Word: kramer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...botches the job. The book, written with Thomas M. Coffey, is starchy, stentorian, too careful, like the world's longest Oscar-acceptance speech. We learn that Kramer grew up in New York City's tough Hell's Kitchen, that as a kid he belonged to an interracial gang, that after World War II he became a producer by buying the rights to two Ring Lardner stories. He writes that just before shooting began on Champion, the Lardner boxing story that would make Kirk Douglas a star, the actor got a nose job and said that in the fight scenes...
...there's some life in the films, especially the early ones. They still play briskly; Home of the Brave, The Men, High Noon, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. and The Wild One all run under 90 minutes. And Kramer had a knack for finding sharp writers (Carl Foreman, John Paxton, Ted ["Dr. Seuss"] Geisel) and fresh actors; Marlon Brando (The Men) and Grace Kelly (High Noon) made their first strong movie impressions in his films...
...Kramer's reputation is stale, Coe's is forgotten, though as producer of Philco Playhouse and later for Playhouse 90, he was the primo impresario of TV drama. Jon Krampner's engrossing The Man in the Shadows: Fred Coe and the Golden Age of Television (Rutgers University Press; 243 pages; $32.95) helps restore the stature of the Tennessean who made trouble in the studio and at home--he told his pregnant wife, "When the child is born, I want a divorce"--but was still one of TV's smartest, boldest pioneers...
This was just the fieldwork. Coe also chose scripts, fought with sponsors over the hiring of blacklisted actors, scoured the theater scene for talent. He enticed stars, from Jose Ferrer (Coe put Cyrano de Bergerac on TV between its Broadway run and the Kramer film adaptation) to Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda (for a Producer's Showcase staging of The Petrified Forest) to Frank Sinatra (who, in the musical version of Our Town, sang Love and Marriage). Coe's 1955 airing of the Mary Martin Peter Pan was the highest-rated show in the young medium's history...
Today film scholars ignore Kramer's work the better to pore over Ed Wood's bizarrely inept Plan 9 from Outer Space. And TV writers, instead of challenging themselves and the medium, mostly want to rip off the latest hit. "What do you feel like rippin' off tonight?" "I don't know. What do you feel like rippin...