Steve Krantz R.I.P.

[Reza]

January 12, 2007

Steve Krantz, 83, Maker of TV Mini-Series, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Steve Krantz, a producer and writer who pushed his wife, Judith, into starting her first novel at 48, then turned her signature ''sex and shopping'' best sellers into television mini-series, died on Jan. 4 in Los Angeles. He was 83.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said John Tellem, a family spokesman.

Mr. Krantz wrote comedy for Milton Berle; worked on the Tonight Show with Steve Allen; adapted bingo for television; and produced Fritz the Cat, the first X-rated full-length animated film. His other movies included Cooley High which inspired the ABC sitcom What's Happening?

He wrote two steamy novels of his own, one of which, Laurel Canyon (1979), was a drama of depravity in Hollywood's high circles that made best-seller lists.

But his best-known achievement grew out of the Fourth of July weekend of 1953, when Mr. Krantz met Judith Tarcher at a party organized by Barbara Walters, a high-school friend of Ms. Tarcher.

Neither then suspected that the future Ms. Krantz would go on to write novels that would sell more than 80 million copies in more than 50 languages. Nor that the books would be copyrighted not in her name, as is customary, but by Steve Krantz Productions. Nor that Mr. Krantz would make opulent mini-series based on them.

In 1986 The New York Times called the couple ''a cottage industry''. But their initial meeting flickered with the all-too-human emotions of a Judith Krantz novel.

''We flirted outrageously'', he said in an interview with The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in 2000.

''I fell in love with him the moment I saw him'', Ms. Krantz said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1990.

She wore a headdress of white lilacs and hyacinths when she married Mr. Krantz on Feb. 19, 1954. They had two sons, Tony and Nicholas, both of whom now live in Los Angeles. Mr. Krantz is survived by them, Ms. Krantz, two grandchildren and his sister, Sunny Ornish of Manhattan.

Mr. Krantz was long the family's breadwinner. Ms. Krantz chipped in with freelance articles, the best known being ''The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm'' for Cosmopolitan.

His many entertainment projects included shepherding creative development for Columbia Pictures Television, where he was midwife to Haze and Dennis the Menace. Later, through his own company, he bought rights to the Marvel Super Heroes and made cartoons of them.

Ms. Krantz began writing fiction only after Mr. Krantz kept insisting that she was a natural storyteller. She told The Los Angeles Times that she wrote her first novel, Scruples, the lusty tale of a Beverly Hills boutique, to prove to Mr. Krantz that she could not write fiction. She quickly found the opposite: ''Halfway through the first chapter, I felt I was flying without wings'', she said.

Stephen Falk Krantz was born in Brooklyn on May 20, 1923, attended Manual Training High School there and graduated from Columbia University. He served in the Army Air Forces in the Pacific during World War II as a second lieutenant.

He was a producer and writer for WNEW radio in New York before moving to NBC as program director. A production of his own company was the first televised bingo game in the 1950s, with Monty Hall as host.

His Fritz the Cat (1972), about R. Crumb's sex-obsessed cartoon cat, was the first independent animated film to earn gross revenues of more than $100 million.

After Fritz, directed by Ralph Bakshi, came Heavy Traffic and The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat, which was the United States entry at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974.

His stalwart promotion of his wife emerged in his dislike of the word ''trashy'' to describe her work. Mr. Krantz told The New York Times that its use showed ''an incredible poverty of language''. As alternatives, he suggested ''delectable'' and ''smoldering''.

Strongly, but less frequently, he spoke up for himself.

''Early on'', he told The Times in 1986, ''I found it very important to make the point that I had been a millionaire for many years before Scruples''.