The foursome who came together for Primary in 1960 are like the Beatles of documentary. Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles transformed nonfiction film and produced an unmatched streak of classics. (As with the Beatles, there was also a fifth, lesser-known member, Terence Macartney-Filgate). The team would change and grow and become known as Drew Associates, producing twenty films from 1960 to 1964. Among these works, the ones featuring John F. Kennedy have certainly left the most indelible imprint. Indeed, it’s possible to trace the birth, growing pains, and maturation of the modern American documentary through those four films: Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, Crisis, and Faces of November.
It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today – the art of candid observation – didn’t exist. Not the equipment, not the techniques, not the philosophy. The Drew team was making it up as they went along.
John F. Kennedy was considered an unlikely nominee – too young, too Catholic, too Eastern Establishment. To overcome those biases, the Boston-bred son of a millionaire had to prove himself in the Wisconsin primary against Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Drew and Leacock met with Kennedy in Washington in mid-March and gained his consent to be filmed during the primary; they then quickly got Humphrey’s. Two weeks later, in April, the filmmakers had their first day of shooting.
To round out their team, they brought aboard Pennebaker, Maysles, and Macartney-Filgate.
The team devised a set of revolutionary principles: No interviews. Tell the story through action, not narration. Don’t interfere with what’s happening, just observe. In Primary, the cameras follow the candidates as they meet voters on the street, catnap in cars, and confer with aides in private rooms.
On primary night, Leacock’s camera observes Kennedy awaiting the results in his hotel suite with family and colleagues. “We did capture the look of it”, Leacock told me, “the sense of being there”.
When it was finally finished, Drew hoped to sell it to a national network but had no takers. The hour-long show was cut down to twenty-six minutes and syndicated to local stations owned by Time Inc. after Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the general election. Despite the film’s scant distribution, Kennedy had been impressed. Drew, emboldened by this warm reception, proposed an even more daring idea: to follow the president in the White House during a crisis. Kennedy liked the concept.
Shortly after Kennedy’s inauguration, the president invited Drew for two days of test filming inside the Oval Office. The footage, used in the 1961 ABC program Adventures on the New Frontier, didn’t yield much fresh insight. But the test allayed Kennedy’s concerns about bringing cameras into the White House.
Then, in the spring of 1963, newspapers started reporting on a new crisis in the making. A federal court order had mandated that the University of Alabama accept the enrollment of two black students. Governor George Wallace was threatening to stand in the school’s doorway to block their entrance.
Gregory Shuker recognized that Alabama could be the next flashpoint for the civil rights struggle. He won permission from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to cover the story inside the Justice Department, with Pennebaker as cameraman. The White House admitted them to deliberations in the Oval Office, on the condition that the administration could see the film before it aired and kill any dialogue they thought would damage the presidency. In Alabama, Leacock and James Lipscomb were dispatched to follow the urbane U.S. deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Wallace, while Hope Ryden and cameraman Abbot Mills focused on the black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, filmed in June 1963, crosscuts between the various characters. The suspense builds with every scene, as Wallace eulogizes his Confederate heroes, the attorney general contemplates calling in the National Guard, the NAACP advises the students on possible risks, the president’s advisers calculate the political fallout, and Katzenbach instructs federal marshals to “take whatever force is necessary” to protect the students.
Wallace stood his ground until one hundred troops arrived later in the day and the black students were permitted to enroll. That night, Kennedy made the commitment referred to by the film’s full title, giving his strongest speech on civil rights, in which he called it a “moral issue” and pushed for new legislation from Congress.
In the three years between Primary and Crisis, the filmmakers had made tremendous advances, in both the quality of their equipment and their experience. In Primary, the ability to record synchronous sound was still primitive. By Crisis, they had obtained Polish engineer Stefan Kudelski’s more sophisticated Nagra audio deck, and synchronized it to the film speed using a Bulova Accutron watch, so the cinematographer and sound person no longer had to be tethered together by a wire.
In October 1963, ABC broadcast Crisis, amid the first storm of controversy over what we now call reality television. The next month, Kennedy was assassinated, and the media debate over the propriety of filming in the White House was moot. No outside camera crew ever gained such access to the Oval Office again.
ABC News president Elmer Lower commissioned Drew to make a film about Kennedy’s funeral that resulted in the poetic Faces of November. But the network had no place for a twelveminute film. According to Drew, it wasn’t until Faces won prizes at the Venice Film Festival that an excerpt was shown on a news broadcast.
There is one moment in Primary when Drew steps clearly into the frame. We can see Drew, with thick black hair, pointing a shotgun microphone at Humphrey. Drew’s face has a look of concentration as he glances down at his equipment, and when I rerun those few seconds, I detect a faint smile. Maybe he’s just being polite to the senator. Or maybe he knows that he’s making history, not just recording it.

Thom Powers