inc., with Armand S. Deutsch, an heir to the Sears, Roebuck, and Company fortune. “He came to Hollywood in 1947 with the dream of more than one rich man: to get into the movie business. He needed an ambitious young fellow to show him the ropes, and I was elected.” Although they managed to secure the rights to “a very hot property,” they never proceeded with the production. Kramer believed that “Deutsch had second thoughts about me. To him I was just a kid.” Kramer sold his interest in the film rights to Deutsch and started Screen Plays, Inc., in 1947, with Carl Foreman and Herbert Baker, writers whom he had met in the military; George Glass, a publicist who had worked with Kramer just before the war at Loew-Lewin; and Sam Zagon, an attorney. “So there we were—army buddies with a new film company!”⁷

Screen Plays became the first company through which Kramer produced a film but not the last. In 1949 he organized Stanley Kramer Productions, Inc., and over the years he would form different companies for legal and financial reasons. For example, the Stanley Kramer Company, Stanley Kramer Pictures Corporation, and Lomitas Productions received credits for various films at different moments in time over his long career. “Business as such does not interest him,” reported Bosley Crowther in a major profile feature article on Kramer in the New York Times in 1950, but as a producer it demanded his attention and drew on his evident “entrepreneurial ability.”⁸

Financing did as well, and Kramer was creative with funding his productions. Banks were unwilling to put up money without collateral, “and I had no collateral.” “In other words, to attain a loan, the producer need only give tangible proof he has no need of one.” At Bank of America, he also was told he had no reputation to bank on: “Who are you, Mr. Kramer?”⁹ Despite such blows, he made it work. Early on he found investors, such as Deutsch, and later Hollywood studios would provide funding. He enjoyed telling tales about securing money for his movies, and journalists enjoyed hearing them. One of his favorite stories concerned an acquaintance, Willie Schenker, whom he had met in his early days in Hollywood. Schenker was supposed to invest money in opening a Chinese restaurant, but instead “I promoted Willie out of his seventy-five hundred dollars.” “I suppose you could say that was a triumph of art over egg foo yung.” Schenker’s investment in Kramer’s first picture, So This Is New York, failed. “My sense of guilt about Willie was horrible. I mean, the Chinese restaurant had gone up in smoke.” But, with a stake in Kramer’s next few films, Schenker’s investment paid off at an estimated $300,000, “a pretty good return,” Kramer added.¹⁰ He convinced additional investors, such as John Stillman, whose son Robert became an associate producer for a time, and Bruce Church, a produce grower in Salinas, California’s richest agricultural area and the so-called Salad Bowl of the World. With Church and his partners as financial backers, Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times could not resist pointing out, Kramer “is thus assured plenty of lettuce.”¹¹

Even as Kramer became more established in the movie industry, he still needed to manage the nerve-racking negotiations of getting a production “greenlighted.” “I’ve always claimed it was the most creative part of filmmaking.” He described one instance, after he and his partners had a story and screenplay they liked: “Then started the almost impossible progression of events which goes into an independent production. We blew our publicity horn. We promoted bank backing. The bank wanted to know who the distributor, director and stars were. But you can’t have the others signed until you have the bank set—it’s a vicious circle. So you work on all of them at the same time.”¹² Kramer later called these maneuvers “an advanced game of footsy,” while others considered his machinations “a kind of diplomatic gamemanship.”¹³ Either way, the young producer excelled at pinpointing and persuading potential backers for his films. Financing also came through partnership deals with other independents and with individuals. New business partners such as Sam Katz, cofounder of the Balaban and Katz theater chain, brought funds into Kramer’s companies ($2 million in Katz’s case). Later, United Artists and Columbia Pictures provided financial backing for Kramer’s productions.

Even with financing, Kramer and his partners needed to keep expenses low to ensure they could be covered. They developed several innovative strategies “to use brains instead of money” in their filmmaking. In the process, Kramer received recognition inside and outside the motion picture industry as a “genius on a low budget.”¹⁴ The fundamental strategy was solid preparation, including rehearsals, before shooting the film. “Wouldn’t you rather we made our mistakes in rehearsal, with no expensive crew standing around,” Kramer asked, “than make them during shooting at the cost of $2,000 an hour?” This innovation cut the number of shooting days and costs to half the amount of the major studios. “Every nickel [spent] must show on the screen,” he wrote.¹⁵ Although commentators such as Bosley Crowther found this strategy “very sensible,” it was perceived as “revolutionary” within the industry. Kramer disagreed with this perception. “Changing an obsolete pattern which is losing money is not revolutionary. It is only good solid business. . . . Hell, it’s conservative,” he exclaimed.¹⁶

Kramer’s company shared several strategies with other Hollywood independents. They kept overhead low. A small salaried team of Kramer as producer, Foreman as screenwriter, and Glass as production assistant, general manager, publicist, and salesman started. Later, the team expanded to include others, such as a production designer, Rudolph Sternad, and composer Dimitri Tiomkin. They kept only a small office—“If you want to talk to somebody, you just stick your head out the window and yell,” Glass reported—and rented soundstages and equipment as needed.¹⁷ Their salaries were often deferred until a picture made money. “It’s murder,” Kramer felt. Since the producer needed “to wait till everyone else is paid off, he may never have it at all!” But it got his movies made and set the pattern for the rest of his career. “That’s smart business,” Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reported.¹⁸ Deferment evolved into “participation,” whereby the filmmakers—from th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontmatter
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “The Thinking Man’s Producer”
• 1 A Hollywood Independent
• 2 Civil Rights Meets The Defiant Ones
• 3 Nuclear War On the Beach
• 4 Inherit the Wind Champions Civil Liberties
• 5 Holocaust History in Judgment at Nuremberg
• 6 Cinematic Diplomacy in Cold War Moscow
• 7 An Old Liberal in New Hollywood
• Conclusion: Legacies of a Hollywood Liberal
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover