This Day in Film History (Louis B. Mayer Loses MGM Showdown)

June 22, 1951—Loews Inc. announced the results of a long-rumored feud in its Hollywood subsidiary, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): production chief Dore Schary would replace Louis B. Mayer (pictured) as head of the largest of Hollywood’s seven major studios.

The press release mentioned that Mayer was becoming an independent producer, but it was inconceivable to longtime employees—including many who came out the following day to bid him goodbye—that the mogul would voluntarily end his 27-year reign, including a stretch when he was the highest-paid man in America.

Those suspicions proved correct: Mayer had traveled from his Hollywood offices to the studio’s New York-based financial directorate to present an ultimatum to Loews President Nicholas Schenck: It’s either Schary or me. Instead, Schenck called his bluff and forced his resignation.

Forget about Schary: Mayer had also talked down his boss so much that it would have been a miracle for word of the backbiting not to reach Schenk eventually.

They spoke constantly—"two or three times a day in an age when coast-to-coast telephone calls were not so easily made as they are today,” according to David McClintick’s account of a later Tinseltown-New York power struggle, Indecent Exposure—but were seldom on each other’s wavelengths.  Mayer referred to him variously as “The General," "Nick Skunk," “the smiler and the killer," and “the big cheese.”

Ironically, Mayer had brought back to MGM the number-two he came to loathe. A former screenwriter, Schary was chafing as production chief at RKO after its acquisition by the increasingly eccentric Howard Hughes when he was invited back to the lot he had once known as his professional home.

Schary’s key demand for his return—that he bring along his pet project, Battleground—sparked conflict between himself and his new boss.

One of the most grittily realistic WWII dramas released in the early postwar period, it was anathema to Mayer, a mogul not just of old-fashioned tastes but even Victorian ones. If his movie factory could have churned out only musicals and Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series, he probably wouldn’t have minded very much. 

In contrast to Mayer’s conservative Republican sympathies, Schary—two decades younger—was an industrial-strength New Deal Democrat who wanted more socially conscious fare like Battleground that sent a message.

Battleground’s triumph with critics and, more important, the public (it was one of the top box-office hits of 1949) boosted Schary’s cachet with Schenck while undermining Mayer’s.

With television emerging as a rival medium, lost court cases weakening studio control over stars and movie houses, and international Communism threatening audience optimism across the country, Mayer no longer seemed in touch with public tastes. The question was, would Schary?

Mayer might have been wrong about the commercial prospects for Battleground, but turned out to be right about another war film on the bubble in his final days at MGM: John Huston’s adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Even with an authentic war hero, Audie Murphy, as the lead, audiences stayed away, proving Mayer’s contention that they would find it too depressing.

In the long run, Schenck might have been correct that Mayer was too old and set in his ways to continue running MGM, but it did not mean that Schary was the right leader to steer the studio through its choppy new waters. 

A highly capable scriptwriter and playwright (as he would show in a few years with his biopic about polio-stricken Franklin Roosevelt, Sunrise at Campobello), he proved less adept at managing talent or sensing what audiences wanted. Any positive impression generated by his geniality faded once his corporate mismanagement became apparent.

In contrast, even before he participated in the 1924 merger that established MGM, Mayer had been involved with the movie industry in multiple capacities, so he knew the business thoroughly.

While Schary soon frustrated the studio’s musical hands with his complete lack of interest in the genre, Mayer valued their contributions.

And, while Schary would in a few short years drive away stars like Clark Gable from their longtime home, Mayer, for all his paternalism, sincerely wanted to prove there was no hype in MGM’s longtime slogan, “More stars than there are in the heavens.”

There was no ultimate victor in the MGM showdown. In late 1955, Schenck would be kicked upstairs when Arthur Loew Sr. became president of his family company. Among Lowe Sr.’s most notable moves in his single year at MGM was firing Schary, who spent his remaining quarter-century of life doing what he probably was most cut out for to begin with: writing.

As for Mayer, he was able neither to make a go at independent producing nor in regaining control of MGM when the studio’s declining finances wore down investors’ patience. 

When he died in 1957, though some deplored his penny-pinching tendencies, others would have agreed with one of his stars, Katharine Hepburn, when she wrote in her autobiography, “L.B. Mayer was a shrewd man with enormous understanding of an artist. He was not stupid, not crude. He was a very sensible fellow, and extremely honest.”

