B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, AUGUST 6 , 2019
the conclusion that is as powerful
as any fictional scene that could
have been scripted,” Associated
Press writer Linda Deutsch wrote
in her review of the
Oscar-nominated movie. In 2008,
some of the key members of
Clinton’s team were interviewed
for “Return of the Room,” a look
at how campaigns had changed
since the first Clinton presiden-
tial run.Donn Alan Pennebaker, whose
father was a commercial photog-
rapher, was born in Evanston, Ill.,
on July 15, 1925. After Navy serv-
ice, he graduated from Yale Uni-
versity in 1947 with a bachelor’s
degree in mechanical engineer-
ing before going into filmmaking.
He used his college skills to
help develop portable camera
equipment used in documenta-
ries and to design a computerized
airport reservation system. He
completed his first short, “Day-
break Express,” in 1953, combin-
ing a pulsing Duke Ellington
score with a jazzy, shadowy mon-
tage of an elevated New York City
subway station and passengers.
He also wrote and painted and
worked briefly in advertising.
By the late ’50s, he had formed
Drew Associates with Drew and
Richard Leacock and begun work
on landmark movies, from “Pri-
mary” to “Crisis,” about the 1963
standoff between the Kennedy
administration and Alabama gov-
ernor George Wallace, who was
resisting integration at the Uni-
versity of Alabama. Mr. Penne-
baker would criticize Drew’s edit-
ing of “Crisis,” saying he made it
too worshipful of Kennedy and
cited that as a reason for making
films on his own.
Many of Mr. Pennebaker’s later
films were made in partnership
with Hegedus, an independent
filmmaker whom he married in- His earlier marriages to
Sylvia Bell and photographer
Kate Taylor ended in divorce.
In addition to his third wife,
survivors include three children
from his first marriage; three
children from his second mar-
riage; and two children from his
third marriage; and many grand-
children and great-grandchil-
dren.
— Associated Press
Joplin. Mr. Pennebaker captured
not only some of the rock era’s
most dynamic performances but
also the crowds who took them
in, including a close-up of an
awed Mama Cass during Joplin’s
explosive “Ball and Chain.”
Mr. Pennebaker also made a
documentary about a 1969 con-
cert in Toronto with Lennon and
a pickup band featuring Eric
Clapton. He made films about
performers he admired and some
he came to enjoy, like Depeche
Mode, whose dedicated fans
warmed him to their music.
In 1993, Mr. Pennebaker re-
turned to politics with “The War
Room,” co-directed by Mr. Penne-
baker and his wife, Chris Hege-
dus. This time, the stars weren’t
the candidates but those behind
the scenes. The filmmakers were
granted limited access to Clinton,
so the documentary focused on
the campaign headquarters in
Little Rock as political strategists
and future media stars James
Carville and George Stephanopo-
ulos guide the young Arkansas
governor’s journey to the White
House.
The film blended raw, ruthless
moments such as Stephanopou-
los’s threatening a phone caller
who claimed to have evidence of
Clinton’s adultery and high emo-
tion.
“Carville, the general, gives a
tearful farewell to his troops atedly unsatisfied with Mr. Penne-
baker’s cut and reworked the film
himself. Some of the footage was
released as “Eat the Document”
while other parts were used by
Martin Scorsese for “No Direc-
tion Home,” a Dylan PBS docu-
mentary released in 2006.
After Dylan, Mr. Pennebaker
again recorded a musical land-
mark with “Monterey Pop,” a
documentary of the 1967 Califor-
nia gathering that was rock’s first
major festival and featured such
current and future stars as Otis
Redding, Jimi Hendrix and JanisLook Back” and was on hand for
his raucous European tour in- An all-out rocker by this
time, backed by expert and un-
known musicians who later be-
came the Band, Dylan performed
snarling, defiant versions of “Like
a Rolling Stone” and “Just Like
Tom Thumb’s Blues” as fans of his
folk style booed and heckled.
Dylan was also seen working
on music with Johnny Cash and,
looking and sounding strung out,
bantering nonsensically with
John Lennon in the back of a car
in London. But Dylan was report-
his changing career.
Scenes from “Don’t Look Back”
have become part of the musical
and movie canon, among them
Dylan playing “It’s All Over Now,
Baby Blue” in his hotel room
while an impressed (and perhaps
intimidated) Donovan looked on.
In a much imitated sequence that
anticipated rock videos, Dylan’s
fast-talking “Subterranean
Homesick Blues” plays on the
soundtrack as the singer holds a
stack of cue cards with fragments
of the lyrics, peeling the cards off
and discarding them one by one.
