Mel Stuart, an award-winning documentarian who also directed "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," has died. He was 83.
His daughter, Madeline Stuart, said he died Thursday night of cancer at his home in Los Angeles.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Stuart was associated with David L. Wolper, with whom he established a base of West Coast documentary production at a time when New York filmmakers and TV networks' news divisions dominated the field.
Stuart's documentaries during those years include "The Making of the President 1960," for which he won an Emmy, as well as subsequent explorations of the campaigns in 1964 and 1968. Other programs were "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and the Oscar-nominated "Four Days in November."
His groundbreaking 1973 film "Wattstax" focused on the Wattstax music festival of the previous year and Los Angeles' Watts community in the aftermath of the 1965 riots.