Stanley Earl Kramer (September 29, 1913February 19, 2001) was an American film director and producer, responsible for making many of Hollywood's most famous "message films" (he called his movies heavy dramas) and a liberal movie icon. As an independent producer and director, he brought attention to topical social issues that most studios avoided. Among the subjects covered in his films were racism (in The Defiant Ones and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), nuclear war (in On the Beach), greed (in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), creationism vs. evolution (in Inherit the Wind), and the causes and effects of fascism (in Judgment at Nuremberg). His other films included High Noon (1952, as producer), The Caine Mutiny (1954, as producer), and Ship of Fools (1965).
Director Steven Spielberg described him as an "incredibly talented visionary" and "one of our great filmmakers, not just for the art and passion he put on screen, but for the impact he has made on the conscience of the world." Kramer was recognized for his fierce independence as a producer-director, with author Victor Navasky writing that "among the independents...none seemed more vocal, more liberal, more pugnacious than young Stanley Kramer." His friend Kevin Spacey honored him in his acceptance speech for the 2015 Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Drama, calling him "one of the great filmmakers of all time."
Despite uneven critical reception, both then and now, Kramer's body of work has received many awards, including 16 Academy Awards and 80 nominations, and he was nominated nine times as either producer or director. In 1961, he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1963, he was a member of the jury at the 3rd Moscow International Film Festival. In 1998, he was awarded the first NAACP Vanguard Award in recognition of "the strong social themes that ran through his body of work". In 2002, the Stanley Kramer Award was created, to be awarded to recipients whose work "dramatically illustrates provocative social issues".
Early life
Kramer was born in New York City. His parents were Jewish, and having separated when he was very young, he remembered little about his father. His uncle, Earl Kramer, worked in distribution at Universal Pictures.
Kramer attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he graduated at age fifteen. He then enrolled in New York University, where he became a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity and wrote a weekly column for the Medley magazine. He graduated in 1933 at the age of nineteen with a degree in business administration. After developing a "zest for writing" with a newspaper, biographer Donald Spoto wrote, Kramer was offered a paid internship in the writing department of 20th Century Fox and moved to Hollywood.
Film career
Move to Hollywood
Over the following years, during the period of the Great Depression, Kramer took odd jobs in the film industry: He worked as a set furniture mover and film cutter at MGM, as writer and researcher for Columbia Pictures and Republic Pictures, and associate producer with Loew-Lewin productions. Those years as an apprentice writer and editor helped him acquire an "exceptional aptitude" in editing and develop the ability to understand the overall structure of the films he worked on. They enabled him to later compose and edit "in camera," as he shot scenes.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 during World War II, where he helped make training films with the Signal Corps in New York, along with other Hollywood filmmakers including Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak.
After the war, Kramer soon discovered that there were no available jobs in Hollywood in 1947, so he created an independent production company, Screen Plays Inc. He partnered with writer Herbie Baker, publicist George Glass and producer Carl Foreman, an army friend from the film unit. Foreman justified the production company by noting that the big studios had become "dinosaurs," which, being shocked by the onrush of television, "jettisoned virtually everything to survive." But they failed to develop cadres of younger creative talent in their wake. Kramer was given free rein over what films he chose to make, along with a budget of nearly a million dollars each. Kramer agreed to a five-year contract during which time he would produce 20 films.
Kramer continued producing movies at Columbia, including Death of a Salesman (1951), The Sniper (1952), The Member of the Wedding (1952), The Juggler (1953), The Wild One (1953) and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953). With a larger budget, his films took on a "glossier" more polished look, yet his next 10 films all lost money, although some were nonetheless highly praised.
In 1953, Cohn and Kramer agreed to terminate the five-year, 20-film contract Kramer had signed. However, his last Columbia film, The Caine Mutiny (1954), regained all of the losses Columbia had incurred as a result of his earlier projects. The Caine Mutiny was an adaptation of the book written by Herman Wouk and was directed by Edward Dmytryk.
Kramer observed that during the 1940s and 1950s, "cinema was the producer's medium:"