Robert Drew
| Robert Drew | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Robert Lincoln Drew February 15, 1924 Toledo, Ohio |
| Died | July 30, 2014 (aged 90) Sharon, Connecticut |
| Occupation | Documentary filmmaker |
| Years active | 1955–2014 |
Robert Lincoln Drew (February 15, 1924 – July 30, 2014) was an American documentary filmmaker known as one of the pioneers—and sometimes called father—ofcinéma vérité, or direct cinema, in the United States. Two of his films are archived in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The moving image collection of Robert Drew is housed at the Academy Film Archive. The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of his films, including "Faces of November," "Herself: Indira Gandhi," and "Bravo!/Kathy's Dance". His many awards include an International Documentary Association Career Achievement Award.
Robert Drew was born in Toledo, Ohio. His father, Robert Woodsen Drew, was a film salesman and a pilot who ran a seaplane business. Drew grew up mostly in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. He left high school to join the U.S. Army Air Corps as a cadet in 1942 and qualified for officer's training. At the age of 19, he was a combat pilot in Italy flying the P-51 dive bomber, completing 30 successful combat missions. During that time he met Ernie Pyle, an important experience for a pilot who would become a journalist. Drew was shot down behind the lines, where he survived for more than three months. Back in the U.S., he was a pilot in the First Fighter Group, the first to fly jet airplanes. He wrote an article for Life magazine about the experience of flying a P-80, and was offered a job.
While working at Life as a writer and editor, Drew held a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. In 1955 he focused on two questions: Why are documentaries so dull? What would it take for them to become gripping and exciting?
He developed a unit within Time Inc. to realize his vision of developing documentary films that would use picture logic rather than word logic. Drew envisioned—as he explained in a 1962 interview—a form of documentary that would "drop word logic and find a dramatic logic in which things really happened". It would be "a theater without actors; it would be plays without playwrights; it would be reporting without summary and opinion; it would be the ability to look in on people’s lives at crucial times from which you could deduce certain things and see a kind of truth that can only be gotten from personal experience."
He formed Drew Associates around this time. Some of his early experiments premiered on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jack Paar Show. Drew recruited like-minded filmmakers including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert Maysles, who all have had internationally renowned careers. They experimented with technology, syncing camera and sound with the parts of a watch.
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