In a 2000 Associated Press
interview, Mr. Pennebaker said
he didn’t know much about Dy-
lan at the time, but watching
through his lens, saw “an amaz-
ing prodigy. Very smart in an
untutored way. He created his
own persona right before your
eyes.... He was a compendium of
things it takes professors years to
figure out — startlingly naive, but
smart.”
He recalled Dylan “went into
shock” the first time he saw the
film but then returned a night
later, watched it again, then gave
his okay. “He had no idea that one
camera sitting on one guy’s shoul-
der could make him feel so na-
ked,” he said. “I’ve always ad-
mired Dylan for letting [the film]
go the way it was.”
Mr. Pennebaker continued to
work with Dylan after “Don’tBY HILLEL ITALIED.A. Pennebaker, the
Oscar-winning documentary
maker whose historic contribu-
tions to American culture and
politics included immortalizing a
young Bob Dylan in “Don’t Look
Back” and capturing the spin
behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 presi-
dential campaign in “The War
Room,” died Aug. 1 at his home in
Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 94.
His son, Frazer Pennebaker,
confirmed the death but did not
cite a specific cause.
Mr. Pennebaker, who received
an honorary Academy Award in
2012, was a leader among a gener-
ation of filmmakers in the 1960s
who took advantage of such inno-
vations as handheld cameras and
adopted an intimate, sponta-
neous style known as cinéma
vérité.
As an assistant to pioneer Rob-
ert Drew, Mr. Pennebaker helped
invent the modern political docu-
mentary, “Primary,” a revelatory
account of John F. Kennedy’s
1960 victory in Wisconsin over
fellow Democratic presidential
candidate Hubert Humphrey.
He went on to make or assist
on dozens of films, from an early
look at Jane Fonda to an Emmy-
nominated portrait of Elaine
Stritch to a documentary about a
contentious debate between Nor-
man Mailer and a panel of femi-
nists (“Town Bloody Hall”).
Widely admired and emulated,
Mr. Pennebaker was blessed with
patience, sympathy, curiosity, the
journalist’s art of setting his sub-
jects at ease, the novelist’s knack
for finding the revealing detail
and the photographer’s eye for
compelling faces and images.
When reducing vast amounts of
raw footage into a finished film,
Mr. Pennebaker said, “The one
barometer I believe in is bore-
dom. The minute people start to
lose interest, that’s it.”
He parted from Drew in the
mid-’60s and became a top film-
maker in his own right with the
1967 release “Don’t Look Back,”
among the first rock documenta-
ries to receive serious critical
attention. It follows Dylan on a
1965 tour of England, featuring
Joan Baez, Donovan, Allen Gins-
berg and others.
Dylan was then transforming
from folk singer to
rock-and-roller, and “Don’t Look
Back” finds the artist clashing
with journalists and breaking
from his own history, including
Baez, with whom he had com-
prised folk music’s signature cou-
ple. She was his girlfriend at the
start of the movie and ex-girl-
friend by the time the documen-
tary was done, his growing disre-
gard for her unfolding on camera.
Decades later, he would apolo-
gize, saying he feared she would
be “swept up in the madness” of
obituaries
D.A. PENNEBAKER, 94
Documentary maker was a master of cinéma vérité
JORDAN STRAUSS/INVISION/ASSOCIATED PRESS
From left: George Stevens Jr., D.A. Pennebaker, Hal Needham and Jeffrey Katzenberg at the Oscars in 2012. With 1960’s “Primary,” Mr.
Pennebaker helped invent the modern political documentary.KATHY WILLENS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Pennebaker in his New York editing suite in 2000, with images
of Bob Dylan behind him. “Don’t Look Back” became a classic.“The one barometer I
believe in is boredom.
The minute people start
to lose interest,
that’s it.”
D.A. Pennebaker,
talking about filmmakingBY EMILY LANGERRichard B. Stone, a conserva-
tive Florida Democrat who served
one term in the U.S. Senate before
becoming President Ronald Rea-
gan’s special envoy to Central
America amid civil war and un-
rest in El Salvador and Nicaragua,
died July 28 at a rehabilitation
center in Rockville, Md. He was
90.
He had pneumonia and other
ailments, said a son-in-law, Joel
Poznansky. Mr. Stone, who was a
longtime resident of the George-
town neighborhood of Washing-
ton, also served as ambassador to
Denmark during the Republican
administration of George H.W.
Bush and the Democratic admin-
istration of Bill Clinton.
The son of a Belgian-born Jew-
ish builder, Mr. Stone grew up in
the Blackstone hotel in Miami
Beach, a regional landmark that
his family owned and operated
for decades. (The name of the
hotel was an Anglicized version of
his father’s surname at birth,
which meant “black stone.”)
