Man Out of Time

Avery Corman wasn’t an immediate success as a novelist. Oh, God!, his first novel, was published in 1971 and generated very little cultural buzz until, six years later, Carl Reiner’s film version turned the title into a household name. The film, which starred George Burns and John Denver, was released during one of Hollywood’s most fecund periods, a year that also saw the release of the original Star Wars, Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Goodbye Girl, and The Spy Who Loved Me, and yet it still managed to be one of the ten highest grossing films of 1977. It also spawned two sequels. What’s more, while Oh, God! was still in theaters, Corman brought out an even more successful book, Kramer Versus Kramer. Two years later, the film version of that book (slightly retitled: Kramer vs. Kramer) became the highest grossing movie of the year. It was also a critical success, and it earned Oscars for its stars, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep (her first, and she famously lost the statuette in a bathroom), its director (Robert Benton), its screenwriter (Benton, again) as well as a Best Picture Oscar for its producer (Stanley R. Jaffe).