It is odd how one finds the story for the next picture; or perhaps it is the reverse: how a story finds the person destined to put it on film.
FRED ZINNEMANN
Carl Foreman watched the deadly serious HUAC follies in Washington in the fall of 1947 with a mixture of horror and disdain. While he admired his former comrades for their courage, he believed they had erred by refusing to answer the fundamental question of whether they belonged to the Communist Party. The party was wrong to cling to its secrecy, he believed: people could accept radicals who had the courage of their convictions but would suspect that those who remained silent must have something to hide. It felt like a straitjacket for members of the Ten to say, “I’m going to answer that question but in my own way.” Better, Carl believed, to lay out the truth openly and defend it.
He felt a sense of relief that he was too small a fish to be of interest to the committee. He and Estelle had finally left the party—drifted away, as they put it, due to the press of having a baby (Kate was born that year) and coping with the full-time grind of making movies on a shoestring with Stanley Kramer and his partners. Still, he knew his name had appeared on some kind of suspected Red list as far back as 1943 when Frank Capra had recruited him to make documentaries for the Army. It had also popped up in later testimony before the Tenney Committee investigating Communists in Hollywood for the California state legislature, the local mini-version of HUAC. And it could always come up again. The sad irony was that the more successful and noteworthy Carl became as a screenwriter, the more likely it was that someone would come along sooner or later and expose him as a suspected subversive. His clock was ticking.
Meanwhile, as his friend Dore Schary had suggested, there were movies to be made. The next one on the list for Stanley Kramer and company now had a title: The Men. And a screenplay draft written by Carl. And it had a director: a genteel but insistent artist and craftsman named Fred Zinnemann.
Born in 1907, Fred had grown up in Vienna in an affluent Jewish home where culture and dignity reigned. His father was a dermatologist and played the viola in a string quartet, and his mother worshipped classical music and art. Fred himself had hoped to become a violinist but felt he lacked the talent. Instead, he studied at the University of Vienna for a doctorate in law, which he wound up hating out of sheer boredom. He recalled sneaking out of lectures to go to the cinema, where a world of enchantment and adventure seemed to open before him. With the wary approval of his doting parents, who stifled their horror that their oldest child had been captured by such a low form of popular entertainment, he boarded a train for Paris to study film.
His eighteen months there were a revelation. Paris was a world of great drama and color, and he wanted desperately to be part of it. He studied how to use a camera but he aspired to be something more than an efficient technician with a lens; he wanted to become a creative filmmaker. When his French visa expired, he relocated to Berlin, where one of his earliest assignments was as assistant cameraman on People on Sunday (1930), a full-length film featuring a cluster of young German talent, including Billy Wilder, who co-wrote it, and Robert Siodmak, who directed it. “My contribution was simply carrying the camera around and loading the film and keeping it focused as best I could,” Fred recalled. But somewhere in there, he saw a possible future for himself.
Fred had grown up in a world where Jews were barely tolerated and often were subjected to discrimination and contempt, and it grated on his dignity and sense of justice. “It was always there—oppressive, often snide, sometimes hostile, seldom violent,” he would recall. “A Jew was an outsider, a threat to the country’s culture … Raised as an Austrian, he would still never truly belong.” Later it would be much worse. Both his parents would be murdered in the Holocaust.
When Weimar Germany’s economic collapse crippled its film industry, Fred boarded a decaying ocean liner for New York, and then rode a Greyhound bus that took seven days to cross the country to Los Angeles. While the grimy, economically battered cities of the eastern United States depressed him, he was thrilled by the wide open spaces and spectacular sunsets along the Santa Fe Trail and in the Mojave Desert. It was a stunning visual introduction to the American West for a young man from the claustrophobic confines of Western Europe. Despite being sponsored by the famous cameraman Billy Blitzer through a family connection, he failed to gain entry to the cinematographers’ union in Hollywood, but he did get menial work as an extra in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) before landing a job as personal assistant to Berthold Viertel, a distinguished Austrian stage and film director. Around the table of the comfortable Santa Monica home of Viertel and his wife Salka, a former actress turned hostess and gossipmonger, Zinnemann met scores of famous émigrés, including Charlie Chaplin, F. W. Murnau, Max Reinhardt, and Greta Garbo. One of the occasional guests was the legendary documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty—another artist who, like Viertel, seemed uncomfortable with the conventions and culture of the studio system. Flaherty “didn’t know the meaning of compromise,” Fred wrote, “and this quality attracted me to him above everything else.”
