Saul Swimmer

• Name — Saul Swimmer • Born — 25 April 1936 • Birthplace — Uniontown, Pennsylvania • Died — 3 March 2007 • Place of death — Miami, Florida • Known for — The Concert for Bangladesh The Boy Who Owned a Melephant • Occupation — Documentarian, director, producer

Born to a Uniontown, Pennsylvania, family that included a sister, Esther, and three brothers, Wolford and Alvin, and Herbert, Swimmer earned a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University in nearby Pittsburgh. He began directing in his early twenties, gaining attention for his half-hour children's short The Boy Who Owned a Melephant (1959), narrated by actress Tallulah Bankhead and produced with Peter Gayle and Tony Anthony, who would become his frequent collaborators. Swimmer's biography at his company's website states the film won a Gold Leaf award at the Venice Film Festival, a claim that subsequently appears in many accounts, but that festival has no such award; in actuality, this award was from the Venice International Children's Film Festival. Following that short, Swimmer directed and, with Anthony, co-wrote the independent features Force of Impulse (1961), a Romeo and Juliet story about a high school football player who turns to robbery, filmed in Miami Beach, Florida, and Without Each Other (1962). The film was co-produced by Allen Klein and Peter Gayle with the film financed by Gayle's family's business.

Swimmer developed the MobileVision Projection System, a pre-IMAX giant-screen technology for projecting movies on a 60x80-foot screen. Swimmer said that after the 1991 death of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury, MovileVision distributed We Will Rock You in 20 countries. His final work was the documentary Bob Marley & Friends, completed in 2005 and distributed beginning in 2006 after Swimmer worked on it for more than five years, using footage of the 1977 Rainbow concert in London, England that had been discovered in a London storage vault bombed by the Irish Republican Army. 2007.

Swimmer, who moved to the Miami-area Key Biscayne, Florida, in the 1980s and to nearby Coral Gables, Florida in the 1990s, died of heart failure at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami on March 3, 2007.