This Day in Film History (Death of Stanley Kramer, Postwar Liberal Producer-Director)

Feb. 19, 2001— Stanley Kramer, a director and producer who stirred audiences’ consciences with provocative sociopolitical content, died at age 87 at the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.

It had been more than two decades since Kramer had retired from the movie business, and more than three since his films had made money or even won critical acclaim. In the quarter century since his death, both conservatives and liberals, in agreement on little else, believe that he was as stodgy in technique as square in outlook.

But Kramer had a two-decade run in which he attracted major stars and made profitable movies with content that risk-averse, politically conservative studio executives regarded as radioactive. 

He might not have been the flashiest, most innovative director, but he was important for making Cold War America look in the mirror he held up to it on injustice at home.

Coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen in New York during the Great Depression, hearing his mother extol her clerical job at Paramount Studios in Gotham, Kramer eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he got ground-up training in the film industry as a carpenter, screenwriter, editor, and producer before his rise was interrupted by a stint in the Army Signal Corps during World War II.

The fracturing of the studio system in the late 1940s opened the way for someone like Kramer who had, in effect, adopted guerrilla tactics in producing his early independent pictures, on the cheap and on the fly. Because of its sensitive subject, Kramer shot Home of the Brave (1949), generally considered the first movie on racism to be distributed by a Hollywood studio, in seventeen days in total secrecy under a different title.

A five-year contract he signed as an independent producer for Columbia Pictures in 1951 guaranteed a steadier financial base and higher budgets, but at the price of being second-guessed by studio head Harry Cohn, whom Kramer later described as “vulgar, domineering, semi-literate, ruthless, boorish and malevolent.”

High Noon, a taut western with a not-so-subtle message about the dangers of McCarthyism, represented perhaps his greatest triumph in this period while also damaging a friendship and giving him a reputation for having the courage of someone else’s convictions.

After his producing partner, screenwriter Carl Foreman, ran afoul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities for refusing to “name names” of Communists he had known earlier in the industry, Kramer bought his share of the partnership, and would have totally erased his participation in the movie were it not for protests by director Fred Zinnemann and star Gary Cooper.

A move into the director’s chair, Kramer felt, was a natural progression for him, considering how he had become so involved with all aspects of his films to date. 

But it took a couple of years before he hit his stride with The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped convicts forced to overcome their differences over race—a dramatic encapsulation of the conflict starting to rage in earnest in America during that time.

Over the next nine years, Kramer would delve into nuclear annihilation (On the Beach, 1959), evolution and church-state relations (Inherit the Wind, 1960), antisemitism (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961, and Ship of Fools, 1965), greed (his atypical 1963 breakneck farce, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World), and, most controversially, interracial marriage (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967, in the image accompanying this post).

What The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael lambasted as Kramer’s “irritatingly self-righteous” themes may have limited the director’s critical acceptance. But with his movies continuing to mint box-office gold, Hollywood congratulated him—and itself, for appreciating him—with the Irving Thalberg Award for overall excellence at the 1961 Oscars.

But after Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer never had another success. A self-described New Deal Democrat, he fell out of step with youth that gravitated towards more radical “New Left” politics, telling film historian Donald Spoto that he had been “somewhat viciously attacked along the way for being part of a ‘do-good' era.”

I don’t think that audiences simply tired of Kramer’s politics or of his largely stationary camera. Many were driven to distraction by his earnestness, an outlook that naysayers found out of place in an age gone so stark, raving mad that it required movies with the kind of subversive style and substance of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde.

I question whether any Kramer-directed movie has served as fodder for film-school sessions on technique, but, by directing 14 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances, he displayed a deft touch with often skittish professionals, and his influence runs stronger than many cynics care to admit:

*Aaron Sorkin’s penchant for courtroom drama (the scripts for A Few Good Men and The Trial of the Chicago Seven) and preachy politics (The West Wing) owes much to him.

*Quentin Tarantino has compared him to Oliver Stone, except that the controversial J.F.K. auteur was not a “clumsy filmmaker” like Kramer.

*And, with Judgment at Nuremberg, Kramer paved the way for Steven Spielberg’s searing Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List.

Today, the Producers Guild of America presents the Stanley Kramer Award to honor films that highlight significant social issues, including, for example, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Normal Heart, and Get Out.