Henry Jaglom, the uncompromising indie filmmaker who eschewed big-budget productions in order to preserve his creative vision, died Monday night. He was 87.
Jaglom died at his Santa Monica home surrounded by his family, his daughter Sabrina Jaglom said. The writer-director, whose filmography includes “Last Summer in the Hamptons” and “Eating,” was known for his intimate, naturalistic style and foregrounding of women’s stories in his work.
Sabrina, also a director, said in a statement that her father was “larger-than-life, and made the world a lot more colorful for those of us lucky enough to know him.”
“But, most of all, he was the most loving and supportive Dad. He will be greatly missed, but impossible to forget,” she said Thursday.
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From his earliest directing gigs, Jaglom was committed to creating autobiographically inspired and emotionally resonant stories with as little studio intervention as possible. He kept costs low, cast his friends and family in his movies and pursued an improvisational production style that preceded the early-2000s film genre mumblecore.
“My movies talk about the emotional side of life,” Jaglom told The Times in 2009.
“I just try to have people do what we do, which is sit around, talk, deal with the emotions of life,” he said. “It can be touching, sad, happy, but it allows people to go through some of what they go through in life and not feel isolated and lonely.”
Jaglom’s 1985 film, “Always,” in which he co-starred with his ex-wife Patrice Townsend, was inspired by the disintegration of the couple’s own relationship. Jaglom and Townsend divorced two years before the film’s release.
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Nearly a decade later, conversations Jaglom had with his second wife, actor Victoria Foyt, about parenthood were distilled into 1994’s “Babyfever,” which the couple wrote, directed and Foyt starred in.
Former Times staff writer Chris Willman called the comedy-drama “remarkable in its comprehensive documentary aspects.”
“Jaglom is, as always, big on verite and improvisation; with such a large cast milling about the airy, oceanside house, he’s managed to cover just about every conceivable baby base, with sentiments ranging from banal self-interest to self-conscious belly laughs, and a lot of very real, undeniably affecting poignancy in-between,” Willman wrote in his review of the film.
“Babyfever” was lauded for sincerely engaging with topics affecting women and for starring a mostly female cast — both of which were trademarks for Jaglom, who went on to form a women’s arm to HHH Rainbow Productions, his production company with producers Howard Zucker and Henry Lange, which for many years was located on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.
“Women are the most disenfranchised people in this business,” he told The Times in 1987. “They still have to play mostly by men’s rules. And as I’ve been successfully making million-dollar movies for some time now I thought: ‘Why can’t they do it too?’”
Jaglom was a mentee and close confidant of acclaimed filmmaker and actor Orson Welles, whose farewell performance came in Jaglom’s 1987 comedy “Someone to Love,” which screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
“He plays himself, shedding even the persona he adopted for TV talk shows,” Jaglom told The Times of Welles’ acting style in the film. “People will finally get to see him the way I knew him; it’s almost as if he was sitting there having lunch with you.”
Peter Biskind compiled conversations between the longtime friends for his popular 2013 book, “My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.”
Several people approached Jaglom about publishing the tapes before Biskind came knocking, the director told The Times in 2013. But Biskind was the first one he took seriously.
“I said, ‘You want to put yourself through all this?'” Jaglom said. “And he said, ‘Yeah, on the one condition that you don’t censor me.'”
Jaglom, born in London in 1938, was the child of Jewish parents who immigrated to England to escape Nazi persecution. Later, Jaglom’s family moved to New York, where Jaglom spent his formative years and returned after attending the University of Pennsylvania.
In New York, Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, acting in and directing off-Broadway theater and cabaret before moving to Hollywood in the late 1960s. The multihyphenate went on to make his directorial debut in 1971 with “A Safe Place,” which starred Wells and Jack Nicholson.
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After finding commercial success with his third film, “Sitting Ducks” (1980), Jaglom told The Times in 1987 that he was pitched by several big-time studio heads who said, “’When you’re ready to make a serious movie, a big movie, come and see me.’”
“I said: ‘If you love my films why would you want me to come and make one of your big ones?’” Jaglom said, adding that with a large studio at the helm, directors run the risk of ceding the “final cut.”
“As far as I’m concerned all the big stars and fancy limos and fine dressing rooms aren’t worth a thing if you don’t control your film creatively,” he said.
For years, Henry ate at the same cafe on Santa Monica’s Montana Avenue. He was always delighted when fans and aspiring filmmakers stopped to say hello.
In addition to Sabrina, Jaglom is survived by a son, Simon Jaglom, and ex-wives Townsend and Foyt, Sabrina and Simon’s mother.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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