Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [451]
Both jumped from Fox to M-G-M, Tracy as a featured player on the studio’s fabled talent roster, Kramer as a researcher for the costume department. After a few weeks Kramer was transferred to Editorial, where he apprenticed and eventually became a cutter’s assistant. (“The pay was low, the glory was small, but it was a good place to learn how to put a movie together.”) Through an uncle who happened to be a talent agent, Kramer found work writing for radio—guest shots for The Chase & Sanborn Hour and Rudy Vallee, episodes of Big Town starring Edward G. Robinson. He sold a spec script to Republic and eventually joined Irving Briskin’s B-picture unit at Columbia.
In 1940, at the age of twenty-seven, Kramer was hired as casting director, story editor, and general factotum by Albert Lewin, the producer who had at one time been his boss at M-G-M. It was Kramer’s doing that a relatively unknown Glenn Ford played the juvenile lead opposite Margaret Sullavan in Lewin’s first United Artists release, So Ends Our Night. On their second picture together, The Moon and Sixpence, Kramer was elevated to the position of associate producer. The film, lacking marketable stars, wasn’t a success, and Kramer was working for producer Val Lewton when he was drafted in 1943.
He spent the rest of the war in the Signal Corps, working out of the former Paramount studio complex on Long Island. Energetic and resourceful, Stanley Kramer returned to Hollywood at a time when independent production was remaking a landscape once dominated by the major studios. Setting out to do what Lewin and his partner David Loew had done on a smaller scale, Kramer optioned two of Ring Lardner’s better-known works, The Big Town and Champion, and went looking for a deal.
Big Town, retitled So This Is New York, was set up at Enterprise, but the film flopped commercially. Rebuffed by the banks, Kramer sought private capital for Champion and eventually secured it from a retired garment manufacturer living in Florida. Guaranteed with lettuce money from central California, Champion turned out to be a huge success. It made a star of Kirk Douglas and set Kramer on his way. There followed a series of productions, all financed with money from “drygoods manufacturers, wildcat oil operators, and all sorts of people.”
A graduate of New York University, Kramer had a taste for class material—often plays that had proven themselves on Broadway. As a producer he amassed one of the industry’s most impressive postwar résumés: Home of the Brave, The Men, Cyrano de Bergerac, Death of a Salesman, High Noon, The Member of the Wedding, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny. He put Marlon Brando onscreen before anyone else, hired Eddie Dmytryk straight out of prison, filmed original screenplays by Carl Foreman, Michael Blankfort, Edward Anhalt, and Dr. Seuss.
In 1955 Kramer began directing and, after a shaky start, landed a six-picture deal with United Artists. His first film under the new contract, The Defiant Ones, was finished and awaiting release when he approached Tracy about playing a role he had rejected on two previous occasions—that of Henry Drummond in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s enduring stage hit, Inherit the Wind. Herman Shumlin had been the first to come calling, thinking he could get Tracy for old times’ sake and the promise of a limited run. Tracy, of course, had other commitments, and Shumlin got a similar turndown from Fredric March, who was vacationing in Europe with his wife, the actress Florence Eldridge. Later that same year, Burt Lancaster’s partner, Harold Hecht, optioned the play and offered to set the deal up anywhere—M-G-M, Paramount, Fox, Columbia, Universal—if only Tracy would play the lead. Again, the timing wasn’t right.
Tracy went on to do The Old Man and the Sea and forgot all about Inherit the Wind until Kramer nabbed the rights