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Robert Lincoln Drew is an American documentary filmmaker known as a pioneer of cinéma vérité, or direct cinema, in the United States.
Born in Toledo, Ohio, one of his best known films is Primary, 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.
Some time after completing a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1955, Drew was hired at Time Inc. to develop new portable film equipment. This funding led to Drew engineering the first portable sound-sync picture camera unit, enabling him to record picture and sound at the same time. Around this same time Drew formed Drew Associates in the early 1960s, working closely with many exemplary filmmakers who had and have continued to have documentary careers of their own, including Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and Terence Macartney-Filgate. For Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, Drew convinced President John F. Kennedy to let his crews shoot candidly in the White House, and Drew Associates filmmakers took cameras into the Oval Office and into the home of Alabama Governor George Wallace who was resisting desegregation. The film includes candid presidential meetings over the crisis precipitated by Wallace when he planned to physically block the entry of two African-American students to the University of Alabama. The program aired in October 1963 on ABC and triggered a storm of criticism over the admission of cameras into the White House.
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