Douglas Cramer, controversial M:I figure, dies

Dougas S. Cramere title card on a third-season episode of Mission: Impossible.

Douglas S. Cramer, a successful TV executive and producer, has died at 89, according to The Wrap. His credits include the likes of the likes of The Love Boat, the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series and Vega$. But he was also a controversial figure with the original Mission: Impossible television series.

Background: Mission: Impossible originated with writer-producer Bruce Geller who had landed at Desilu. During M:I’s second season, Lucille Ball sold Desilu to the parent company of Paramount. Suddenly, Desilu became Paramount Television.

In M:I’s third season, Geller was now dealing with Douglas S. Cramer, who more cost-conscious that previous management.

Among many Mission: Impossible fans, Cramer is seen as a villain. It was under his tenure that Martin Landau and Barbara Bain departed the show. Landau had never signed a long-term series deal and negotiated his salary a season as a time.

It was during the Cramer regime at Paramount that Landau’s bargaining power ran out. Bain, his wife at the time, went with him out the door.

The 1991 book The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier by Patrick J. White included interviews with Cramer.

“Bruce had a wonderful concept of the show, put it together beautifully, but paid no attention to budget,” Cramer told the author. “Secondly, he traditionally wrote bigger shows than we could afford to do….Bruce was a madman about scripts and there would be layer after layer of writers working on them.”

There were other Mission: Impossible conflicts. Bruce Geller, as executive producer, clashed with writer-producers William Read Woodfield and Allan Balter during the third season. The Woodfield-Balter team, who had authored many of the best episodes, left.

Still, the big conflict was the one with Geller and Cramer. The latter described his perspective to author White.

“Bruce and his refusal to pay any attention to budget had permeated all the people that worked for him,” Cramer said. In the book, Cramer referred to Geller as a “mad dictator.”

For many Mission: Impossible fans, Cramer was in the wrong and Geller was proven correct in the end. M:I ran seven seasons, the longest run of the 1960s spy craze and spawned a successful series of Tom Cruise movies.

Regardless, Cramer’s story is a reminder that making a television series it never easy. It’s always a balance of art and commerce.

Peter Graves’ unanswered Call to Danger

Call to Danger was an idea that refused to go away. It never became a series but it affected one show that did.

The notion behind Call to Danger was that the U.S. government would maintain information on citizens with unusual abilities and talents. Such people would be enlisted to provide help for investigators on important cases. The Man From U.N.C.L.E. would end up using a variation of this idea with the “innocent” characters who would become involved (sometimes by design, sometimes by accident) in assignments Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin carried out.

CBS commissioned a half-hour pilot of Call to Danger in 1961. That version starred Larry Blyden (later an U.N.C.L.E. episode innocent), according to Patrick J. White’s 1991 book, The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier. While it didn’t sell, it remained on the minds of CBS executives.

In 1967, CBS tried again, this time commissioning an hour version starring Peter Graves. It sported a theme by Morton Stevens, who ran CBS’s West Coast music operation. Stevens had the choice of hiring composers or assigning jobs to himself. Once more, it didn’t sell although CBS managed to get the pilot on the air as part of something called Premier (which appears to have been a way to broadcast unsold pilots). Here’s how it started:

Meanwhile, Steven Hill had been fired after the first season of Mission: Impossible. No replacement had been lined up. According to White’s book, CBS liked Graves’ performance in Call to Danger. The network, according to White’s book, suggested to the brass at Desilu (the maker of Mission) that Graves would be just the man to take over as the mastermind of the Impossible Missions Force. That, of course, is exactly what happened, with Graves filling the new role of Jim Phelps.

CBS and Stevens also found other uses for the Call to Danger theme. For one thing, it was put on the 1969 Hawaii Five-O soundtrack. Also, a much-shortened version would be used as part of CBS specials:

After Mission: Impossible completed its run in 1973, a third Call to Danger pilot was made, once again starring Graves. The call went unanswered yet again. It started like this: