In the Summer of 1979, a Chicago native and college freshman named Shamey Cramer took a seasonal housekeeping job at an Inn on Mackinac Island. It just so happened that on the other side of the island, Universal was shooting Somewhere in Time. This would be the trailhead of Shamey Cramer’s professional journey in filmmaking. He was assigned to maintain the three stars’ dressing rooms, which lead to being cast as an extra. After proving his salt on set, he was offered a job with Lorimar Television in Los Angeles, who produced the show Dallas. Unfortunately, the job Shamey came to LA to pursue dissolved the week he arrived, due to simultaneous writer, director, and actor strikes, which lasted about a year. But he stuck it out, and remained in Los Angeles until 1985.
One day in May of 1982, he walked into a bar called The Mother Lode on Santa Monica Blvd., and saw a poster for the first Quadrennial Gay Games. This was a moment of kismet. As a child, Shamey was fascinated by the Olympics, and dreamed of producing the opening and closing ceremonies. He also comes from a family of athletes; his father played against the Harlem Globetrotters, his uncle played for the Cleveland Indians, his brother was drafted by the New York Knicks, and Shamey has personally peddled over 100k miles on a bicycle. |
With all of the ground Shamey was breaking as an organizer, athlete and ceremonies producer, he hit a glass ceiling, and realized what he needed to do to grow professionally. He enrolled at LA Valley College and, in 1985, at the age of 25, Shamey was diagnosed HIV positive. Feeling defeated, it no longer made sense to spend the next two years going to college, when he was only given 6 months to 3 years to live. In 1985, there were 15,000 recorded cases of HIV in America, and 12,500 had already died. So, Shamey returned home to Chicago, but didn’t tell his family about his test results. In fact, he didn’t tell anyone for 13 years. After 3 years back home, his health did not decline. And so, he got busy living, continued his journey towards becoming a filmmaker, and moved to New York.
There, he wrote and bartended at Broadway theaters, which exposed him to great writing, night after night. A couple years later, Shamey took a job at a ski resort in Colorado and suffered a major accident, tearing all the major muscles and breaking the bones in his right leg, landing him back home in Chicago to heal once more for two years. In 1992, when Cramer made it back to Los Angeles, his writing skills were put to use working in public relations for such clients as Gene Kelly, Paul Newman, Joan Collins and the Jenner-Kardashian clan. |
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