Up Till Now: The Autobiography

security had become extremely important to me. I could see it, it was within reach, it was right there, at the end of the next project.
    When I was offered a featured role as a young prosecutor in Stanley Kramer’s new movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, my agent told me that this was the one, this was the film that was finally going to make me a star. He may have even called me “kid,” as in, “This is the one, kid.” Truthfully that did seem possible; this was going to be a big-budget star-studded film about an unbelievably serious subject directed by Stanley Kramer. Abby Mann’s screenplay was based on the true story of the trial of four Nazi judges after World War II, but really the German people were on trial. I had worked with Abby Mann on several television shows and I suspect he supported me for the role. I do remember my agent telling me, “This is a great part. You have no idea who wanted it.”
    That was the other thing I was often told: you have no idea who wanted this role. I didn’t. But why wouldn’t they want this role, if it was going to make them a star?
    Looking back, I sometimes wonder how I spent so many years in Canada knowing so little about what was going on in the world. Until I was offered this role, for example, I knew very little about the full extent of the unspeakable horrors that had taken place in Nazi Germany. But then, almost no one did.
    I remember the day I became aware of it.
    There were films. When the U.S. army liberated the concentration camps they had filmed the survivors, as well as the results of Hitler’s final solution. Abby Mann and Stanley Kramer required the entire cast and crew to watch these films. Hundreds of people. They wanted us to understand what this film was about. They set up two screens on either side of a stage and turned on the projectors. These films had not yet been released to the public; very few people had seen them. We didn’t know what to expect. I vaguely remember a little stirring, some people whispering—and then the silence. Theabsolute silence. We watched scenes of bulldozers shoving piles of bodies into mass graves. We saw the survivors, their eyes bulging, their bones practically protruding from their bodies. We saw the crematoriums and the piles of shoes. People gasped in shock, others started crying. If I close my eyes I can rerun these films in my mind, and I remember exactly where I was sitting and what the room looked like. Certainly it was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen in my life, but that doesn’t even begin to describe the impact.
    When the lights finally went on the room stayed silent. It stayed silent as we all walked out. But from that night on we understood the importance of the film we were making. A lot of the cast and some of the crew were Jewish, so this picture had an even deeper impact on us. Every day I went to work feeling like I was doing something important. Stanley Kramer continued to emphasize that we were recording history, and the story we were telling should never be forgotten. And Abby Mann carries himself with a sense of importance, anything he does is important—he went to the bathroom, it was important. Although probably not historic.
    The movie starred Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, and Montgomery Clift—most of them working on it for one day. I’ve co-starred in many movies with actors I’ve never met. We had no scenes together, we probably were scheduled to work at different times, we may not have even been on the same location. That happens all the time. But I had never seen anything like when a few years earlier the biggest movie stars had begun making cameo appearances—basically one scene or even a one-shot walk-on—in big-budget movies. The studios hired a star for a small role, a part that could be shot in a day or two, paid that star substantially less than their usual salary, and still got the value of that star’s name in all the advertising. Judgment at Nuremberg was the perfect example of that. Most of the stars had only one or two scenes; usually they were testifying in the courtroom. My role consisted primarily of sitting at a long table watching this parade of fabulous stars whose luminosity was fading—but who were still stellar—put to use all of their experiences, all of their abilities, tocreate memorable performances. I had a few scenes with some of them. Early in the picture I showed Spencer Tracy to his