Filmmaker Bob Drew followed John F. Kennedy as he signed autographs in his documentary Primary.

Over the past 60 years -- the first 15 using still photography, the past 40 equipped with movie cameras -- Robert "Bob" Drew has made his creative priority the task of capturing events that happen to other people. Finally, at age 79, Drew turns the camera on himself, recounting his experiences as a World War II fighter pilot, his friendship with famed war reporter Ernie Pyle, his family and his life's work for a documentary film tentatively titled My War, Mother and Ernie Pyle and scheduled to be completed early next year.

The idea of self-producing one's film autobiography sounds extremely egotistical until you summarize Drew's life and his significant role in American film.

A Toledo, Ohio, native who grew up with his mother outside Cincinnati in Fort Thomas, Ky., Drew left the area as a teenager to serve as an Air Force fighter pilot in WWII. Inspired by Pyle, who reported on Drew's squadron while in Italy, Drew moved to New York City after the war, becoming a correspondent, photographer and editor at Life Magazine.

He later headed the television production division of Time Inc. While a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the late '50s, Drew worked to develop a new form of TV journalism, one that would capture people and events with honesty and vitality.

Drew wanted to eradicate the Edward R. Murrow-inspired, "word-logic," talking-head format of journalism preferred at TV networks. After partnering with likeminded filmmakers Don Alan Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, Drew produced Primary (1960) for ABC-TV, following Hubert H. Humphrey and John F. Kennedy on the Democratic Party campaign trail during the Wisconsin primary election.

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., Drew proudly confirms that less than three minutes of narration was used in the 53-minute Primary. He doesn't promote the film or himself as the originator of the cinéma vérité movement. He doesn't have to.

"The idea behind Primary was to create a new form of reporting and history in which the viewer would see for himself," Drew says, speaking in a booming, confident voice. "That's why it works today. In a vérité documentary like Primary you get a sense of looking for yourself and making your own judgments. It's like being there."

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, two early Drew documentaries, Primary and Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, about the president and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy confronting Alabama Gov. George Wallace to allow two black students to enroll at the all-white University of Alabama, are released on DVD for the first time.

True to Drew's description about creating a new form of filmmaking, Primary thrives on its intimate details. Campaigning to a variation of the Davey Crockett theme song, Humphrey passes out business cards to anyone within arm's reach.

"Let me give you one of my cards," he says to a passerby. "Name's Humphrey."

Autograph seekers, usually children and young women, surround Kennedy wherever he goes. The best moment in Primary occurs during a Kennedy speech at a packed social hall in a predominately Polish Catholic section of Milwaukee.

Jackie Kennedy, young and fashionably dressed, wows the crowd with a few lines of perfectly spoken Polish, but the lasting image captured by Drew and his cameramen are her white-gloved hands nervously twisting behind her back.

Shot three years later during Kennedy's tenure in the White House, Crisis exemplifies Drew's method of humanistic reporting, even when the subject is as important as the integration of the University of Alabama. Crisis recounts the events accurately and fairly, but the real story of the battle between Kennedy and Wallace unfolds in the personal details, the private phone calls and conversations among Kennedy family members, delicately captured by Drew.

Drew's landmark documentary Faces of November, a film about Kennedy's funeral as seen in the faces of the people who came to Washington, D.C., to pay their respect, is included on the Crisis DVD. The Primary DVD contains more than its share of speckles, yet the worn look of the film is in sync with its historical spirit. The best bonus on Primary is a segment titled "The Originators," footage of Drew and his Primary colleagues Maysles, Leacock and Pennebaker speaking at a recent conference on documentary filmmaking.

Leacock delivers the best line: "I don't care for cinéma vérité. To me, CV rhymes with VD."

Watching Drew, Maysles, Leacock and Pennebaker banter, one grasps the legacy of their film handiwork. Pennebaker went on to make landmark music documentaries like Don't Look Back, a film about Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of England; Al Maysles partnered with his brother David on the documentary Salesman, about door-to-door Bible salesmen, as well as the Rolling Stones concert film Gimme Shelter.

Told that 2003 is being promoted as the "year of the documentary" due to the commercial success of films like Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, the nature documentary Winged Migration and the spelling bee film Spellbound, Drew responds with enthusiasm. He's aware of the newer digital cameras, gear far lighter and higher quality than the equipment he used in the early '60s. He is also confident that the latest documentary masterpieces are just around the corner.

"I think this is an explosive point," he says. "Now that the equipment is available, talents all over the world, of all ages and sexes will have the chance to express themselves. We are going to see a lot of trash and a lot of failed experiments, but we're also going to see a number of masterpieces." ©