Documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles dies at 88

(The Hollywood Reporter)Albert Maysles, who collaborated along with his late brother David in a documentary film career that included the troubling 1970 concert documentary “Gimme Shelter,” has died. He was 88.

The director and cinematographer, an Oscar nominee, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan of natural causes, Stacey Farrar, marketing director at the Maysles Center in New York, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.

“Gimme Shelter” — which chronicled the 1969 Rolling Stones tour that culminated in the Altamont Free Concert, in which a fan brandishing a gun was stabbed to death by a Hells Angels security man — stood in a stark and more enduring counterpoint to the myth of the documentary “Woodstock,” a depiction of the glorified 1969 free concert whose own dark side was left out in its pre-conceived, celebratory style.

Their most well-known film, “Grey Gardens” (1975), was a profile of Jacqueline Onassis’ eccentric cousins — mother and daughter Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier — who lived in a dilapidated, cat-packed estate in East Hampton, New York. The brothers worked with fellow directors Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer on the film, which was remade as a Tony-winning Broadway play and as an award-winning 2009 HBO drama that starred Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

Just prior to “Gimme Shelter,” they filmed “Salesman” (1969), which covered six weeks in the lives of four door-to-door Bible salesmen.

The brothers, who preferred the moniker of filmmaker rather than director, often focused on musical figures. Maysles

Article source: http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/06/entertainment/feat-obit-albert-maysles-gimme-shelter-thr/