Hollywood & Kramer--A Union With a Certain Solidarity to It

Compared to the lure of Hollywood film-making, the powers of gravity and magnetism seem weak and erratic.

Some eight years ago Stanley Kramer decided that Hollywood no longer had anything to say to him or vice versa. He sold his house in Beverly Hills and translated himself, his wife Karen and their two teen-age daughters to Seattle. He wrote a weekly column for the Seattle Times, conducted a weekly television show and did some teaching.

He made one film in Seattle, in a converted hangar. “The Runner Stumbles” (1979), in the Kramer tradition, dealt with a sensitive social topic: a Catholic priest (played by Dick Van Dyke) falls in love. The film was not successful.

Now Kramer has reversed his field, pulled up stakes in Seattle and resettled in Los Angeles. It is partly, he admits, because both his daughters have their eye on show business--one sings, one acts--and wanted to be nearer the action. He has two children from an earlier marriage, and a son teaches history at UCLA.

Kramer, at the age of 74, is now back in business himself. He and the Oscar-winning writer Dan Taradash, with financing from a group of Polish-Americans, are preparing a script on Lech Walesa, leader of the now-banned Solidarity movement.

Kramer and Taradash, who worked together years ago preparing MacKinlay Kantor’s “Andersonville,” which in the end was never filmed, spent 10 days with Walesa in Gdansk earlier this year, videotaping six hours of conversation with him.

“I told him, ‘I may want to ask you some embarrassing personal questions; is that OK?’ He said, ‘Ask anything, the more embarrassing the better.’ ”

Kramer insists that the film will not be political. “It’s not going to be anti-anything,” he says. “It’s proof of the credo that one man can make a difference. It’s also a great love story.”

Walesa and his wife, whom Kramer describes as a doll-like beauty, have eight children born between 1970 and 1983. One of the sons went to Oslo with Walesa’s wife to accept Walesa’s Nobel Peace Prize. Walesa stayed home, evidently partly from concern that he might not be allowed to re-enter the country.

“He still works a 6 a.m.-to-2 p.m. shift as a shipyard electrician. He goes home, has a nap, then spends the rest of the day in union meetings. Solidarity has been outlawed, but the authorities can’t really touch him. He’s very patriotic, very Polish. He’s also nonviolent, a negotiator. The authorities knew we were there talking to him and they knew who we were. As a matter of fact Lech knew some of my films, ‘On the Beach,’ ‘The Defiant Ones.’

“He thinks of himself as a man of destiny, no doubt about it. He has a natural arrogance and says his fate is in the hands of God, or Whomever. His wife kids him about being in love with the tinkling sound of his own voice. She’s a strong lady and doesn’t want to be just the wife of an electrician.”

The Walesa project (very tentatively titled “Polonaise”) had unusual auspices, with Washington columnist Jack Anderson as the link between the Polish-American backers and the executive producer, television producer Ralph Andrews (“Celebrity Sweepstakes”), who involved Kramer and Taradash.

Several studios are interested in the project, Kramer says, but there is evidently sufficient financing to make the film independently.

“I’ve only been happy once in a while in my checkered career,” Kramer said the other day at lunch in the noisy, crowded La Scala Presto restaurant, which has become the off-campus canteen for the Burbank Studios. “But this project makes me feel like a young film maker. We’re giving it its full chance.”

Before the “Polonaise” project took form, David Puttnam, in his brief stay at Columbia, had invited Kramer to undertake a film called “Chernobyl,” to be done with Soviet cooperation. Puttnam and Kramer went to Moscow for talks and Puttnam assigned a Russian writer to undertake a first draft. Before the script showed up at Burbank (it apparently never has), Puttnam was out at Columbia and the project, Kramer is sure, is stone dead.

Kramer, always a Hollywood loner, often riled the critics because of his films’ headlong assaults on social issues like racial prejudice (“The Defiant Ones”), dispossessed liberals (“RPM”) and even animal rights (“Bless the Beasts and Children”).

But his craftsmanship has always been impeccable--he began as an editor--and his work has continued to take the motion pictures seriously in an industry that, in Kramer’s early days particularly, seemed in a frenzied quest for frivolity. When his ability to evoke powerful performances has been linked with strong material, as in films as different as “Inherit the Wind” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” the results have been enduring.

When he decided to leave Hollywood, Kramer says, “I don’t know if I was half a step behind or half a step ahead, but I was out of step and I wanted out.”

Now there have been so many personnel changes that Hollywood seems--almost--like a different place. “I remember tsars,” says Kramer, who worked, often uncomfortably, with Harry Cohn. But much stays the same. “If a film has electricity, it carries you over whatever flaws there may be. But you can have a perfect film and if it’s full of cottage cheese, it’s a nothing.”

What never changes, obviously, is the appeal of generating the electricity.