Fred signed on as Flaherty’s assistant to make a documentary about the Soviet Union. The project never got made, but Fred spent six months in Berlin, where he absorbed the master’s ideas, techniques, and attitudes, some of which would land him in continuous trouble once he returned to Hollywood. He kicked around a variety of jobs, including assistant to Busby Berkeley for dance routines on The Kid from Spain (1932). Then he took over from a friend the direction of a full-length documentary for the Mexican government on the lives of fishermen on the Gulf of Mexico coast. The Wave (1936) took almost a year to complete and was made under incredibly frustrating conditions: halfway through the film shoot, for example, the leading man decided his face was too hot and shaved his beard, delaying his participation in the movie for two months while it grew back. Still, the finished product helped Fred land a regular job in 1937 with MGM’s short films department. He made eighteen shorts over three years, learning how to tell stories quickly and cheaply (the life and career of George Washington Carver in ten and a half minutes!), while meeting a dozen other promising young filmmakers on the MGM payroll like Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, and Vincente Minnelli. Two of Zinnemann’s short films won Academy Awards for MGM. His reward was a seven-year contract as a director.
His first feature-length film was Kid Glove Killer (1942), a B-movie police procedural with Van Heflin and Marsha Hunt. She would later recall how Fred had introduced himself to the entire cast and crew on the first day of the film shoot, explaining that he was a novice and inviting them to come to him with their ideas. No director had ever been so open with them before. “They were speechless,” Hunt said. She glanced at Fred’s personal copy of the script one day and saw that the margins on each page were black with his small, handwritten notes. “He had really done his homework.”
After several less promising projects, Fred landed a larger, more complex film, The Seventh Cross (1944), starring Spencer Tracy, Signe Hasso, and Hume Cronyn. It tells the story of an anti-Nazi resistance fighter who escapes from a German concentration camp and must seek the help of friends and strangers to survive. It was the first of Fred’s films to explore what became his most enduring theme: one person against a repressive system, driven slightly mad by his own principles yet determined to stick to them.
Fred Zinnemann was a small man with thin lips, a large nose, and a passive, thoughtful expression that made him seem a model of Old World gentility. He “was a lean and wiry mountain climber who spoke softly with a gentle Viennese accent—you might have taken him for a doctor or a psychiatrist,” recalls George Stevens Jr., whose famous director father was one of Fred’s closest friends. Yet Fred was also fiercely independent and intensely sensitive to anything that felt like a personal or professional slight. Although he worked inside a studio system in which producers had most of the power, Fred insisted that the director alone was the true author of a film, “the only person who has the central, overall vision of it from beginning to end.” Actress Jane Fonda, who worked with him on Julia many years later, remembered him as “a gentleman and a dictator.”
“My father had this courtly manner and he was always soft-spoken,” recalls Tim Zinnemann, Fred’s only child, “and when he got really mad he’d be even quieter. There’s a common theme to his movies: the outsider sticking to his guns no matter what happens—and that’s exactly how he was.”
He was yanked from his next project, The Clock (1945), through no fault of his own. Judy Garland, the star, wanted to work with Minnelli, her new husband, and had the clout at MGM to make it happen. “I wish I could look upon this whole thing as a joke but somehow it doesn’t strike me very funny,” Fred wrote to his friend Minnelli in a private letter bristling with anger. “I think that this incident marks a new low in the treatment of directors, in professional ethics, tact, and consideration, which a director has a right to expect.”
