Robert Drew

Robert Drew was born on February 15, 1924 in Toledo, Ohio, USA as Robert Lincoln Drew.

Before graduating high school, he enlisted as a cadet in the U.S. Army Air Corps (U.S. Army Air Force or USAAF) during World War II. After his training, in 1943, he was assigned to a combat squadron near Naples, Italy, from where he flew 31 missions before his plane was shot down behind enemy lines on January 31, 1944, just sixteen days before turning twenty years old. He was able to elude capture by the Nazis, surviving for three and a half months eluding the Germans in a mountainous area near the northern Italian town of Fondi, before making his way back through Nazi and American lines, enabling him to return to his unit to continue fighting before returning to the U.S. just before the end of the war to enroll in the first U.S. class for jet fighter pilots.

He founded a documentary film company, Drew Associates, in 1960, on the central premise that there would be no direction of the subjects of his films, meaning they would not be coached on how or what to say whatever they had to say. In the process, he hired some of the most important documentary filmmakers of the last fifty years, from 1960s through the 2000s, including Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles.

He was a producer and director, known for Storm Signal (1966), The Bell Telephone Hour (1959) and The Sun Ship Game (1971). He was married to Anne Gilbert and First Wife.

Along with others, many trained by him, he was the subject of a documentary made by another party, Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment (2000), produced by the National Film Board of Canada.