Producer of Controversy

Jennifer Frost is associate professor of history at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She is the author of An Interracial Movement of the Poor: Community Organizing and the New Left in the 1960s and Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism.

In an era when Hollywood’s biggest female star was Doris Day, Stanley Kramer gallantly offered a counter-example of a politically conscious, forthrightly liberal cinema. The great virtue of Producer of Controversy is to reposition Kramer at the center of American film-making in the two postwar decades that required attention to the urgent challenges of racial injustice, intellectual conformity and the threat of nuclear war. Jennifer Frost’s writing is lively, judicious and makes for truly compelling reading."" - Stephen J. Whitfield, author of The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd edition ""In this engaging and informative book, Jennifer Frost illuminates the role of Stanley Kramer, one of Hollywood’s most influential filmmakers. Kramer produced and directed bold movies shortly after the post-World War II Red Scare, when critics of Hollywood blacklisted many artists. Kramer’s provocative films included Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Ship of Fools, On the Beach, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Inherit the Wind. Jennifer Frost shows how this Hollywood liberal aroused the thinking of movie audiences through notable films that addressed controversial subjects of the times."" - Robert Brent Toplin, author of Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood and History By Hollywood ""Producer of Controversy is a very apt description of Stanley Kramer, whose liberal films during the Cold War provoked strong reactions from viewers of all political persuasions. Jennifer Frost’s admirable study of the filmmaker and his accomplishments provides a firm historical context by which to reassess Kramer’s cultural and political significance."" - James Deutsch, adjunct professor of American Studies, George Washington University