Celebrity Biographies
Leon Gast
He received the Oscar for best documentary for “When We Were Kings.” The filmmaker specialized in the genre, Leon Gast, passed away on March 8, 2021, at the age of 85, according to another prestigious director, Barbara Kopple, with whom he had a friendly relationship. No further details of the death are known at this time.
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1936, Leon Gast studied drama at Columbia University. He combined classes with a job as a cameraman on the television series High Adventure with Lowell Thomas . After finishing, he continued to accept jobs in the audiovisual industry while excelling in the field of still photography, selling snapshots to prestigious magazines, such as Vogue, Squire and Harper’s Bazaar.
In 1974, Leon Gast was in Kinshasha, taking photos of a music festival, when he decided to shoot everything that happened around the historic fight that was going to take place there between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
In 1974, he was in Kinshasa to film a music festival when he decided to focus on the Ali-Foreman fight. He returned to the United States with almost 100,000 meters of film, but lacked the resources to complete a documentary, which led him to archive the material and work on other productions, such as The Grateful Dead Movie ( 1977), which he co-directed with Jerry Garcia, and Hell’s Angels Forever (1983), which he co-directed with Richard Chase and Kevin Keating.
He received numerous lawsuits to prevent him from publishing his work on the boxing match, from boxing promoter Don King, music promoter Lloyd Price, and distributor Hank Schwarz. However, producer David Sonenberg acquired the rights to the film two decades after the sporting event, and premiered the documentary at Sundance.
After When We Were Kings won the Academy Award, Leon Gast achieved immense prestige. His later projects included Smash His Camera (2010), a pioneering paparazzi portrait Ron Galella, for which he won Best Director of a Documentary at Sundance, and Manny , about Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
Gast is survived by his wife, Geri.