Lucien Ballard (1908-1988), an Oklahoma-born cinematographer of part-Cherokee heritage, rose from film cutter to acclaimed director of photography, mastering both black-and-white and color work across a career that included collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, for which he won the National Society of Film Critics Award. Along the way he married actress Merle Oberon and invented "The Obie," a special spotlight designed to minimize her facial scars on camera, before specializing in sweeping Western landscapes late in his career and earning his sole Oscar nomination for The Caretakers (1963).