Henry Jaglom, the uncompromising indie filmmaker who eschewed big-budget productions in order to preserve his creative vision, died Monday night. He was 87.<\/p>\n
Jaglom died at his Santa Monica home surrounded by his family, his daughter Sabrina Jaglom said. The writer-director, whose filmography includes \u201cLast Summer in the Hamptons\u201d and \u201cEating,\u201d was known for his intimate, naturalistic style and foregrounding of women\u2019s stories in his work. <\/p>\n
Sabrina, also a director, said in a statement that her father was \u201clarger-than-life, and made the world a lot more colorful for those of us lucky enough to know him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, most of all, he was the most loving and supportive Dad. He will be greatly missed, but impossible to forget,\u201d she said Thursday.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy movies talk about the emotional side of life,\u201d Jaglom told The Times<\/a> in 2009.<\/p>\n \u201cI just try to have people do what we do, which is sit around, talk, deal with the emotions of life,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Jaglom\u2019s 1985 film, \u201cAlways,\u201d in which he co-starred with his ex-wife Patrice Townsend, was inspired by<\/a> the disintegration of the couple\u2019s own relationship. Jaglom and Townsend divorced two years before the film\u2019s release.<\/p>\n Nearly a decade later, conversations Jaglom had with his second wife, actor Victoria Foyt, about parenthood were distilled into 1994\u2019s \u201cBabyfever,\u201d which the couple wrote, directed and Foyt starred in. <\/p>\n Former Times staff writer Chris Willman called the comedy-drama<\/a> \u201cremarkable in its comprehensive documentary aspects.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJaglom is, as always, big on verite and improvisation; with such a large cast milling about the airy, oceanside house, he\u2019s 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,\u201d Willman wrote in his review of the film. <\/p>\n \u201cBabyfever\u201d was lauded for sincerely engaging with topics affecting women and for starring a mostly female cast \u2014 both of which were trademarks for Jaglom, who went on to form a women\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen are the most disenfranchised people in this business,\u201d he told The Times<\/a> in 1987. \u201cThey still have to play mostly by men\u2019s rules. And as I\u2019ve been successfully making million-dollar movies for some time now I thought: \u2018Why can\u2019t they do it too?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Jaglom was a mentee and close confidant of acclaimed filmmaker and actor Orson Welles, whose farewell performance came in Jaglom\u2019s 1987 comedy \u201cSomeone to Love,\u201d which screened at the Cannes Film Festival.<\/p>\n \u201cHe plays himself, shedding even the persona he adopted for TV talk shows,\u201d Jaglom told The Times<\/a> of Welles\u2019 acting style in the film. \u201cPeople will finally get to see him the way I knew him; it\u2019s almost as if he was sitting there having lunch with you.\u201d<\/p>\n Peter Biskind compiled conversations between the longtime friends for his popular 2013 book, \u201cMy Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.\u201d <\/p>\n Several people approached Jaglom about publishing the taped conversations before Biskind came knocking, the director told The Times<\/a> in 2013. But Biskind was the first one he took seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018You want to put yourself through all this?\u2019\u201d Jaglom said. \u201cAnd he said, \u2018Yeah, on the one condition that you don\u2019t censor me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Jaglom, born in London in 1938, was the child of Jewish parents who immigrated to England to escape Nazi persecution. Later, Jaglom\u2019s family moved to New York, where Jaglom spent his formative years and returned after attending the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n In New York, Jaglom trained with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, acting in and directing off-Broadway theater<\/a> and cabaret before moving to Hollywood in the late 1960s. The multihyphenate went on to make his directorial debut in 1971 with \u201cA Safe Place,\u201d which starred Welles and Jack Nicholson.<\/p>\n