Pulitzer-winning journalist Frankel (
High Noon) delivers a vivid chronicle about the classic 1969 movie
Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Frankel covers the film’s main contributors: James Leo Hurlihy, whose 1965 novel was the basis for the movie; director John Schlesinger, who took a chance on a novel “so bleak, troubling and sexually raw no ordinary film studio would go near it”; formerly blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt; actors Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman (whom Frankel interviewed); and casting director Marion Dougherty, who convinced Schlesinger to take a chance on then-unknown Voight. Frankel offers behind-the-scenes anecdotes, notably about the challenges of filming in New York City during a garbage strike, and in Texas, where the film crew needed protection from a den of rattlesnakes. Frankel also renders the social upheaval of the era the Stonewall riots, antiwar protests, racial unrest and the window between the
The making of a classic American film in âShooting Midnight Cowboyâ
By Abby McGanney Nolan Globe Correspondent,Updated March 11, 2021, 4:31 p.m.
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A scene from Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman (left) and Jon Voight.COURTESY OF UNITED ARTISTS
On a brutally hot Texas day in the summer of 1968, near the end of filming âMidnight Cowboy,â the British director John Schlesinger had a sort of fit. Visibly shaking, stirred by grievous doubts, he asked his lead actor Jon Voight, âDo you really think anyoneâs going to pay money to see a movie about a dumb Texan who takes a bus to New York to seek his fortune screwing rich women?â
Lynn Stalmaster, ‘master caster’ who gave actors including John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman their breakthrough roles – obituary
He got Ned Beatty his film debut in Deliverance and proposed Christopher Reeve for Superman
15 February 2021 • 3:34pm
Stalmaster: ‘If you’ve got Lynn Stalmaster to cast your movie, you have a damn good chance of having a good movie,’ said the director John Frankenheimer
Credit: Tony Korody/Sygma via Getty
Lynn Stalmaster, who has died aged 93, largely devised the profession of casting director with which he was to become synonymous in Hollywood; he helped shape more than 400 films and television shows, from West Side Story to Roots to Superman, and among many others launched to stardom Dustin Hoffman, Christopher Reeve and John Travolta.
Lynn Stalmaster
He impacted hundreds of films and jump-started the careers of unknowns including Dustin Hoffman, Christopher Reeve, LaVar Burton and Ned Beatty.
Lynn Stalmaster, the canny casting director who pushed relative unknowns Dustin Hoffman for
The Graduate, Christopher Reeve for
Superman and John Travolta for
Welcome Back, Kotter, has died. He was 93.
Stalmaster, who at the Governors Awards in November 2016 became the first casting director in history to receive an Academy Award, died Friday morning at his home in Los Angeles, Laura Adler of the Casting Society of America told
The Hollywood Reporter. A pioneer of our craft, Lynn was a trailblazer with over half a century of world-class film and television casting credits, CSA co-presidents Russell Boast and Rich Mento said in a statement. He was a friend and mentor to many of us. … Thank you, Lynn, for showing us the way.