Krantz started his career in the American entertainment industry as an agent, spending 15 years at Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
Under his leadership at CAA, there were 32 shows on the primetime lineup that the agency represented when Krantz left to start the next part of his career.
He has since directed three films, Sublime, Otis, and The Big Bang, and is currently the principal and owner of the independent production company Flame Ventures.
[4][5] As Krantz rose from a TV literary agent to a television packaging agent at CAA, one of his early movie of the week packages won the Emmy for best television movie: Inherit the Wind, starring Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards directed by David Green.
Afterwards, Krantz expanded into series, largely working with the agency's motion picture clients who at the time viewed the television business with skepticism.
During an internal development meeting at CAA in 1993, Krantz remembered a film script that Michael Crichton had written years earlier based on his experience at Harvard medical school.
He executive produced many television shows, including Felicity with J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, Sports Night with Aaron Sorkin, Wonderland with Peter Berg, The PJs with Eddie Murphy, Mulholland Drive.
[2][5][8] After six years at Imagine, Krantz chose to leave and pursue his producing and directing dream at his own company, Flame Ventures.
"[3] So Krantz became part of a trio of directors (alongside Daniel Myrick, director of The Blair Witch Project and John Shiban, writer and executive producer for Supernatural and The X-Files)[4] who were tapped to create "Raw Feed," a series of films in the sci fi, horror, and thriller genres.
[16] In a 2008 interview at SXSW where it opened the festival in its midnight slot, Krantz described Otis as a purposeful satire on the over-abundance of torture and gore porn movies, but also a "meditation on the Iraq war.
Krantz and Jendresen were influenced by the Coen brothers and David Lynch[3] with the concept of putting a mystery story about particle physics into the middle of a neo-noir detective thriller about the search for a missing girl.
[18] Agent Ed Limato of the William Morris Agency read the script, fell in love with it and gave it to Antonio Banderas, who quickly agreed to star in the film.
Along with Banderas, the cast included Thomas Kretschmann, William Fichtner, Delroy Lindo, Autumn Reeser, Sienna Guillory, James Van Der Beek, Sam Elliott, Jimmi Simpson and Snoop Dogg.
[24] Among many television projects in development across broadcast, cable and streaming, Krantz is writing a movie on the famous Watergate burglars called the Plumbers, producing a remake of Cooley High (a film his father produced)[25] and a multi-part scripted virtual reality science fiction series titled Six, about a doomed mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, 75 years in the future.
[27] Krantz describes his work as a concert promoter at Berkeley as the major early influence on his career, because it was all about "idealism, spirituality and artistic integrity."
[28] When interviewed about his highly unusual transition from agent to executive producer to director and writer, Krantz shared that he has wanted to direct since he was in third grade at Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, but he knew that it would be difficult to enter that realm.
[29] He defies a widely held conception in Hollywood that agents and even producers are not creatively inclined as directors and writers.
When Krantz was worried about leaving his established, comfortable career at CAA to produce television, it was his wife who encouraged him to pick up the phone and call Brian Grazer to inquire about a partnership, after the couple saw the movie "Ransom" in San Francisco which Grazer produced and Ron Howard directed.
[32] In May 2014, Krantz hosted a Foreign Policy Roundtable (on which he serves as a board member) at his home in Beverly Hills where attendees listened in on a conversation between Ari Shavit, noted Israeli journalist and author of My Promised Land, and Jessica Yellin, former CNN White House correspondent.