Then he was assigned two B movies with a six-year-old child star named Butch Jenkins, whom Fred described as “a perfectly normal, charming little boy who had no talent, could not remember his lines, and hated being in movies.” Fred then turned down three scripts in a row—unheard-of behavior for a lowly director on the assembly line at the MGM dream factory. He was developing a reputation as a cranky nonconformist and managed to get himself suspended for several weeks, which meant he got no salary but was still bound to the studio.
It also meant he was free to accept the opportunity to direct The Search (1948), a drama set in the war-ravaged urban ruins of Germany. Swiss film producer Lazar Wechsler wanted to tell the story of displaced war orphans and chronicle the work of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and he came to the United States to recruit talent. Having seen and been impressed by The Seventh Cross, he asked MGM for permission to borrow Fred’s services. “MGM was happy to get rid of me for a year,” Fred recalled. “The feeling was mutual.”
He plunged into the project with great enthusiasm. Reacting sharply to the smug complacency and ignorance of his adopted country, Fred said, “In America there was no clear awareness of what had happened to countless human beings in the rest of the world … We were as on an island of stagnation and claustrophobia in the midst of a rapidly changing world.”
Before he left for Europe, he recruited a gifted young actor named Montgomery Clift to play the lead. Clift had already made Red River with John Wayne but the film had not yet been released, and so The Search became his first appearance on the screen. Then Fred and Wechsler roamed the displaced persons’ camps and bombed-out cities of postwar Germany, interviewing people and taking photographs. They returned to Zurich with dozens of case histories, which two writers turned into a story about a nine-year-old boy, separated from his parents during the war, who is picked up and cared for by a friendly GI while the boy’s mother searches for him all over Germany. Fred filmed most of the interiors in Zurich but shot the exteriors in the bombed-out remains of Munich and Nuremberg. He used professional actors working alongside children recruited from the streets and the camps.
The result is a flawed but deeply satisfying drama. It begins with a poorly composed introduction—pasted on by Wechsler after Fred completed his work—delivered by a woman in a once-upon-a-time voice that makes it seem like we’re watching a fairy tale rather than a gritty urban drama. Once that’s over, however, the actors begin to play their parts and the movie becomes gripping and agonizingly sad. It features two superb performances: one by Clift as the young, easygoing GI who has no interest in playing a humanitarian hero but can’t turn his back on a child in need; and the other by a nine-year-old Czech actor, Ivan Jandl, whose wary face, awkward, underfed body, and plaintive voice create a portrait of wounded vulnerability. Their scenes together are both casual and intense, and build powerfully as their relationship grows. Clift, who hadn’t served during the war, prepared for the part by living with a platoon of Army engineers in the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany. After the film was released, someone asked Fred, “Where did you find a soldier who could act so well?”
It was sometimes the case that the children depicted in the film were not acting at all. For one scene, Fred put displaced children inside a Red Cross truck and told them they were to be transported to a new home. But many of them knew that the Nazis had often disguised mobile gas chambers as Red Cross ambulances, and they panicked when the doors were shut. The hysteria that Fred filmed inside the claustrophobic vehicles was real. It was a cruel but highly effective use of his young amateur cast—and a measure of how far Fred was willing to go to get what he wanted on film. In his memoirs, he describes this moment without expressing any remorse.
In a sense this was Fred’s own story: a displaced war orphan seeking his way in a new and unfamiliar landscape. The film has an almost unbearable intimacy about it as the camera roams the devastation. This was the world Fred came from, one he had known so well, and now, like his murdered mother and father, it was gone.
The Search has fine acting, careful and efficient visual storytelling, and a deeply humanistic perspective that demands its audience pay attention—“a major revelation in our times,” wrote Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who urged every adult in the United States to see it.
