Robert M. Young, filmmaker who indulged his wanderlust, dies at the age of 99

Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican-American farmer who kills a Texas police officer and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on February 4 . in Los Angeles. He was 99.

The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.

In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.

“I wanted to live my life,” he said. “I wanted to have adventures, I wanted to live in the world.”

He has more than fulfilled that ambition.

In the 1950s, he and two partners made educational films, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and on a reef near the Bahamas, chronicling the life cycles of octopuses, seahorses and seahorses were depicted. , lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.

In 1960 he was hired by NBC News for the new documentary series, “White paper.” That year he directed “Sit in,” about the black students whose protests led to the desegregation of downtown Nashville’s lunch counters. The following year he worked on a report about the Angolan war of independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of kilometers with Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was not satisfied with the report.

“They filed a formal protest,” Mr. Young told American Film magazine in 1982, “and said if I ever went to Portugal I would be tried.”

A few days before the program aired, he said, NBC forced him to take footage of the fragments of two American-made napalm bombs dropped on Angolans.

His last project for ‘White Paper’ was about a poor family, the Capras, living in a slum in Palermo, Sicily. But it was pulled by NBC in May 1962, a few days before it was set to air. The issue apparently centered on the editorial freedoms granted to Mr. Young and his co-producer Michael Roemer, including a decision to stage a scene in which the lead character appeared to be giving birth, which the channel said violated journalistic standards.

Mr. Young said he staged the scene because he left Italy before the woman actually gave birth; his solution was to add a disclaimer. He refused NBC’s demands to make changes and was fired.

Mr. Young believed that NBC destroyed the negative, but someone secretly made copies, which were shown 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 Capras, interspersing footage from his father’s film.

Mr. Young further tapped into his cinematic wanderlust with a documentary series for the National Film Board of Canada about the lives of the indigenous Netsilik people in the bleak land now called the Nunavut Territory.

Mr. Young was one of the cinematographers of the 24-part series and the director of ‘The Eskimo: fight for life’ which he shot on the sea ice over several weeks at a winter camp in Netsilik. It won an Emmy Award after being shown on CBS in 1970.

“Previous Eskimo filmmakers had used zoom lenses and tripods,” Mr. Young told American Film. “They tried to be anthropologists and were left behind. What they got were profiles. But when a man looked at his wife, I wanted to see his face and her face. I would shoot at close range. I used the cameras like 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 establish DuArt Film Laboratories in the 1920s, which processed and printed feature films, documentaries, newsreels, television newsreels and commercials. His mother, Ann (Sperber) Young, managed the household.

At his father’s urging, Bob studied chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to prepare him for a career at DuArt. He entered MIT at age 16, but did not like his classes and dropped out in late 1942, during his sophomore year, to enlist in the Navy. He joined the photographic unit and spent two years filming behind the lines in New Guinea and the Philippines.

After his discharge, Mr. Young resumed his education at Harvard, where he studied English literature and made his first film — about a turtle crossing a road. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1949.

Mr. Young began working in features in 1964 as a cinematographer for “Nothing but a Man,” directed by Mr. 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 Miguel Piñero’s play, and “Alambrista!”, the fictional story of a Mexican man who illegally crosses the border with the Crosses the United States to make money. to support his wife and daughter.

John J. O’Connor of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s use of documentary techniques to convey the frustrations his protagonist encounters in his pursuit of a better life. “Mr. Jong, he wrote, ‘captured with stunning freshness an old, old story of almost unbearable pain.’

“Alambrista!” won the Golden Camera for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival.

Edward James Olmos, who had a small role in “Alambrista!”, was a producer and the star of “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (1982). He hired Mr. Young to direct the film, which was based on the true story of a farmhand who fled a manhunt in 1901 after killing a sheriff in Gonzales, Texas.

“Bob Young, to me, is clearly one of the best American filmmakers, if not the best, that we’ve ever had,” said Mr. Olmos wrote in A.Frame, the digital publication of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 2019. “But we don’t all know that.”

“The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2022. “Alambrista!” was added in 2023.

Among Mr.’s other films. Young belonged “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 in Auschwitz, where the film was shot, to the amusement of his Nazi captors; And “Extremities” (1986), starring Farrah Fawcett as a woman who thwarts a rapist’s attack and exacts revenge on him.

After a screening of “Extremities,” Mr. Young recalled in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he saw a woman in the audience crying. She was the victim of sexual assault, she angrily told him, adding: “This is not life. In life, the woman cannot escape.”

“It just doesn’t interest me mirror life,” he told her. “I am interested in taking people into an experience that can ultimately be enlightening or revealing.”

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 couldn’t fight back, he said, but she told him that “she was very proud of herself for surviving.”

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, led DuArt after their father’s death in 1960 and helped raise young filmmakers like Spike Lee and Michael Moore.

In 1965, Mr. Young and Peter Gimbel, heir to the Gimbels department store chain, dived into the waters off eastern Long Island to film a short documentary, “In the World of Sharks.”

She and a third diver descended into a cage that Mr. Gimbel had designed. Mr Young then swam freely outside the cage with a 35 millimeter camera and captured remarkable close-ups of a pod of swirling 10-foot-long great blue sharks, one of which tried to bite him.

“It could have been a macho movie, but it’s not,” Mr. Young told American Film. One shark hit his camera with his eyeball. Another time he tried to surface and hit his head on the belly of a shark.

“It felt like I hit a waterbed,” he said.