My Lunches with Orson Read Free

seem to matter to him, so long as they put money in the bank, although hustling like this took its toll. He made Paul Masson a household name by intoning the slogan, “We will sell no wine before its time.” (Outtakes of an inebriated Welles slurring his way through one of these commercials can be seen on YouTube.) But even Paul Masson turned him out when a slimmed down Welles reportedly explained on a talk show that he had given up snacks—and wine.
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    Henry Jaglom was born into a family of wealthy German and Russian émigrés. His father, Simon, was imprisoned after the 1917 Russian revolution for being a “capitalist,” and left the Soviet Union with his brothers shortly thereafter, eventually making his way to London, where Henry was born in 1941, and then to New York City, where he grew up. He never knew exactly what his father did for a living, but when he applied to the University of Pennsylvania and was asked his father’s occupation, Simon told him, “Write international commerce and finance.”
    Jaglom studied at the Actors Studio, and then joined the mid-1960s migration from New York to Los Angeles, where his friend Peter Bogdanovich had promised him the lead in his first feature, Targets (1968), a role Bogdanovich later decided to play himself. His acting career ended abruptly when he was washing his feet in the sink of his apartment and the phone rang, the caller notifying him that Dustin Hoffman had gotten the lead in The Graduate (1967), a role he was convinced he was born to play. He muttered an epithet and turned his attention to writing and directing.
    In the wake of a worldwide explosion of film culture in the 1960s, movies became the medium of choice for aspiring artists. Under the sway of the French, Jaglom, like many of his contemporaries, wanted to do it all: not just act or write, but edit, direct, and produce as well. They didn’t want to be directors for hire by some baboon in the front office with a big, fat cigar; they wanted to be filmmakers or, as the French would have it, auteurs , a term popularized in America by Andrew Sarris in the sixties. Simply put, an auteur was to a film what a poet was to poetry or a painter was to painting. Sarris argued, controversially, that even studio directors such as Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, or bottom-of-the-bill toilers like Sam Fuller, displayed personal styles, were the sole authors of their pictures, and were therefore authentic artists. Welles, of course, was the very avatar of an auteur . Jaglom and his friends venerated him as the godfather of the so-called New Hollywood. He recalls, “We used to talk about him as the patron saint of this new wave of filmmaking.”
    Partial to long, colorful scarves and floppy hats, Jaglom swiftly fell into bad company. He smoked dope at the Old World Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard with Jack Nicholson and was drawn into the orbit of Bert Schneider. Schneider, along with Bob Rafelson, had made a lot of money off the Monkees, and with the addition of Steve Blauner, ran a small production company called BBS. Schneider gave Jaglom a crack at editing the company’s second picture, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider (1969).
    Easy Rider was a hit, and BBS was on its way. Jaglom discovered in himself the ability to talk people into things they didn’t want to do. On the basis of his work on Easy Rider , he convinced Schneider to allow him to finance his first feature, A Safe Place (1971), with Nicholson and Tuesday Weld. Jaglom was desperate to add Welles to the cast. Bogdanovich was conducting a series of exhaustive interviews with Welles that would become a book and had become very friendly with him. Jaglom asked his friend to introduce the two of them. Bogdanovich warned him, “He won’t do it.”
    â€œWell, tell me where he is, and I’ll go meet him.”
    â€œHe’s in New York at the Plaza