The movie was nominated for four Oscars, including Clift for best actor and Fred for best director. It won for best story, and also won a special award for Ivan Jandl’s powerful performance.
Fred went on to make two more compelling films about the aftermath of the war on GIs (Act of Violence and Teresa), but it was The Search that established him as a director who could pull off a complex, ambitious project on location and make a drama that looked like a documentary with actors who looked and sounded like real people. After it opened, he recalled, “the tiny little people” at MGM “who had been running for cover away from me a year earlier were now coming at me, all broad smiles, moving into close-ups and hugging me … This was when I became a cynic.”
He got buckets of praise for the gritty social realism and quiet artistry of The Search, but no work at MGM for nearly a year. Then Stanley Kramer and Carl Foreman came knocking.
Stanley made the first approach. After toiling for a decade in the suffocating confines of MGM, Fred was delighted with the kinetic energy and lack of pretense at Stanley and Carl’s company. “Working in a small rental studio near Cahuenga Boulevard … ,” he would recall, “there were no luxurious offices, no major-studio bureaucracy, no small internal empires to be dealt with, no waste of time or effort.”
He signed a three-picture deal with the company. “I decided I had had enough of the factory system and asked to be released from MGM.”
The Men, the first of the three films, was based on the draft screenplay Carl Foreman had constructed using the stories of the disabled war veterans he had met and interviewed at Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital outside Los Angeles. Its main focus was on a fictional young Army officer named Bud who had been shot in the spine near the end of the war, and Ellen, the girl he had left behind. She now wanted to marry him despite the fact that he would most likely remain paralyzed from the waist down and sexually impotent for the rest of his life. The screenplay was a tough-minded, brutally honest portrait of what these young people were up against.
From the beginning, Fred was delighted that the artificial walls between producer, director, and screenwriter were readily breached at Screen Plays Inc. He and Carl worked together on revising the script and all three men shared the decision on who to cast in the starring role. All of them were intrigued by a newcomer named Marlon Brando, a young actor making a huge impact on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire.
“The wonderful thing about the film was that Stanley Kramer, Carl Foreman, and I were our own front office. We didn’t have to bargain with anybody or persuade anybody,” Fred recalled. “I remember Kramer bringing up three possibilities, and Brando was one of them. We all felt that Brando would be the most interesting. He had just finished A Streetcar Named Desire onstage, and it was just a question of how he would work out, not having ever worked in film.”
Deeply ambitious yet equally ambivalent, Brando wanted to conquer Hollywood on his own terms. He had no interest in tying himself down to the seven-year contract the big studios were offering. Stanley’s alternative universe, which consisted of a one-picture deal for far less money, was much more attractive to him, as was the quality of Carl’s screenplay. Brando signed on.
The aspiring movie star arrived on the train from New York in jeans and a torn T-shirt. Stanley picked him up at Union Station and dropped him at his aunt’s bungalow in Eagle Rock in northeast Los Angeles. A devout believer in Method acting, Brando immediately immersed himself in patient life at the Birmingham hospital. He confined himself to a wheelchair and drove a car specially fitted with hand controls like the vets themselves used. Brando spent four weeks living in a ward with thirty-one wary, frustrated, and often angry men. He dealt with them without a teaspoon of pity or condescension. Soon he became their leader.
In the most famous tale, Brando went drinking one night with his new friends from the ward, and when a woman at a bar started praying aloud for their recovery, Brando listened for a spell, then rose up haltingly. “I can walk! I can walk!” he cried. Then he broke into a soft shoe and danced his way to the sidewalk, his paraplegic buddies trailing after him in full mirth.
As he had done with Montgomery Clift, Fred gave Brando room to design his own performance. And as he had done with displaced children in The Search, Fred mixed forty-five real patients and hospital staff with professional actors to help give the film a more realistic feel.
