Stanley R. Jaffe, the producer and studio executive who won an Oscar in 1980 for Kramer vs. Kramer and shepherded other acclaimed films like Fatal Attraction, Goodbye, Columbus and The Bad News Bears, died Monday. He was 84.
Jaffe died peacefully at his home in Rancho Mirage, his daughter Betsy Jaffe announced.
A son of Leo Jaffe, an executive who spent more than a half-century at Columbia Pictures, Jaffe also received an Academy Award nomination for Fatal Attraction (1987), which he produced alongside Sherry Lansing during their fruitful eight-year partnership at Jaffe-Lansing Productions.
At age 29, Jaffe was named executive vp and COO of Paramount Pictures in October 1969, becoming the youngest head of a major studio in Hollywood history. Before he departed as president in August 1971 to return to independent producing, he greenlighted such films as Love Story (1970) and The Godfather (1972), projects also championed by chief of production Robert Evans.
Jaffe returned to the studio’s executive ranks two decades later when Martin Davis named him president and COO of Paramount Communications, and he took over for former NBC wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff as Paramount Pictures chairman in 1992. However, he was axed when Viacom and Sumner Redstone won a bidding war to acquire the company in 1994 for about $10 billion.
As a producer, Jaffe was extremely hands-on. He said the movies to which he was drawn “deal with the family and what it’s like to be a member of that family, whether it’s together or apart, given the pressures that are put on it by the outside world,” he told The New York Times shortly after making his directorial debut on Without a Trace (1983).
Jaffe’s road to the podium at the Academy Awards began when Richard Fischoff, a young film executive he had hired just that week, got a hold of the manuscript for Avery Corman’s Kramer vs. Kramer, before the 1977 novel would reach bookstores.
The producer hired Robert Benton to write and direct the film and took a chance in casting a relatively untested Meryl Streep, and the drama — about a family torn apart by divorce — went on to win best picture and four other Academy Awards.
“Oh boy. I grew up in a home that’s been associated with this business for 51 years. This [Oscar] has always been very important to all of us as a representation of excellence,” Jaffe said in his acceptance speech, calling Kramer vs. Kramer “a film that’s made with love, and it’s made about love.”
Stanley Richard Jaffe was born in the Bronx on July 31, 1940, and raised in New Rochelle, New York. His dad started in the mailroom at Columbia, became chairman of the board in 1973 and received the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1979.
”My only real contact with what my father did was that he could get 16-millimeter prints, so every weekend we would show two or three movies at home,” he said. “But our house wasn’t frequented by stars. My father’s personal life was his personal life, and it was separate from his professional life.”
Early on, Jaffe recognized Sam Spiegel, who was behind 1954’s On the Waterfront at Columbia, as the kind of producer he wanted to emulate. “Five of his films were up for best picture Oscars, and they were directed by four different men,” Jaffe said in Bernard F. Dick’s 2001 book, Engulfed: The Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood. “So I grasped the importance of producing early on.”
Jaffe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with an economics degree in 1962, then was hired at Seven Arts as an assistant to Eliot Hyman, who had founded the film company with Ray Stark. In 1968, a year after Seven Arts merged with Warner Bros., he left for CBS.
His timing could not have been better when he optioned Goodbye, Columbus, a 1959 novella written by Philip Roth, who was soon to become one of the hottest authors in America with the release of Portnoy’s Complaint. “If I had tried to option the book three weeks after I did, I would never have been able to afford it,” he said.
Jaffe borrowed money to make the film, convinced Oscar nominee Arnold Schulman to accept just $25,000 to write the screenplay and paired He & She sitcom actor Richard Benjamin with Ali MacGraw, a photographer’s assistant new to acting.
Goodbye, Columbus, directed by Larry Peerce and released in May 1969, was one of Paramount’s biggest hits of the year and led Gulf & Western chief Charles Bluhdorn to offer Jaffe the top job at Paramount.
In a 1982 interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Jaffe said he was too inexperienced to know he should have turned Bluhdorn down. ”I had a big enough ego to move into a job like that at 29 and say, ‘Sure, give me enough money to work with and I’ll fix things for you,’” he said. “I wasn’t old enough to know that I wasn’t supposed to say yes.”
After he left Paramount the first time, he launched his own Columbia Pictures-associated company, Jaffilms, and produced Bad Company (1972), written and directed by Benton. He then paid Oscar winner Tatum O’Neal — fresh off her Oscar victory in Paper Moon — $350,000 to star as a hotshot Little League pitcher inThe Bad News Bears (1976).
In 1977, he became executive vice president of worldwide production at Columbia before reaching the pinnacle of his profession with Kramer vs. Kramer.
Jaffe produced Taps (1981), then tried his hand at directing with Without a Trace, about the search for a 6-year-old boy who disappears on his way to school.
With a five-year exclusive production contract at Paramount, he joined forces with former Fox studio head Lansing in 1984. She operated out of Paramount in Hollywood while he maintained an office in New York.
In addition to the box office sensation Fatal Attraction, starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close, other films to come out of their company included Michael Apted’s Firstborn (1984); Racing With the Moon (1984), directed by Benjamin; the Jodie Foster-starring The Accused (1988); Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989); and School Ties (1992), which Jaffe was going to direct before he returned to Paramount.
Lansing often called Jaffe her “idol” and said he “begged” her to take the job as chairman of Paramount in 1992, which she did.
At Paramount Communications, he oversaw Paramount Pictures, Simon & Schuster, Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers and Paramount Parks. One of the highlights of his life came in 1994 when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup — their first in 54 years.
More recently, he produced Madeline (1998), I Dreamed of Africa (2000) and a remake of The Four Feathers (2002).
Jaffe served on the boards of several organizations, including The Wharton School, The Taft School, Rippowam Cisqua School, The Children’s Blood Foundation and The Courtney Steel Foundation.
Survivors include his wife of 38 years, Melinda; children Bobby (and wife Tracy), Betsy, Alex and Katie (Dan); grandchildren Jordan, Leo, Avery, Sabrina and Zoe; sister Marcia (Gene); and brother Ira (Sonda), a former president of Paramount music arm Famous Music. Another sister, publicist Andrea Jaffe, died in 2016 at age 66.
Donations may be made in his name to support the restoration and preservation of cinematic arts at the Margaret Herrick Library. A memorial service is being planned.
“He will be remembered as a visionary, a philanthropist and a loving husband, father, grandfather and friend,” his family noted. “His legacy of integrity, generosity and creativity will continue to inspire for years to come. Let’s not forget a perfect day for Stanley was spent on the golf course with his many friends.”
Source: Hollywoodreporter
