Documentary filmmaker Robert Drew has died at the age of 90. Drew was one of the founders of the cinema vérité movement in the United States, using new, light cameras and sound equipment to create a more intimate, “fly on the wall” style of film journalism. Other famous documentarians of the period, including D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and the Maysles brothers, got their start with his company, Drew Associates. Drew himself was involved in scores of documentaries over the course of his career, but he is best remembered for a series of films he made in the early 1960s that followed John F. Kennedy—the first real TV president—from the campaign trail to the Oval Office.
In 1960, Drew produced and directed Primary (1960), an up close and personal look at the 1960 Wisconsin Primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. The contest was between Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, and Drew knew who he wanted for the star of his film. “The first time I saw him stride onto a stage, my heart sank for him,” Drew said of Kennedy. “He was this young, thin, inexperienced local politician, and I thought, ‘My God, how can he put himself up for president?’ After listening to him speak for five minutes, I was on the edge my chair. He was incredibly compelling, and his charisma was basically rooted in how calm and confident he was—and, of course, he was also very good-looking.”
After Kennedy won the election, Drew screened Primary for him and pitched him on the idea of allowing Drew’s cameras into the White House for a few days, to use “a new form of journalism” to create “a new form of history.” The end result was Crisis (1963), a nonfiction political thriller capturing the standoff between the White House and the segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, on the occasion of the forced integration of the University of Alabama.