He proudly calls himself "the most frequently picketed producer in movie history" - a distinction he richly earned by taking on some of the most controversial subjects of our time. In the process, he directed or produced such classics of the American cinema as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, High Noon, On the Beach, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Defiant Ones, Champion, Inherit the Wind, Ship of Fools, Death of a Salesman, and The Caine Mutiny.

He is Stanley Kramer, and now for the first time he tells his story - from a boyhood some eighty years ago in the Hell's Kitchen section of Manhattan to the present.

The actors and actresses he hired during his long career reads like a Who's Who of the golden age of American film: Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly, Lee Marvin, Kirk Douglas, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant, Sidney Poitier, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Vivien Leigh.

Unafraid and fiercely independent, Kramer is regarded by many of today's leading filmmakers as an important forerunner for his willingness to tell any story, treat any subject, and overturn any sacred cow in pursuit of a film of substance.