The younger Mr. Stone ran a
lucrative legal practice in Florida
before entering state and then
national politics. To win his Sen-
ate seat in 1974, he formed, ac-
cording to “The Almanac of
American Politics,” an “unlikely
alliance between condominium
dwellers in the Gold Coast and
rural Protestants in the northern
panhandle, having attracted the
latter group by playing the har-
monica and spoons on campaign
trips in north Florida.”
With his election, he became
the first Jewish person sent to the
Senate from the South since the
1880s. (In that era, and until the
ratification of the 17th Amend-
ment to the Constitution in 1913,
senators were not directly elected
but rather named by state legisla-
tures.)
In both his state and national
offices, he supported greater
transparency in government op-
erations — a philosophy that he
demonstrated, his son-in-law
said, by removing the doors to his
personal offices.
Mr. Stone served on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee,
where he represented his many
Cuban-born constituents by
forcefully opposing the Commu-
nist regime of Cuban leader Fidel
Castro and by helping enact legis-
lation that extended $100 million
in aid to Cuban refugees. As chair-
man of the subcommittee with
oversight of Middle Eastern af-
fairs, he was regarded as a strong
advocate for Israeli interests.
Mr. Stone campaigned against
but then ultimately became per-
suaded to support the treaties
that transferred control of the
Panama Canal to Panama, an
issue that he said contributed to
his loss in a primary runoff in
1980.
After his defeat, Mr. Stone sur-
prised some fellow Democrats by
becoming a foreign policy adviser
to the transition team of presi-
dent-elect Reagan, a Republican.
He later was a lobbyist for the
right-wing government of Guate-
mala.
In May 1983, Reagan named
him special envoy for Central
America with the rank of ambas-
sador at large. Mr. Stone, who
spoke Spanish, saw for himself a
limited ambassadorial role amidthe internecine conflicts plaguing
the region.
“My role is to foster and pro-
mote discussions, not to preempt
them,” Mr. Stone said upon his
appointment, according to the
New York Times. “Let’s be a friend
and supporter rather than telling
them what to do. The agenda for
negotiations in Central America
must be maintained by Central
Americans. Efforts by the United
States to be a negotiator could
upset those initiatives.”
He remained in the post for
about nine months, traveling ex-
tensively in the region. He im-pressed the State Department
with his efforts to lead leftist
Salvadoran rebels into negotia-
tions with the Salvadoran govern-
ment but was ultimately unsuc-
cessful, and the bloody conflict
dragged on for nearly another
decade.
Mr. Stone later embarked on an
international tour to bolster sup-
port for Reagan’s policies in Nica-
ragua, where the United States
backed the rebels fighting the
Marxist Sandinista government.
He stepped down in March 1984
amid what The Washington Post
described as “personal and turfdisputes.”
Richard Bernard Stone was
born in New York City on Sept. 22,
1928, and raised in Florida, where
the family moved when he was a
baby. He and his siblings grew up
in the penthouse of their father’s
hotel. Amid the indignities of Jim
Crow-era segregation, his father
supported civil rights by opening
the hotel to a convention of Afri-
can Methodist Episcopal minis-
ters, according to the Miami Her-
ald.
Mr. Stone received a bachelor’s
degree in economics from Har-
vard University in 1949 and a lawdegree from Columbia University
in 1954. He served as city attorney
of Miami in 1966 before joining
the state Senate in 1967 and then
becoming Florida secretary of
state in 1970.
In 1974, he edged out then-Rep.
William D. Gunter in a contest for
the Democratic nomination for
the Senate. Six years later, Gunter
narrowly beat Mr. Stone in the
primary before losing to the Re-
publican nominee, Paula Haw-
kins.
Outside of government, Mr.
Stone held executive-level posi-
tions with Capital Bank and Dart
Group Corp., a company based in
Landover, Md., whose holdings
included Shoppers Food Ware-
house and Crown Books. He acted
as a lobbyist for Taiwan in its
efforts to improve trade with the
United States and also helped
lead the group Democrats for
Bush during then-Vice President
Bush’s 1988 campaign for presi-
dent.
Mr. Stone’s wife of 51 years, the
former Marlene Singer, died in- Survivors include three
children, Nancy Poznansky of
Bethesda, Md., Amelia Stone of
Los Angeles and Elliot Stone of
Miami; two brothers; five grand-
children; and a great-grand-
daughter.
As ambassador to Denmark,
Mr. Stone learned that during
World War II, his residence there
had been used as the home of a
Nazi commandant. He used his
post to honor the memory of the
Danish resistance, remarking to
the Herald, “We took the Nazi
curse off that building pretty ef-
fectively.”
[email protected]
RICHARD B. STONE, 90
Conservative Democrat was special envoy to Central America for Reagan
IRA SCHWARZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Richard B. Stone during his 1983 nomination hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
to become ambassador at large for Central America. He also served as ambassador to Denmark.