On August 1, at the age of 77, one of the Hollywood’s most impressive filmmakers died. Reports dropped on several sites, but the news cycle went on, and Jonathan Kaplan‘s name faded from the headlines. I believe his work, however, deserves longer reflection.
IndieWire’s own Anne Thompson connected me to Kaplan’s daughter Molly, who in turn directed me to some of Kaplan’s closest friends and colleagues. Thanks to their participation, I was able to stitch together remembrances that better describe Kaplan than a simple obituary or list of credits could accomplish.
We are talking about a resume, though, that includes some buzzy titles — “Unlawful Entry,” “Bad Girls,” and a series you might have heard of called “E.R” among them. He was nominated for five Emmys. He directed Jodie Foster to her first Oscar win in 1988’s “The Accused.” “Love Field,” in 1992, brought Michelle Pfeiffer her third nomination.
“Jonathan really excelled as a director of actresses,” producing partner and NYU film professor Ken Friedman said. “I marveled at the performance he got, obviously, with Jodie Foster in ‘The Accused’ and ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ with Bonnie Bedelia. This is the exceptional work in their careers. He’s a good storyteller, obviously, but I think he deserves a footnote in the books of books about directors for his working with actresses.”
Friedman’s life first intersected with Kaplan’s 60 years ago, when the pair were graduate film students at NYU. He described Kaplan as the hippie and himself as the aspiring avant garde filmmaker.
“We knew each other, but we didn’t become friends,” Friedman said. “Both [our] films that we were working on won or shared first prize in the National Student Film Festival, sponsored by Schlitz beer. We hit the road together and had kind of a road show where we showed the movies […] and we got to hang out on the trip and became really good friends.”
As time went on, their friendship only got stronger. “We had similar ideas of what makes good movies,” he said. The two would go on to work together on six films, including Friedman’s current favorite, which he admits “changes week to week.”
“As a complete piece of work, ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ stands out. And that really was a good movie. We enjoyed making ‘White Line Fever.’ And even though it was a lower budget independent — an independent movie with Columbia — we were very affectionate toward film, filmmaking, and westerns, and gave us opportunity to comment upon the thing we love doing,” he said.
Director Allan Arkush was also an NYU student with Kaplan in the late ’60s. “We took a class called American Cinema based on the [Andrew] Sarris book,” he said. “The teacher was a 27-year-old Martin Scorsese, the films he ran became a lifetime auteur touchstone [for Kaplan].”
He said Kaplan’s biggest influences were “Shock Corridor,” “The Searchers,” “The Big Heat,” “The Band Wagon,” “Force of Evil,” “Johnny Guitar,” and “El Dorado.” Arkush recalled that they later screened some of these classics in their backyard on 16mm for their families. “We ran them for our daughters who yelled at us to stop ooo-ing and ah-ing over movies we had seen at least 20 times,” Arkush said, adding that the two of them “often felt like the characters in ‘Two Weeks in Another Town,’” a Vincente Minnelli film about a location shoot in Italy.
In a statement provided to IndieWire, Scorsese himself said:
“Many years back, I taught a class at NYU. I had some very talented students, and Jonathan Kaplan was one of the most passionate. He and Allan Arkush, Jon Davison, and Joe Dante were the ones with the greatest love for movies. I mean, they really loved movies. All different kinds of movies. And they loved Hollywood, past and present. Jonathan actually grew up in the heart of the business. His father was the composer Sol Kaplan (and his uncle was Van Heflin), and he lived in Hollywood as a child until his father was blacklisted and his family moved to New York. I liked Jonathan so much as a person, and early on I could see that he was quite a filmmaker — his student picture ‘Stanley’ was really striking. When Roger Corman called me to ask if I had any young directors I could recommend, I immediately thought of Jonathan. He started for Roger with ‘Night Call Nurses,’ worked his way up to ‘Truck Turner’ with Isaac Hayes (produced by Roger’s brother Gene), then he moved on to make a series of excellent pictures including ‘Over the Edge,’ ‘Heart Like a Wheel’ and ‘The Accused,’ for which Jodie Foster won an Oscar. It really saddens me to know that Jonathan is gone. He was a very special filmmaker and a wonderful human being.”
“Jonathan was pretty unique in my experience,” Davison, the aforementioned classmate, told IndieWire. “He had a fierce intelligence and was very funny. He was a people-person and could empathize with a wide variety of his characters which gave his pictures a lot of warmth. His best work is very energetic and doesn’t lag. He kept things moving on the set and on the screen. Being a child of the blacklist, he wasn’t lazy about the politics of his pictures, either. Actors and audiences were in good hands with Jonathan directing.”
Like Scorsese described above, Kaplan was a prodigy with old Hollywood roots. He even acted when he was a kid, working with legends like Elia Kazan and Elaine May. After his classes at NYU, he moved to Los Angeles, where he became what his daughter called part of “the Roger Corman school of filmmaking.”
“River’s Edge” director Tim Hunter described Kaplan as a “populist filmmaker,” but said that Kaplan would be quick to point out the description was “not in the Trumpian sense.”
“He was big-hearted, exuberant, smarter than anyone and he always knew what felt most real, on and off a set. A lot of his best films are about working and blue collar class heroes,” Hunter said. “For a liberal red diaper baby growing up amid the blacklist and theatre communities of NY city and going to a progressive school (Walden), in his best films he became a poet of the western working class — as comfortable with blaxploitation pictures and redneck trucker action pix as more serious films about underrepresented classes, women, and disenfranchised teens. That’s when he was at his best.”
Hunter also talked about the banger, “needledrop” soundtracks in movies like “Over the Edge” and “Heart Like a Wheel,” which include songs such as “You Really Got Me” by Van Halen and “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” by The Byrds. Appropriately, he would also direct music videos for major artists like Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart, and John Mellencamp.
“People loved him even when he occasionally blew up on the set — they knew he had their backs, was really good, really skillful, and knew exactly what he was doing,” Hunter added. “In the same way he advocated for the characters in his films, he was protective of his actors and the crews he worked with, and they all knew it, trusted him and loved him.”
The impact he made on these colleagues and friends is undeniable, and Friedman said it had ripple effects on each successive generation of aspiring filmmakers. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years, and I still would refer students to Jonathan to get a sense of the business. I think he was incredibly generous with his time and his opinions and his care,” he said.
And that love was, of course, gifted to Kaplan from his talented family — particularly his father, composer Sol Kaplan. “I think the first recording session I went to was when I was like 4-years-old,” Kaplan told Bobby Wygant in 1992. “I think that makes such a strong impression that, you know, now that I look back on it, I see that I didn’t really have any choice [but to go into filmmaking].”
To close out with words from the great director himself, here’s the full, perfectly wonderful, interview with Wygant.
Well done, Mr. Kaplan.
