Awards & Winners

Robert Drew

Date of Birth 15-February-1924
Place of Birth Toledo
(Ohio, Lucas County, United States of America, Area codes 419 and 567, Area code 419, Area code 567)
Nationality United States of America
Also know as Robert Lincoln Drew
Profession Film Producer, Film Director, Television Producer
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.

Awards by Robert Drew

Check all the awards nominated and won by Robert Drew.

1968


Nominations 1968 »

Award Nominated Nominated Work
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Series The Bell Telephone Hour

1966


British Academy Television Award for Best Foreign Television Programme
Honored for : Living Camera
(Winner: Robert Drew Associates)

Nominations 1966 »

Award Nominated Nominated Work
British Academy Television Award for Best Foreign Television Programme Living Camera
Nominee: Robert Drew Associates