These talented Academy Award winners were not-so-famous.
The Oscars are known as “Hollywood’s biggest night,” a time when the biggest celebrities of the silver screen get together to pay tribute to the year’s greatest achievements in filmmaking. When we watch the Academy Awards, most of us recognize the major Hollywood actors and directors (and even some writers and producers) who receive Academy Awards for their work.
But what about all of those other Oscar winners? The documentary filmmakers, animators, costumers, sound effects specialists, cinematographers. Without them, the quality of motion pictures would suffer dramatically. Many of them have received multiple nominations and awards over the years, but most of them are not really known to the public at large.
Today we remember a few talented but less-than-famous Oscar winners who have died in the past year.
Sound effects engineer Frank Edward Warner won an Academy Award for1977 Steven Spielberg film, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” according to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times. Of his work on “Close Encounters,” Warner said this:
“For the Mother Ship sound, I made up 31 different sounds including haybalers (slowed and reversed), trucks, trains, mosquitoes, metal and wood twists, squadrons of planes, etc. All were treated to remove their source and to move this tremendous image of a big, heavy living but harmless mass.”
Warner’s other notable films include “Spartacus,” “Harold and Maude,” “Taxi Driver,” “Being There,” “Raging Bull,” and three “Rocky” movies.
John L. Horn Jr. “began his 22 year career at LucasFilm on the EditDroid project, helping transition film editing from analog to the digital age,” before moving to the R&D division — the “code mine” — where he remained until his death. Over the years, he “codeveloped image processing, animation, and motion capture technologies, including 2 systems that won Academy Awards for technical achievement.” Horn worked on “dozens of feature films,” including “Hook,” “Jurassic Park,” “Forrest Gump,” “Cowboys & Aliens,” and the Star Wars prequels.
I personally was impressed that he helped the video games division with tools for “The Force Unleashed,” one of my favorite books from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and also “worked on a pre-visualization system used extensively on the Clone Wars TV series.”
Bernard “Barney” Posner “became a cartoon animator during The Golden Age of Animation,” according to his obit in the Los Angeles Times. Posner’s credits include Jerry Mouse, Gene Kelly’s dance partner in “Anchors Aweigh” (MGM 1945) —”Hollywood’s most successful animation and live action film.” Posner and his team at UPA earned an Academy Award for “When Magoo Flys” in 1957.
Dwight Montgomery Shook worked in motion picture special effects and was “a regular crew member at Academy Award winning Grant McCune Design,” according to his obit in the Los Angeles Times. Shook’s credits include “Airplane II,” “Terminator 2,” “Batman Forever,” “Spaceballs,” “Spiderman” (1 and 2), “X Men 2,” “Serenity,” and “Flight Plan.”
Documentary filmmaker Christian Robert Odasso “worked with Orson Welles, François Reichenbach, Chris Marker, and Claude Lelouch,” according to his obituary in the Palm Beach Post. With Reichenbach, Odasso “won multiple awards, including an Academy Award and the Palme d’or at Cannes.” Although the obit does not indicate what he won the Oscar for, it says that he “filmed luminaries like Dalí, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Karajan, Menuin, Arthur Rubinstein, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Van Morrison, BB King, and Jimmy Buffett [and] recorded JFK’s funeral, the Vietnam war, Woodstock, Mission Control during the moon landing, and extensively with indigenous peoples in Central America.”
Fred “Mac” Hardman, aka. M. J. McMasters, was employed by CELCO Manufacturing “where his company received an Academy Award for Technological Innovation in the development of the ‘colorizer’ equipment used for a number of Disney Films,” according to the obit in the Lompoc (California) Record.
This post was contributed by Alana Baranick, a freelance obituary writer. She was the director of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers and chief author of Life on the Death Beat: A Handbook for Obituary Writers before she passed away in 2015.
