Friday, March 10, 2017

HAVE GUN-WILL TRAVEL Acknowledged by Oscar

Two weeks ago the Motion Picture Academy presented the 89th annual Academy Awards and for a few minutes, on national television, they honored four individuals by bestowing them with Honorary Awards for their lifetime achievements. The awards were given out during an awards dinner on November 12 but the acknowledgment on national television during the Oscars was traditional. Present in the audience to be acknowledged were the award winners: actor Jackie Chan, film editor Anne V. Coates, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman and casting director Lynn Stalmaster. The latter of whom made history.


Lynn Stalmaster, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, went to Hollywood in 1950 to seek out a career as an actor. He played all-too-brief roles in two movies, The Steel Helmet and Flying Leathernecks, while attending UCLA, then pursued a career as a production assistant at Gross-Krasne. When the studio system restructured as a result of the growing television industry, Stalmaster, along with his wife Marion Dougherty, opened their own casting office.

Among his first projects was casting supporting roles and guest spots for television’s Gunsmoke, The Lone Wolf and Official Detective. Over the next five decades Lynn Stalmaster handled casting for more than 200 feature films and dozens of weekly television programs. In case you are wondering what a casting director does in the entertainment industry… Lynn Stalmaster was basically the man that producers turned to and said, “find me a cast for my movie” or “find me four extras who play henchmen in next week’s television episode.”

Stalmaster is credited for the careers of Richard Dreyfus, John Travolta, Christopher Reeve, Jill Clayburgh, Jeff Bridges, Scott Wilson and Jon Voight, among others. He was responsible for casting such films as In the Heat of the Night, Tootsie, The Graduate, Inherit the Wind, Pork Chop Hill, Deliverance, The Right Stuff and many others.


Casting directors, believe it or not, is the only position in Hollywood that appears during the opening credits of motion-pictures and has yet to receive acknowledgement by the Academy with an Oscar category of its own. So for Lynn Stalmaster this award meant something more.

As a fan of television’s Have Gun- Will Travel I found it amusing that, among Stalmaster’s achievements featured in a brief montage on the screen during the Oscar ceremony, was the television Western by name. Amusing when you consider the fact that the Motion Picture Academy honors motion-pictures, not television.


So for fans of a television Western that premiered almost sixty years ago and never conceived of the notion that it would – even for a brief glimpse – be acknowledged during the annual Oscar awards… well, it happened!