Feature: Henry Jaglom

Henry Jaglom:
The Last of the True Independents

With Henry Jaglom's 14th feature Going Shopping to be released September 30th in Los Angeles and New York, one of Hollywood's last true mavericks speaks out on Jack, Orson and what it means to be independent.

by Greg Freitas

Henry Jaglom sprinkles the names of Hollywood legends like Orson Welles and Jack Nicholson into his conversation the way someone else would discuss an eccentric uncle. "When we were shooting Someone to Love, Orson suddenly stopped me between takes and said 'Henry, you remind me of an old Eskimo I saw in a documentary. The Eskimo kept carving away at a giant tusk, and finally someone asks him, "What are you making?" And the Eskimo says "I don't know, I'm just trying to find out what's inside."' That's you Henry, you're that old Eskimo, you're just trying to find out what's inside all of us. What's inside our whole culture..." It's a story Jaglom has told before and told well, and he pauses with the timing of an expert raconteur. "I'm just trying to tell the truth about our emotional lives, as I see it. Nothing more."

The truth according to Jaglom has spanned 14 films since 1971, and each has reflected, perhaps more than any other living auteur, the mind and idiosyncratic soul of its director. In a word: independence.

In many ways, Henry Jaglom's story is the history of independent cinema. "When I first started out there were seven studios. And if you didn't make a movie at one of those studios then you couldn't make a movie. It was John Cassavetes that encouraged me to reinvent film to suit my own purposes." Cassavetes and Welles, along with Woody Allen, were seen as the original mavericks, working on a shoestring and never compromising. Cassavetes passed away. And much like Jaglom's mentor Orson Welles, Allen's appetites and public persona eventually dwarfed his modest movies. Jaglom forges on.

Like many great directors, Jaglom is also a huge fan of acting, of actors and their methods. He is an actor himself, a former student at the Actor's Studio and a disciple of Lee Strasberg. Jaglom says it was on the set of his first feature A Safe Place (1971), with Jack Nicholson and Tuesday Weld, that those two exciting performers taught him to really trust his actors. "It's a controlled improvisation. I want the actors to continue the scene, beyond what I have written, with the character in their own mind. I want to be surprised, and when you put two good actors together they will constantly surprise you."

Jaglom seems very excited about his latest discovery. "Her name is Tanna Frederick, I found her casting a play of mine last year, and I knew that I wanted her in my next movie." His next movie, Going Shopping, is scheduled for release in the spring and is sure to please movie fans and hardcore Jaglom fans alike. Then will come the film starring Ms. Frederick - Hollywood Dreams.

Going Shopping, is the third film in what could be considered his Women's Trilogy. "I've always felt closer to women," he says. "My mother permitted me and encouraged me to be surrounded by women, and so I felt their concerns." Part of what drives him as a filmmaker is an attempt to level the playing field in patriarchal Hollywood. "Women's lives are not usually represented in film, partly because movies are still largely made by males. So their lives are not reflected accurately and it's demoralizing."

The first in the series, Eating, starred Frances Bergen, mother of Candice Bergen. The movie, perhaps the only of its kind to delve deeply into the complicated relationship between women and food, debuts on DVD November 30th. The second, Babyfever, delved into the issue women face with their biological clocks. Jaglom recognizes that while shopping is central to many women's sense of identity, it is not on the same emotional plane as food or motherhood. "This is why Going Shopping is primarily a comedy. I'm relating the history of a culture that doesn't really need to worry about finding food. So we have other issues that we deal with and obsess about."

In Going Shopping, Jaglom's longtime muse Victoria Foyt plays Holly G, a chic Melrose shop owner who tries, and mostly fails, to balance the demands on her as a businesswomen, mother, and girlfriend (of Bruce Davison, in the ineffectual male role). It's a well played farce, moved along with brisk, witty dialogue and vivid characterizations. And if the women come off as the particulary high maintenance, self-absorbed types who are only recognizable in a couple of zip codes in LA and NYC, their yen for shopping is universal. As with some of his other features, Jaglom shoots it faux docudrama style, with quick talking head sound bites interspersing the action.

Though Paramount Classics released his most recent film, Festival in Cannes, to great acclaim last year, his own company, Rainbow Releasing, has been responsible for many of his other releases, while at the same time distributing other indie works that Jaglom supports, such as The Life of Brian, and The Holy Grail from the Monty Python troupe, and Maximillian Schell's lyrical documentary ode, My Sister Maria.

Jaglom often finances his films with European investors who he has worked with in the past. "In Germany, France, they know what they're getting in a Henry Jaglom film." But he says he feels no resentment at all towards companies like Miramax, who have brought huge budgets and corporate compromise to his world. "I think the whole rise of indie cinema in the 90s was great. But at the same time I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing. And I'm the only person I know in Hollywood who's completely happy and wouldn't change a thing."

When it is suggested that Jaglom has become the eminence grise of indie directors, he laughs drily. "Well, hopefully more eminence than grise."


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