To play Ellen, Bud’s fiancée, Stanley hired Teresa Wright, a thirty-one-year-old actress who had an attractive, fresh-faced, girl-next-door demeanor yet had held her own in some of the best pictures of the 1940s against stars like Gary Cooper (The Pride of the Yankees), Joseph Cotten (Shadow of a Doubt), Dana Andrews and Fredric March (The Best Years of Our Lives). She’d won an Oscar for supporting actress and been nominated for two others, but Stanley got her for a mere twenty thousand dollars after Sam Goldwyn terminated her contract in a dispute over money and artistic control. She and Brando seemed to come from separate solar systems, let alone acting styles. But under Fred’s careful tutelage she managed to meld her performance to that of her brilliant but unpredictable leading man.
Carl constructed many well-written scenes of Bud and his fellow paraplegics that depict their frustrations and agony as their aspirations collide with the hard reality of their injuries, and Brando and the expert supporting cast perform them brilliantly. But one of the most emotionally charged scene features Wright. Ellen confronts her parents about her decision to marry Bud, and when her father confesses his misgivings, her anger—hitherto unseen—boils to the surface.
“Love can be very fragile, El,” her father tells her. “Even healthy people can’t always hold onto it or take it for granted … How long do you think that love is going to last after you realize you’ve signed a contract to be his nurse for the rest of your life? It won’t work. You’re a young healthy girl.”
“… Oh I’m not blaming you,” he adds. “I know you love him. I’d probably be ashamed of you if you felt any other way. Actually I blame Bud. Yes I do. He knows the score better than any of us. He ought to let you go. If he loved you as much as you love him he’d make you go.”
Wright as Ellen strikes back with an unexpected sting that suggests a deep pool of resentment below her saccharine smile. “You’re being so clever, so logical,” she tells her father, her voice growing cold. “I never knew you could handle words so well … You weren’t quite so logical a few years ago when we needed some boys to go out and get killed—or paralyzed…”
“Baby,” he pleads, “is it so wrong for us to want a grandchild?”
Bud and Ellen are married. The doctors, nurses, and fellow paraplegics attend, but not her parents.
That night Bud spills champagne on the living room carpet of their new home, and when his right leg begins to spasm uncontrollably, he catches a flash of despair on Ellen’s face and confronts her viciously. All her defenses collapse under his sustained verbal assault and she confesses her doubts about the marriage. Bud storms out in his wheelchair and returns to the hospital. Brando beautifully captures Bud’s vulnerability and bitterness.
In the film’s final scene, they agree to try again. Ellen smiles at him, but her expression is far from joyful. The audience can sense that every step for these two will be fraught with uncertainty and disappointment. War has robbed a handsome, virile young man—and his comrades in the ward—of his most defining characteristic: his manhood. There is no happy ending.
Bud is a compelling character because of Brando’s keenly sensitive performance. But Ellen was truly Carl’s creation, his first complex woman character. She is strong, idealistic, and determined to live up to her values, yet unsure she has the wherewithal to do so. She is vicious to her father because she knows deep inside that he may well be right, and she’s frightened by Bud because he sees behind her façade of strength and determination. It’s a finely etched, bravely realistic portrait.
“The courage, resolution, and compassion of the approach were never in question,” writes British film critic Penelope Houston of The Men. “Zinnemann’s handling of the professional and non-professional players, the balance maintained between the central story and the hospital background, the grasp of the human implications of the material, and the vitality of Carl Foreman’s script, made this a film of unusual honesty.”
The reviews were glowing and Carl got another Oscar nomination for best screenplay. But box-office receipts were weak. Fred was proud of his work on the picture and had enjoyed working on the film set with Carl. But doubts were beginning to eat at both men over their partnership with Stanley Kramer and George Glass, his devoted public relations wizard.
