Robert Drew

American documentary filmmaker

Robert Lincoln Drew (February 15, 1924 – July 30, 2014) was an American documentary filmmaker known as one of the pioneers—and sometimes called father—of cinéma vérité, or direct cinema, in the United States. Two of his films, Primary and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, have been named to 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 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 flying a P 80 and was subsequently offered a job. 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. One of Drew Associates' best known films is Primary (1960), a documentary about the Wisconsin Primary election between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. It is considered to be one of the first direct cinema documentaries. According to critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Primary "had as immense and measurable an impact on nonfiction filmmaking as Birth of a Nation had on fiction filmmaking." After Kennedy responded positively to Primary, Drew "proposed to make a next film on him as a President having to deal with a crisis. 'Yes,' he said, 'What if I could look back and see what went on in the White House in the 24 hours before Roosevelt declared war on Japan?'" Drew has made scores of documentaries and has won awards internationally. His subjects have included civil rights, other social issues, politics, music, dance and more. One of his most recent was From Two Men and a War, which recounts his experience as a World War II fighter pilot and his encounters with the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Ernie Pyle.

Drew died on July 30, 2014, at his home in Sharon, Connecticut.

Year Title Notes 1954 Key Picture (Magazine X) 1961 Cine Golden EagleEmmy Award, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 1968 On the Road with Duke EllingtonCine Golden Eagle 1976 Parade of the Tall ShipsCine Golden Eagle 1982 Herself, Indira GandhiCine Golden Eagle 1984 Marshall High Fights BackCine Golden EagleNomination, Emmy AwardFirst Prize, Education Writers Association 1985 Shootout on Imperial Highway 1986 For Auction: An American HeroBest Documentary, DuPont Columbia AwardCine Golden EagleNominee, Emmy Award 1988 River of Hawks 1988 Your Flight is Cancelled 1988 Messages from the Birds 1990 London to Peking: The Great Motoring Challenge 1991 Life and Death of a DynastyCine Golden Eagle 1996 L. A. Champions 1996 On the Trail of the Vanishing Birds 2005 From Two Men and a War