Robert M. Young, an eclectic filmmaker whose documentary subjects included civil rights sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican-American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, is died February 6. in Los Angeles. He was 99 years old.
The death, in hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrea.
In an interview with the Directors’ Guild of America In 2005, Young recalled what attracted him to film.
“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to have adventures, I wanted to live in the world.”
He more than fulfilled this ambition.
In the 1950s he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and on a coral reef near the Bahamas that depicted the life cycles of octopuses, seahorses marine animals, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.
In 1960 he was hired by NBC News for its new documentary series, “White paper.” He directed that year “Sit-Ins”, about black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The next year she worked on a report on the war for Angolan independence against Portugal, for which hundreds of thousands walked with the Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was not satisfied with the report.
“They filed a formal protest,” Young told American Film magazine in 1982, “and said if I ever went to Portugal, I would be prosecuted.”
A few days before the program aired, he said, NBC forced him to cut footage of fragments of two American-made napalm bombs that had been dropped on the Angolans.
His final project for “Libro Bianco” concerned a poor family, the Capras, who lived in a slum in Palermo, Sicily. But NBC pulled it a few days before it was due to air in May 1962. The problem was apparently editorial liberties taken by Young and his co-producer, Michael Roemer, including the decision to stage a scene in which the central character she appeared to give birth, which the network said violated its journalistic standards.
Mr Young said he staged the scene because he was leaving Italy before the woman actually gave birth; his solution was to add a disclaimer. He refused NBC’s requests to make changes and was fired.
Mr. Young believed that NBC had destroyed the negative, but someone surreptitiously made copies, which were screened at film schools and festivals. His son Andrew and Andrew’s wife, Susan Todd, produced an updated documentary, “Children of Fate: Life and Death in a Sicilian Family” (1993), about four generations of Capra, which intercuts images from his father’s film.
Mr. Young has given vent to his cinematic wanderlust with a series of documentaries for the National Film Board of Canada on the life of the Netsilik indigenous people in the wasteland that is now called the Nunavut Territory.
Mr. Young was one of the many cameramen on the 24-part series and the director of “The Eskimo: fight for life”, which I shot on sea ice at a winter camp in Netsilik for several weeks. It won an Emmy Award after it aired on CBS in 1970.
“Early filmmakers of Eskimo life had used zoom lenses and tripods,” Young told American Film. “They were trying to become anthropologists and they fell behind. What they got were profiles. But when a man looked at his wife, I wanted to see her face and her face. I would shoot up close. “I used the cameras the same way the Eskimos used the harpoon.”
Robert Milton Young was born on November 22, 1924 in the Bronx. His father, Al, was a film editor who helped start DuArt Film Laboratories in the 1920s, which processed and printed feature films, documentaries, newsreels, television news footage and commercials. His mother, Ann (Sperber) Young, ran the household.
At his father’s urging, Bob studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare for a career at DuArt. He entered MIT at 16, but he didn’t like his classes and he dropped out at the end of 1942, during his sophomore year, to join the Navy. He joined the photography unit and filmed behind the lines for over two years in New Guinea and the Philippines.
After his discharge, Young resumed his studies at Harvard, where he studied English literature and made his first film, about a turtle crossing a road. He graduated in 1949.
Young began working in films in 1964 as cinematographer on “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Roemer, about a black couple (Ivan Dixon and Abbey Lincoln) dealing with racism in the Deep South.
In 1977, after working on several National Geographic specials, he directed “Short Eyes,” a prison drama adapted from the work of Miguel Piñero, and “Alambrista!”, the fictional story of a Mexican man who illegally crosses the US border. United States to earn money. to support his wife and young daughter.
John J. O’Connor of The New York Times praised Young’s use of documentary techniques to convey the frustrations his protagonist encounters in his search for a better life. “Mr. Young,” he wrote, “has captured, with startling freshness, an old, old story of almost unbearable pain.”
“Alambrist!” won the Golden Camera award for best first film at the Cannes Film Festival.
Edward James Olmos, who had a small part in “Alambrista!”, was a producer and star of “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (1982). He hired Young to direct the film, based on the true story of a farmhand fleeing a manhunt in 1901 after killing a sheriff in Gonzales, Texas.
“Bob Young to me is obviously one of the best, if not the best, American directors we’ve ever had,” Mr. Olmos wrote in A.Frame, the digital publication of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 2019. “But not all of us know.”
“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2022. “Alambrista!” was added in 2023.
Mr. Young’s other films included “Dominick and Eugene” (1988), starring Ray Liotta and Thomas Hulce as fraternal twins with different mental abilities; “Triumph of the Spirit” (1989), about a Greek Jewish boxer (played by Willem Dafoe) who fights in matches at Auschwitz, where the film was filmed, for the amusement of his Nazi captors; AND “End” (1986), starring Farrah Fawcett as a woman who thwarts a rapist’s attack and takes revenge on him.
After the screening of “Extremities,” Young recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he saw a woman in the audience crying. She was a victim of sexual assault, she angrily told him, adding: “This is not life. In life a woman doesn’t run away.”
“I just don’t care mirroring life,” he said he told her. “I’m interested in taking people into an experience that can ultimately be enlightening or revelatory.”
He told the woman about his daughter Melissa Young, who had been sexually assaulted for three and a half hours in a Greenwich Village apartment. She was unable to react, she said, but she told him that she “was very proud of herself for having survived.”
In addition to his son Andrew, Mr. Young is survived by his daughter Melissa and another daughter, Sarah Young, both from his marriage to Ellan Ulery, which ended in divorce in 1975; his wife, Lili (Partridge) Young, whom he married that same year; their sons, Nick and Zack; and nine grandchildren. His brother, Irwin, who died in 2022, ran DuArt after his father’s death in 1960 and helped raise young directors such as Spike Lee and Michael Moore.
In 1965, Mr. Young and Peter Gimbel, heir to the Gimbels department store chain, dove into the waters off eastern Long Island to film a short documentary, “In the World of Sharks.”
They and a third diver descended into a cage designed by Mr. Gimbel. Mr. Young then swam freely out of the cage with a 35-millimeter camera, capturing stunning close-ups of a school of circling 12-foot-long great blue sharks, one of which tried to bite him.
“It could have been a macho movie, but it’s not,” Young told American Film. A shark hit his camera with its eyeball. Another time, she tried to surface and hit her head on a shark’s belly.
“It felt like hitting a waterbed,” he said.