As the company’s PR man, Glass had one primary mission: the care and growth of Stanley’s reputation. To promote the company, he argued, he had to put the spotlight solely on one man, otherwise the plotline would be too complicated for the simple-minded press to digest. A letter Glass wrote to gossip columnist Hedda Hopper in April 1950 was typical. After thanking her for her recent praise of The Men, he launched a plea: “Hedda, from time to time I have said to you that the best story in town is the success story of Stanley Kramer, the man who made this picture, from the conception of the idea through to its completion. His is the best of the modern Horatio Alger stories, and certainly living proof that opportunity is still around for those who have the courage and the initiative to go after it.
“I know that from this one lone guy, who started from scratch less than three years ago, this giant industry has drawn new hope during a most trying period in its history.”
It was Glass who staged the publicity campaign that won for Stanley the Look magazine Achievement Award as Top Producer of the Year for 1950—and along with it, a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter congratulating Stanley for his “distinguished record as maker of Champion, Home of the Brave, [and] The Men.”
The new picture was advertised as “Stanley Kramer’s The Men” on movie posters and advertisements. Carl conceded that the original idea for the film had been Stanley’s. But what about the contributions of Fred and Brando and himself? Carl chafed. There was tension, frustration—“the marriage had turned unhappy and sour,” Carl recalled. And he blamed George Glass, Stanley’s willing agent, more than Stanley himself.
Fred shared many of Carl’s misgivings and added his own exquisite sense of grievance. Visiting New York, he couldn’t help but notice that the newspaper and subway ads didn’t mention his name nor Brando’s, just Stanley’s. He began to sense that Glass and Stanley were teaming up against him.
In a letter to his agent, Joseph Schoenfeld at the William Morris Agency—a letter he never sent but kept in a drawer for decades—Fred expressed his growing resentment. “George Glass’s policy is to keep building the Stanley Kramer legend—about the man who goes out and does all of it, all by himself,” Fred wrote. “If necessary, George is willing to pursue this policy at the expense of other people. By his own statement, he likes to see just how far he can push people before he is stopped, and as you know he is a shrewd and subtle man.”
As a result of Glass’s campaign, Fred complained, “Stanley absorbed a lot of credit that is not his … The ‘team’ idea which was stressed so strongly by him in our original meeting, was carried through the production phase—and yet somehow the picture now emerges as pretty much of a one-man job.”
Next up for Screen Plays Inc., at Stanley’s insistence, was Cyrano de Bergerac, based on the highly successful Broadway play starring the talented José Ferrer. It is the tale of a seventeenth-century French nobleman who is a brilliant swordsman and gifted poet with a disfiguringly large nose. Carl had deep reservations about the efficacy of such a project for the Kramer company; a period piece like Cyrano would be expensive to produce and did not fit their social-realism ethos and style. But Stanley was determined and Carl thought he understood why: he saw a lot of Stanley’s own character in Cyrano. “Not only the nose, but rather Cyrano’s panache, Cyrano’s stubbornness, Cyrano’s unwillingness to compromise, Cyrano’s almost self-destructive honesty and integrity,” said Carl.
As a low-budget movie, Carl argued, Cyrano was bound to fail. They couldn’t afford to film it in color and give it the kind of sumptuous visual panache it needed. They got lucky with casting: Ferrer agreed to reprise his Tony award–winning performance from the Broadway production. But his salary left little money for the rest of the cast. The black-and-white movie looked thin and drab despite Rudolph Sternad’s creative production design and Franz Planer’s superb cinematography. It failed at the box office, although Ferrer won an Oscar for best actor—the first Latino performer to do so. Still, Stanley was now clearly in charge. He was dictating the company’s agenda, no longer consulting first with Carl and the others. The creative collaboration was beginning to unravel.
“They were three men—Kramer, Foreman, and Zinnemann—each of whom was among the very best at what he did,” says George Stevens Jr. “One guy gets the material, one writes the screenplay, and the other directs it. They are arguably the perfect combination for a film company.” But all of them, Stevens notes, were restless with their roles: Stanley and Carl both longed to direct their own films, while Fred wanted total control of his. Each of them was tough, demanding, and blessed with a combative personality and an extra-large ego.
