The 40th anniversary of Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" was actually Dec 11. But no matter. The producer-director was always a pragmatist who knew how to get things done in an often inhospitable climate. And so is his widow, Karen Sharpe Kramer. It was her decision, after all, to push back the release of the "Stanley Kramer Film Collection" DVD box set to February 2008.
As she put it to Sony, "This is not a Christmas set. I prefer to wait to Black History Month."
The reason? In addition to "The Wild One," "Ship of Fools," "The Member of the Wedding" and "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T," the Sony set includes "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
Nominated for 10 Oscars, the 1967 film won two: for Katharine Hepburn and screenwriter William Rose.
Today, the film is best known for its groundbreaking look at a romance between a black man and a white woman. It was the first major Hollywood production to tackle the subject, even if it was cautious in its approach: When Sidney Poitier embraces Katharine Houghton in a taxi, we see their kiss in a rear-view mirror. The film was famously known, as one critic-wag put it, as "the best film of 1957."
Columbia Pictures, however, found Kramer's movie plenty controversial, even for 1967. "They released it in only one theater," Sharpe Kramer recalls. "They were scared."
In fact, the studio never wanted to make the picture, and Kramer had to fudge its contents. His pitch to Col execs: "It's a love story with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier. It's great."
Production had already started when Columbia, getting wind of the real story, pulled the plug. "They said they couldn't insure Tracy," Sharpe Kramer says. "They used that as their excuse."
Hepburn and Kramer put up their own salaries to get the film back on track.
Contact Robert Hofler at
bob.hofler@variety.com