Throughout film history, few debates have caused more spilled ink than who did what on a given movie. Usually, it comes down to whether a director or a screenwriter is most responsible for a classic, a subject revived in the controversy surrounding Mank, David Fincher’s 2020 film about the writing of Citizen Kane.
But what if it turns out that the person who had the most to do with two dozen or three dozen of the best films of the last 50 years was neither a director nor a writer but a casting director? To be sure, Lynn Stalmaster, who died on Feb. 12 at the age of 93, did not develop story structure, rehearse actors, or choose camera angles. But in nurturing actors’ careers and pairing them with projects, he had an almost incalculable effect on the way we experience movies.
“‘Authentic’ is what we wanted,” Stalmaster told me in 2019 when I interviewed him about his collaboration with director Hal Ashby on films such as Coming Home (1978) and Being There (1979). “My searches were always to find the most unique and most truthful performance.”
Casting is one of the few filmmaking departments for which no Oscar is given, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, perhaps out of a justifiable sense of shame, awarded Stalmaster an honorary Oscar in 2016 — something of the equivalent of being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the “Contributor” category.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would be standing here,” Stalmaster said, with typical modesty, in accepting the award for a career whose highlights included Deliverance (1972), Tootsie (1982), and The Right Stuff (1983).
Despite his later reputation as a Hollywood insider, Stalmaster’s journey began in the American heartland: The son of Judge Irvin Stalmaster and his wife, Estelle, Lynn was born in Omaha, Nebraska. At the age of 12, in an attempt to find a climate more suitable for Lynn’s asthma, the Stalmasters picked up stakes and moved to California, first to Los Angeles, then to Beverly Hills. His respiratory condition may have brought him to the West, but show business kept him there. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles, Stalmaster made his first go at a life in show business as an actor. Cult film fans might be able to spot him in the role of a second lieutenant in Samuel Fuller’s Korean War drama The Steel Helmet (1951), but showier parts proved elusive.
Then Stalmaster fell in with the producers of a series called Big Town, on which he appeared as an actor and worked behind the scenes as an all-around gofer. “One day, they turned to me, and they said, ‘Lynn, how would you like to cast our shows?’” Stalmaster recalled in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “What it allowed me to do, and what became so gratifying, was that I was able to help other actors.”
Stalmaster was the beneficiary of good timing: With old-time, studio-era movie stars and character players increasingly winding down their careers or being put out to pasture, a bunch of new actors, many of whom had already proved their chops on stages in New York, were hoping to get a foothold in Hollywood. Striking out on his own as an independent casting director, Stalmaster assured that top shows of the day, from Gunsmoke to Ben Casey, were well stocked with these new arrivals.
One of the first filmmakers to cotton to Stalmaster’s approach was Robert Wise, who recruited the casting director to fill out the cast of his true-life drama I Want to Live! (1958), starring Susan Hayward as Barbara Graham, a woman executed for murder in 1955, with little-known actors who resembled the real-life people on which they were based. “We used brand-new faces throughout,” said Stalmaster, who over the next few decades placed countless actors in signature, sometimes star-making, parts.
Stalmaster cast Beau Bridges in The Landlord (1970), Ned Beatty in Deliverance, and Geena Davis in Tootsie. He campaigned for John Travolta before others recognized his star power. And in casting then-little-known Christopher Reeve in the original screen version of Superman (1978) and its sequels, Stalmaster arguably saved the filmmakers from themselves: The choice of Reeve followed a protracted casting process that included one of the producers asking his wife’s dentist to audition for the Man of Steel. “At first, there was a resistance to Christopher Reeve. And I kept putting his picture in front of them, and they kept putting it at the bottom of the pile,” Stalmaster recalled in a 2001 interview.
Working consistently into the mid-1990s, Stalmaster’s failed acting career was a blessing in disguise. Had he succeeded on-screen, he never would have been able to shepherd so many others to cinematic immortality. For some of us, a credit reading “Casting by Lynn Stalmaster” was as good as the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and as significant, in its way, as the work of any writer or director.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
