Pioneering filmmaker Richard Leacock, former MIT professor, dies at age 89
Innovative documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock, who helped create the cinéma vérité style and was a driving force behind the film program at MIT, died on March 23 at his home in Paris. He was 89. Leacock was best known for expanding the possibilities of documentary film through the use of small, mobile, hand-held cameras, which provided documentaries with greater immediacy and opened up the range of subjects and scenes that could be filmed. He also helped devise some of the technical innovations necessary to provide high-quality sound for hand-held cameras. Leacock's first well-known film was 1954's Toby and the Tall Corn, about a traveling theater troupe in Missouri. He served as the cinematographer for Robert Drew's milestone documentary, Primary, about John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, and formed a working partnership with D. A. Pennebaker, for whom he served as cinematographer on Monterey Pop, from 1967, about...