Word: kramer
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...academic department of Lesbian and Gay Studies remains a fantasy, a full-fledged student center for gay and lesbian students a distant dream. In the dormitories, a homophobic student scribbles "faggot" on the wall, as occurred in Dunster House this past spring. When Angels in America playwright Larry Kramer offered millions of dollars to Yale University, his alma mater, for the creation of a professorship of Lesbian and Gay Studies, it was denied. When students at Harvard agitated for a University-sponsored lesbian and gay student center, we were offered a tiny basement office for the BGLTSA...
DIED. LEO JAFFE, 88, successful Columbia Pictures chairman who helped steer the studio past the rough shoals of a 1970s financial scandal involving Columbia's president; in New York City. Hits during his tenure included Kramer vs. Kramer and Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...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...