Henry Jaglom — the indie filmmaker behind A Safe Place, Déjà Vu, and Can She Bake a Cherry Pie — has died. He was 87. His daughter, Sabrina Jaglom, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that he died at home in Santa Monica. “My dad was the most loving, fun, entertaining and unique father and the biggest cheerleader and champion anyone could be lucky enough to have,” she said.
Jaglom came to Hollywood at the behest of Peter Bogdonovich. He wanted Jaglom to play a role in Targets, a role which Bogdonovich wound up casting himself in. But once in LA, Jaglom got chummy with the New Hollywood kids coming up through Roger Corman’s AIP. He befriended Jack Nicholson, and wound up helping to edit Easy Rider. Jaglom became a studio-eschewing writer-director, making films starring New Hollywood folks like Dennis Hopper, Karen Black, and Nicholson.
But Jaglom was known for being a man-about-town in Los Angeles almost as much as for his films. He had a standing lunch date with Orson Welles for the last two years of the film titan’s life. Jaglom recorded these lunches, which Peter Biskind later condensed into the book My Lunches With Orson. That quote of Welles throwing monumental shade at Woody Allen, which circulates on social media basically any time Allen does anything? From My Lunches With Orson.
Besides eating at Ma Maison, Jaglom and Welles worked together on films. The latter’s final acting performance came in Jaglom’s Someone to Love in 1987. Jaglom acted in Welles’s final movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which was finally released in 2018.
Related
- From the Time Capsule: Lunch Conversations With Orson Welles
- Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind Is a Meta-Masterpiece
Jaglom was a writer, director, editor, and great conversationalist.
