For two decades, from the end of the 1940s until the end of the 1960s, Stanley Kramer was one of the best-known independent producers in Hollywood. He made his early reputation through a series of small-scale, serious, and unusual films that challenged audience's dramatic expectations, and later became known as a bold producer/director of large-scale "message" films that reflected an enlightened liberal point of view.
Stanley Earl Kramer was born in New York City, in the working-class Manhattan neighborhood known as Hell's Kitchen, in 1913. His parents were divorced and he was raised by his maternal grandmother. He had two family connections with the movie business growing up: his mother, who worked as a secretary at Paramount Pictures, and an uncle, Earl Kramer, who was employed in distribution at Universal and later became an agent in Hollywood. Stanley Kramer intended to go to law school, but an article that he wrote in his senior year at New York University got him the offer of a paid internship in the story department at 20th Century Fox. Kramer went to Hollywood and spent the next decade learning the movie business from the ground up, dressing sets and later cutting film at MGM, and then working in the story department at Columbia Pictures. By 1941, he was serving as a production assistant for producer/director Albert Lewin on the movies So Ends Our Night and The Moon and the Sixpence. He was drafted in 1943 and spent the next two years working with an army film unit in New York, where he first met Carl Foreman…  » Read more