William Kronick is an American film and television writer, director and producer. He worked in the film industry from 1960 to 2000, when he quit to devote his time to writing novels.

Biography

Born to European emigrants, William Kronick
grew up in Amsterdam, New York. He attended Columbia College where he was active in the Columbia Players’ stage productions. He also helped form The Gilbert and Sullivan Society at Barnard College.

After graduation William Kronick was drafted into the U.S. Navy where he became a Photographer’s Mate. During a North Atlantic exercise in Stockholm, Sweden Kronick met Alf Sjoberg who arranged for Kronick, once out of the Navy, to apprentice with Ingmar Bergman on his next film The Magician.

Upon returning to New York Kronick found a job as Production Assistant with Louis de Rochemont Associates. So began his four-decade career as a writer, director and producer.

Kronick's first film was a twenty-seven minute comedy-satire called A Bowl of Cherries. The film, which played in nearly a thousand art theaters in the U.S. and Europe, was seen in L.A. by a producer of TV documentaries, David L. Wolper. He offered Kronick the directing/writing position on a new reality series, Story of….

Over a period of decades, Kronick would write and direct some of Wolper’s highest-rated Network Specials, ranging from Alaska! (National Geographic) to Plimpton! to The Five-Hundred Pound Jerk (A Movie-of-the Week, Director only) to Mysteries of the Great Pyramid.

His first feature, independently financed, was A Likely Story (a.k.a. The Dublin Murders) filmed entirely on location in Dublin. It featured Harvey Lembeck, Al Lettieri and Sinéad Cusack. Kronick also did long-term stints as Second Unit Director on features such as King Kong (1976) and Flash Gordon (1980), on which he was responsible for many action and special effects sequences.

Another major film project was the feature-length documentary To The Ends Of The Earth, which recorded the unique three-year expedition of three Englishmen who set out to circumnavigate the globe, crossing both the South and North Poles without leaving the surface of the earth. Known as the Transglobe Expedition, Prince Charles was its patron with Richard Burton narrating and hosting the film. Kronick received a Special Certificate of Merit from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for this film.

He continued to produce, write and direct Network and Cable reality specials until 2000, when he devoted himself to writing novels. To date he has completed five books. The tales are contemporary morality stories, dealing mainly with film and theater.

He has been married and divorced twice and has a son, Max, by his second wife. Kronick resides in Los Angeles.

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