Henry Jaglom

With their punchy, volatile "Who Is Henry Jaglom?," documentarians H. Alex Rubin and Jeremy Workman have come up with an answer worthy of one of America's most idiosyncratic and important independent filmmakers. They whip up lots of debate over Jaglom's talent or lack of same that's fun but is not to be taken seriously. That's because Jaglom, a filmmaker for 25 years, has been around long enough that his work is beginning to stand the test of time.

Director Henry Jaglom was a friend of Orson Welles for several years before his death, and also considered Welles a mentor. What follows are excerpts from Jaglom's journal from 1985, from the days surrounding Welles' death on Oct. 11 of that year. Saturday afternoon at lunch, Orson told me that the attacks were beginning to come in, in response to the books recently out on him, especially Barbara Leaming's wonderfully supportive--and to his mind, largely accurate--biography.

It's been awhile now since jokesters regarded Alan Alda as the poster boy--or whipping boy--for extreme male sensitivity. Though director Henry Jaglom probably isn't mainstream enough to ever rate a "Tonight Show" gag, he seems to have taken up the Alda memorial mantle, releasing movies you could justifiably call "women's pictures," albeit not the kind Douglas Sirk used to make.

Tom Rolla's Gardenia Restaurant and Lounge is the sort of place where you hear testimonials like, "This is one of the few truly intimate, '30s-style elegant boites in L.A. That's b - o - i - t - e ." Although elegant is stretching it, the Gardenia is tiny, boite -like and definitely something of a throwback, where spelling in French goes with the territory.

People who get most of their ideas about love and romance from the movies usually risk disappointment. Yet, in "Venice/Venice" (Music Hall, NuWilshire), Henry Jaglom happily runs the risk. He plays a moody, prickly, woman-obsessed independent American filmmaker who strikes up a romance with a French journalist (Nelly Alard, of "Eating") at the Venice Film Festival--and then has to decide whether to make the fantasy a reality.

"The Famine Within," which starts today at the NuWilshire, is a documentary about women and food, a subject already covered, in fictional terms, by Henry Jaglom's amused, affectionate "Eating." In "Famine," the same obsessions are examined from a broader perspective: sociocultural, psychological, radical-political.

Henry Jaglom manifests the newest incarnation of McCarthyism in his Feb. 25 Counterpunch article when he implies that those who opposed the Gulf War did so only because it was our government policy. Through this device he automatically disposes of any serious examination of the reasons underlying opposition to the war. Few would disagree with Jaglom's characterization of Saddam Hussein. Yet most peace advocates--recognizing that 90% of the casualties in modern warfare are civilians and that military conflicts ultimately create far more problems than they solve--oppose war as a means of resolving differences.

For 33 years she was married to the man once affectionately dubbed "Charlie McCarthy's stooge." Then, as her beautiful, willful daughter became a movie star, the ventriloquist's wife turned into Candy Bergen's mom. "(My mother) had serious doubts that she alone had ever existed on her own," Candice Bergen wrote in her 1984 autobiography. "She had acted on television and was an accomplished singer--a woman of abilities and ambition; instead she felt like Mildred Pierce."

Henry Jaglom is worried. All kinds of people who never like his movies have been telling him they love his latest "New Year's Day," and he wonders if that's a bad sign. Has he sold out? Has he gotten slick, glossy, false? What could he have possibly done to please people who usually regard his work as awkward, amateurish, over-personal or indulgent? Where did he go wrong? Or right? "I always expect more resistance (to) my movies," says Jaglom, about the early reactions at screenings.