Hugh O'Connor (filmmaker)

The death of Hugh O'Connor took place on September 20, 1967. O'Connor, a Canadian television journalist, was filming a coal miner at his rented house in Jeremiah, Letcher County, Kentucky. Hobart Ison, the property owner, arrived and told O'Connor and his crew to leave. Hobart then shot and killed O'Connor. Journalists and filmmakers had descended upon Appalachia in the late 1960s to document the living conditions during the War on Poverty. This offended many residents, who objected to stereotyping and criticism by outsiders, as well as the tendency to show only the poor side of Appalachia.

O'Connor and Ison came to represent the two sides of the conflict: the outsiders who exposed wrongs in hope of righting them and the locals who believed they were only telling one side of the story.

Hobart Ison was born in 1898. His family had moved to Kentucky in the late 19th century, and their wealth was tied to land. During the coal boom of the 1920s, Ison owned several local businesses including a car dealership. However, he lost everything during the Great Depression except the land he had inherited. Ison was often described as eccentric. A lifelong bachelor, he had once been engaged, but his fiancee called off the wedding. Ison had already built a home for them, and chose to leave it unoccupied for 30 years rather than live in it or rent it.

In 1947 Ison used money from the sale of some his land to a railroad company to build a number of rental cottages. By 1967 he was renting them out to mining families for just $10 a month.

Hugh O'Connor was born 1921 in Scotland and worked for the National Film Board of Canada. He was recognized as one of Canada's leading filmmakers. He was known for developing cutting-edge technology in his documentaries, including the five-camera, five-screen film In the Labyrinth, one of the highlights of Montreal's Expo 67. The film split elements across five screens and also combined them for a mosaic of a single image. This inspired Canadian filmmaker Norman Jewison to apply similar techniques to The Thomas Crown Affair. In the Labyrinth was the earliest inspiration for the revolutionary IMAX film format.

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