“It explains why these three made great films but also explains the difficulties that emerged,” says Stevens.
The company had released five pictures in its first four years, four of which had been critical successes and two of which had done very well at the box office. But Stanley wanted to expand its production schedule and grow its finances. To do so, he needed a business partner with money and a solid reputation. He turned to Sam Katz, who had been a behind-the-scenes player in New York and Hollywood since the early days of the film industry. Katz had been a partner in the very successful Balaban and Katz theater chain based in Chicago, and when it was bought up by rival Paramount in 1926, he ran the combined theater empire from the thirty-five-story Paramount Theatre Building in Times Square. After helping stage a bloodless coup against Paramount’s distinguished founders, Adolph Zukor, B. P. Schulberg, and Jesse Lasky, Katz moved over to MGM in the mid-1930s, where he worked for fourteen years as a production executive, part of the leadership group known as “the College of Cardinals.” He had a reputation as a superficially charming but cold-blooded in-fighter. “Katz was a polished, well-groomed man with a mellifluous voice and an engaging smile” that concealed a devious way of doing business, recalled Dore Schary, who worked with him at MGM. Or as director Joseph Mankiewicz put it, “Nobody can be as happy to see anybody as Sam Katz is to see everybody.” But perhaps not so happy; when he met up with Stanley Kramer, Katz had just been pushed out at MGM as the studio attempted to cope with the rapidly changing economics of the movie business.
Katz brought Stanley more than his management experience; he also invested two million dollars in the new partnership and pledged to help raise thirteen million more. They called the new enterprise the Stanley Kramer Company, with Katz in charge of financial affairs while Stanley remained head of production. George Glass, lawyer Sam Zagon, and Carl continued as shareholders and limited partners, with George listed as vice president and Carl as treasurer.
Carl was not happy about the new deal. He didn’t like the corporate name change and he didn’t trust Sam Katz. But he still believed in the Stanley Kramer way of making movies, especially when contrasted with working for a large studio. He was reminded of the difference when he signed on with Warners to help write the screenplay for Young Man with a Horn (1950), a Kirk Douglas picture about a talented but self-destructive jazzman. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, a wily old veteran who had directed Casablanca and many other Warners hits but who knew as much about modern jazz as Carl did about ancient Babylon. Carl thought the finished film was a lethargic mess with none of the excitement and unpredictability of the jazz world it sought to depict. He suggested at a meeting with Curtiz, the producers, and studio head Jack Warner that the movie needed much tighter editing. “Thank you very much,” Warner replied. “Next.”
After that, “nobody talked to me anymore,” Carl recalled.
Back at the Stanley Kramer Company, more changes were in the wind. Sam Katz reported to Stanley that the board of directors at Columbia Pictures was looking to groom someone to succeed Harry Cohn, the company’s autocratic head of production. Cohn was one of Hollywood’s most infamous film czars—“vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish, and some might say malevolent,” as Stanley describes Cohn in his memoirs. Cohn was offering a deal in which the Kramer Company would become a major production unit for Columbia, making six pictures a year for five years—thirty films in all. The company would have unfettered discretion as to which films to make, provided each picture’s budget did not exceed one million dollars. This would be an enormous undertaking, and the risks were obvious. “Anybody who had worked in Hollywood for as long as an hour and a half had heard stories about what an ornery bastard [Cohn] could be,” writes Stanley. Still, the profits were potentially enormous—and looming in the near future was the prospect that Stanley would succeed Cohn as head of Columbia, with Katz lurking in the background as kingmaker. Stanley authorized him to negotiate a deal. Even Carl, despite his reservations, had a hard time saying no.
On March 19, 1951, Cohn held a press conference to announce the agreement. He called it “the most important deal we’ve ever made.” While the major studios were struggling, the Stanley Kramer Company seemed on its way to the top.