Stanley Earl Kramer was born on September 29, 1913 in Manhattan, New York, specifically in a neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen, due to its bad reputation of a rough, gang-infested area. His parents split just very shortly after his birth, and only his mother then raised him, which is her only child. Kramer ran with West Side gangs while growing up in this area of New York. He graduated high school at age fifteen and was the first in his family to go to college. He studied business, which is what he received his degree in. He wrote different satirical pieces for New York University’s humor magazine, which ended up winning him a job making $70 a week being a junior writer for Twentieth-Century Fox in Hollywood. He lost this job six weeks later, but he was always determined to learn more about filmmaking and continued to do work in the field and study this subject.
Stanley Kramer is reflected as an American film director and producer and is commonly known for making plenty of Hollywood’s most famous “message films.” He is an independent producer that focused on social issues that most producers avoided, such as racism, greed, nuclear war, fascism, creationism vs. evolution, etc. Some of these films were The Defiant Ones, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, On the Beach, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg. His films, for a majority and what he is commonly known for is focusing upon some sort of social issue, which is seen in his films. A personal quote by Kramer, “I am always pursuing the next dream, hunting for the next truth.” Which seems to go hand-in-hand with studying and filming social issues, he was very determined and persistent.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), was a film that was comic. It had mixed reviews and critics stating it had too much comedy that it lost its focus, but it was a different sort of film compared to his others. The public seemed to enjoy the socially disruptive and silliness of the acting and storyline. It was actually nominated for six Academy Awards and won Best Sound Editing.
A more popular film, that he is known for is The Defiant Ones, produced in 1958 that focuses on two convicts that escaped in the Deep South, one black and one white, so this is one of his social issue films focusing on race. They had to fight, chained together, to escape, so it demonstrated them forming a brotherhood with one another. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won two. This film was actually shown at the Moscow Film Festival, which ended up being a great success in Moscow.
Stanley Kramer has received different awards while involved in the film industry, such as 16 Academy Awards and approximately 80 nominations. He has also received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, which is awarded occasionally by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Governors Awards ceremonies to who they saw as imaginative producers that had bodies of work that replicated a steadily high quality of motion picture production, in 1961. Another reward, which he was awarded in 1998, was the first NAACP Vanguard Award. He was awarded this due to his strong social theme work that ran through his films. There is even an award named after him, the Stanley Kramer Award, created in 2002. This award was created to inheritors for work that melodramatically exemplifies provocative social issues.
Kramer is known as a genuine original filmmaker. A majority of his films were noticed for engaging the audience with social and political issues for the time period. He was, “emotionally drawn to these subject,” is what he always stated when people asked why he focused on these certain issues. He retired in the 1980s and wrote a column on movies in the Seattle Times and hosted his own weekly movie show on the television station of KCPQ. He passed away on February 19, 2001 in Los Angeles, California at age 87 from pneumonia.
No comments:
Post a Comment