Robert Drew is a documentary producer who, during the late 1950s and 1960s, pioneered a new documentary form for application in the network news departments. This form, which Drew dubbed “candid drama,” also known as “cinéma vérité” or “direct cinema,” did not, ultimately, reshape news programming, but it did provide the medium with a radically different way of covering historical and cultural events.

“Candid drama,” according to Drew, is a documentary filmmaking technique that reveals the “logic of drama” inherent in almost all human situations. In sharp contrast to typical television documentaries, which are simply “lectures with picture illustration” (and for that reason are usually “dull”), the candid drama documentary eschews voice-over narration, formal interviews, on-air correspondents, or other kinds of staged and framed television formulae. Instead, through the slowly acquired photography and long, single takes–called real-time photography– of vérité technique, the details and flavor of a scene become the important elements: the fatigue experienced by candidates on a campaign trail (Primary) or fervid concentration of a race car driver (On the Pole) captures our attention as much as the factual information about a campaign or the Indianapolis 500. According to Drew, the purpose of candid documentaries is to engage the viewer’s “senses as well as his mind.” Over a career that spans more than 30 years, Drew has produced over 100 films and videotapes, most of which employ the theory and methods of vérité technique; and unlike other practitioners of the form, he has also tried to procure a regular slot for vérité on prime-time network programming.

Drew was first introduced to the power of documentary photography just after World War II while demonstrating a new fighter plane for Life magazine reporter and photography team (Drew had served as a fighter pilot during the war). Struck by the power of the resulting article, Drew, at the age of 22, became a staff reporter for Life. In 1955, he accepted a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard to formally pursue the problem of an alternative news theory in the medium of film. It was a time of rigorous talk, study, and analysis, according to Drew, and on his return to Life, he began making films as well as reporting. Some of these early experiments premiered on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Jack Paar Show. In 1960, Drew moved to Time’s broadcast division, where, with the backing of Wes Tullen, vice president in charge of television operations, he obtained the funds for his first project and the means necessary to develop lightweight portable equipment. The engineering of the first small sync sound and picture camera unit, which he undertook with filmmaker Richard Leacock, has undoubtedly had an enormous impact on numerous documentarians working both for the major networks and independently. Sensitive and ephemeral moments could now be more easily captured than with the cumbersome camera, large camera crew, and lighting systems that had been used in news coverage to date.

Also at this time, Drew formed his company, Drew Associates, which enabled him to hire freelance cameramen and filmmakers, some of whom, such as D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and Albert Maysles, have since gone on to establish celebrated careers of their own. By March 1960, Drew was ready to select their first primary in Wisconsin, which pitted the young John Kennedy against Hubert Humphrey. For the last week of the campaign, three two-man crews tracked both Kennedy and Humphrey as they made their rounds of the hustings, photo sessions, and the rare, private moments in between.

Primary, as this first film was named, still stands today as one of Drew Associate’s best-known and celebrated works. It won the Flaherty Award for best documentary and the Blue Ribbon at the American Film Festival while in Europe, according to Drew, “it was received as a kind of documentary second-coming.” (The rough immediacy of the handheld camera is said to have influenced Goddard’s Breathless.) Kennedy, on viewing Primary, liked it so much that he consented to Drew’s request to make further candid films in his role as president. “What if I had been able to observe F.D.R. in the 24 hours before he declared war on Japan?” he said. And indeed, Drew Associates gained permission to film the president during a period of crisis. Called Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), this documentary chronicles the showdown between Alabama Governor George Wallace and the federal government over the integration of the University of Alabama. As in Primary, domestic and personal details of the two main protagonists (Wallace and then–Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy) are intercut with the film’s history-making moments– Wallace’s initial refusal to back down and the government’s decision to employ state troops. To Drew’s great chagrin, however, the films were not broadcast over the networks. While regional outlets were found on occasion, the regular scheduling of these films and the many others he produced proved an elusive goal.

However, a joint sponsorship between Time, Inc., and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) allowed Drew Associates to produce a series of films in 1960 for television, including a portrait of Indianapolis race driver Eddie Sachs, On the Pole, and Yanki No!, about Latin American reaction to American foreign policy in the region. These two films prompted a Time, Inc.-ABC liaison to offer Drew a contract for a regular supply of candid documentaries. In rapid-fire succession, the company made about half a dozen more. They formed a diverse list, including a profile of Nehru (which grew up a 20-year documentary relationship with the Nehru “dynasty,” with subsequent films on Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv). Yet the first season’s series was to be the last produced under the arrangement; again, the regular scheduling of the films, which Drew had made the bedrock of his candid drama theory, did not materialize.

The reasons proffered for the ambivalence of the television industry include the political infighting that arose between Time and ABC and the growing difficulty of attracting a single sponsor for the projects; but perhaps the most compelling reason was the networks’ unshakable preference for correspondent-hosted or narrated reporting. The predictable (and containable) effects of a regular news anchor has prevailed, with exceptions, over more poetic candid documentary. (Moments of vérité reporting have nonetheless been produced in a few instances by networks, Drew maintains, most notably of the network coverage of American troops in Vietnam.) Once the first season of programming was complete, the three-way contractual relationship between Drew Associates, Time, and ABC formally ended. The production company since then has managed to survive and produce prolifically on an independent contractual basis with a variety of sponsors, including ABC, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), corporations, and government agencies, as well with its own Drew Associates funds as an independent producer.

The resulting oeuvre consists of a wide variety of historical and high-profile moments, intermingled with scenes of the ordinary in modern life. Jane (1962) shows us a young Jane Fonda at her Broadway debut. A Man Who Dances (1968), produced as part of a series on the arts for Bell Telephone, about ballet dancer Edward Villella, won Drew an Emmy. Many have dealt with subjects the networks have hesitated to tackle in house; responding to a request by Xerox Corporation for a film “that the networks won’t touch,” Drew made Storm Signal (1966), a documentary on drug addiction; a three-part series on gangs, produced for PBS’s Frontline (1983-84) delves into the world of gangs and an inner-city high school. A full ten years later, Drew Associates completed L.A. Champions, also for PBS, about the basketball teams that play the streets of South Central Los Angeles, which, like Drew’s first films, unobtrusively follows its main characters and without a word of narration talls a stirring story.