R.I.P. L.M. Kit Carson, writer, filmmaker, and guru

The Hollywood Reporter reports the death of L. M. Kit Carson, a versatile man who maintained a Zelig-like presence in the American filmmaking scene for more than 30 years. Carson, who died at 73, first made his mark in front of the camera in Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a meta-fictional take on the cinema verite documentary movement that starred Carson as a young filmmaker who obsessively trains his camera on his own life. With SMU film professor Bill Jones, Carson founded the Dallas-based USA Film Festival partly so he’d have a place to show David Holzman’s Diary; it’s still going strong today.
Carson continued to dance on the line between filmed fiction and reality as the director of The American Dreamer (1971), a freeform documentary about the making of The Last Movie, Dennis Hopper’s career-crashing follow-up to Easy Rider.