February 25, 1999
Longtime Saturday Night Live Associate Director Robert Caminiti will be the recipient of the Directors Guild of America's 1999 Franklin J. Schaffner Achievement Award, DGA President Jack Shea and Awards Committee Chairperson Howard Storm announced today. The Schaffner Award, given to an Associate Director or Stage Manager in recognition of service to the industry and to the DGA, will be presented to Caminiti at the 51st Annual DGA Awards on March 6, 1999, at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.
Caminiti's television career began in 1956 when he joined NBC as a mimeograph operator. In the early 1960s he became a Stage Manager on the game show Concentration, followed by stints as an SM on The Doctors, Jeopardy and The Tonight Show. Eventually he began filling in as an Associate Director on Jeopardy and moved into that post full-time in 1967. In 1968 Caminiti worked as an AD for NBC's presidential primaries and Democratic National Convention, and through the 1970s he worked on most of NBC's game shows, including What's My Line?, To Tell the Truth, Jackpot, Three on a Match and Winning Streak. When Tom Snyder came to New York to host Tomorrow, Caminiti became the AD. In 1982 he moved to Saturday Night Live, where he has been Associate Director for the past seventeen years.
Caminiti has served the DGA as a member of the Associate Directors/Stage Managers/Production Assistants Council for seven years. He was a shop steward at NBC in the 1980s, and was a member of the Guild's 1987 Negotiating Committee.