Frank Price Araya Doheny/WireImage Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Frank Price, the writer-producer who emerged from the world of TV Westerns to preside over the television and movie divisions at Universal and serve two terms as the head of Columbia Pictures, died Monday. He was 95. Price died in his sleep of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son Roy Price, the former president of Amazon Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter. As a movie boss, Frank Price had a hand in such critical successes as the Oscar best picture winners Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Gandhi (1982) and Out of Africa (1985) and huge money-makers including Tootsie (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Boyz n the Hood (1991) and A League of Their Own (1992). Related Stories Movies Danish Filmmaker Per Holst, Who Produced Movies for Lars von Trier and Others, Dies at 86 TV Jerry Adler, Actor on 'The Sopranos,' 'The Good Wife' and 'Rescue Me,' Dies at 96 Earlier, Price had spent nearly two decades as a writer, producer and then head of Universal Television. His idea put The Virginian - one of TV's longest-running Westerns - in motion, and he executive produced Ironside and It Takes a Thief. He also greenlighted Kojak, The Six Million Dollar Man and Battlestar Galactica and helped develop provocative made-for-TV movies and miniseries like That Certain Summer and Rich Man, Poor Man, respectively. Price spent a formative TV season learning from Roy Huggins - the creator of such series as Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files - while working alongside him on The Virginian. Price then married Huggins' daughter, actress Katherine Crawford, in 1965. She also survives him. Price, in fact, was one of the few top Hollywood executives to come from a writing background. His philosophy was to pay top talent big bucks to ensure box-office success, a philosophy that confounded many of his peers. In the early 1980s, Price realized that making a three-hour period piece about Mahatma Gandhi would be a risky proposition. "Nobody under 40 would know who he was, which was true," he told Josephine Reed in a 2013 interview for the National Endowment for the Arts podcast Art Works. "And I was given the other line, which was, 'Nobody's going to care about a little brown man wandering around in a diaper.' But we did undertake it." Price held up the release of Gandhi to build interest in its subject - he noted that Columbia got "six major articles out of [The New York Times] over the next year on various aspects of India, Gandhi and so on." The film, produced and directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Ben Kingsley, went on to capture eight Oscars. Ghostbusters, meanwhile, cost $25 million to make and raked in $295.2 worldwide ($917.8 million today). "I'd had hits before, but [with] Ghostbusters, I was reminded of the movie Boom Town when they hit the gusher," Price told Vanity Fair in 2014. "Oil is just raining down: they're rolling in it. That's what it felt like with Ghostbusters." Not every decision worked out, of course; Price infamously put Steven Spielberg's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in turnaround at Columbia because he thought the $10 million budget was too pricy. Born on May 17, 1930, in Decatur, Illinois, Price spent some of his early years on the Warner Bros. lot, where his mother was a waitress in the commissary. When he was a teenager, he and his family moved to Flint, Michigan, and he was editor of the Central High School newspaper and president of the drama club. He also served as a copy boy at The Flint Journal. After a year in the U.S. Navy, Price attended Michigan State and then moved to New York - not back to Los Angeles - to continue his studies at Columbia University. "The whole experience of being around Warner Bros. drove me away from it, because it loomed too large. That was unreal," he said. "The people on the screen were, you know, 30 feet high or whatever. I understood actors on a stage; that made sense to me." Price searched for a newspaper job but couldn't land one, but he did get hired as a clerk in the story department at CBS Television - because he was an excellent typist - in 1951. "One of the key things that was done in that department was reading, looking for story material," he recalled. "I said, 'Well, I can do that.' So I moved from clerk/typist/receptionist to reader. And that was very good, because I started writing out of that." Price sold a story for an early live TV show, Casey, Crime Photographer, then wrote and produced for NBC's Matinee Theatre, a whirlwind 60-minute live drama that aired five days a week out of Burbank, starting in 1955. After working as a story editor and analyst for Columbia's TV subsidiary, Screen Gems, Price moved to MCA's Universal Tele