Michael Laughlin, a writer and filmmaker who produced the cult 1970s road movie “Two-Lane Blacktop,” died Oct. 20 in his Kailua home.
Laughlin, 82, died of complications related to COVID-19, said Lulu Sylbert, his hanai stepdaughter and New York resident who was at his bedside when he died.
“Michael was a man of incredible charm and eccentricity,” said Sylbert, who is the daughter of Laughlin’s former partner, Hawaii author Susanna Moore, and Hollywood producer Richard Sylbert. She said she lived with Moore and Laughlin from age 1 until they separated when she was 15.
Laughlin was a bon vivant and Hollywood networker who threw great parties, Sylbert said, and after he moved to Hawaii in 1999 his Christmas cards pictured him on the lawn beside his Maunawili pool, surrounded by young women in bikinis, or hitting a golf ball toward Mount Olomana.
But, she added, he also knew how to be there for a child.
“He was a really fun stepfather, game for anything and, in terms of his parenting, pretty loose,” said Sylbert, who acted in two of his science fiction movies when she was 6 and 8 years old.
“But he was really good at being my friend. He spent time with me on my level,” she said.
Laughlin was a generous friend, mentor and meticulous dresser who loved youth, high style, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, cigarettes, Champagne and golf, said Honolulu native Brooke Nasser, a teacher of journalism and English at Kalani High School who worked on screenplays and film development with him.
He let his house be used for fashion shoots and the annual party of Kailua skateboard shop 808 Skate, Nasser said, and “his ‘Club 968’ parties (named for his street address) at Maunawili have a cult following and the infamous kidney-shaped pool has been featured in many late-night Instagram stories.”
There were quiet times, as well: “Every year during the week of the Masters (golf tournament),” Nasser said, Laughlin “demanded absolute silence and would watch (it on television) alone, with enough Zippy’s chili and chocolate truffles to get him to Sunday.”
Sylbert said Laughlin also enjoyed going out to Duk’s Bistro in Chinatown, “which he called the Rick’s Cafe of Honolulu,” Baci Bistro and Alan Wong’s, “always in a beautiful Brooks Brothers pinstripe suit, tinted Raybans and custom Converse sneakers, with a wad of cash in a monogrammed Tiffanys money clip.”
His style cleaved to his favorite era, the 1950s-1960s, she said, adding, “Michael was never a hippie. He never wore a pair of bluejeans in his life.”
Born on Nov. 28, 1938, and raised in Minonk, Ill., where his parents Donald and Hazel Laughlin owned several farms, Laughlin was recruited to play basketball at Stanford University but left his freshman year and graduated from Principia College in Elsah, Ill., in 1960. After college, he went to Los Angeles and then to London, where he met and married French dancer and film star Leslie Caron, who had two children by her previous husband, Sir Peter Hall.
In London in 1967 he produced “The Whisperers,” starring Dame Edith Evans and directed by Bryan Forbes, and in 1968 he produced “Joanna” starring Genevieve Waite and directed by Michael Sarne.
The couple moved to Los Angeles, and Laughlin produced “Two-Lane Blacktop,” starring Laurie Bird, Warren Oates, and James Taylor and directed by Monte Hellman. The film, which some critics found confusing and others praised for its deliberately styled ’50s B-movie effect, was entered into the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress in 2012.
Laughlin and Caron separated in 1975, and in 1976 when Sylbert was 1, she said, Laughlin invited Moore, who had separated from Sylbert’s father, to live with him in London.
The family of three lived in London, Los Angeles and New York, but came to Hawaii yearly to see Moore’s family, Sylbert said.
They temporarily relocated to New Zealand and Australia during the filming of two sci-fi movies in which Sylbert played a half-human, half-alien child: “Strange Behavior” (1981) featuring Academy-award winner Louise Fletcher and Michael Murphy, and “Strange Invaders” (1983) starring Nancy Allen and Michael Lerner. Sylbert later wrote and directed “Mesmerized” (1985), starring Jodie Foster and John Lithgow.
In 1996, Laughlin authored “Radical Golf: How to Lower Your Score and Raise Your Enjoyment of the Game,” published by Crown.
After separating from Moore, Laughlin moved to Hawaii in 1999 and wrote screenplays for Hollywood studios, including “Town & Country” (2001) starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn.
“He loved the Hawaii that my mom knew in the ’50s,” Sylbert said. “He described it as people wearing white cotton. He never went to the beach.”
Although Laughlin and her mother never married, “Michael always described himself as my stepfather and sometimes as my father,” she said, “and I remember feeling more flattered than anything.”
Happy memories included staying at the Ritz in Paris, where he took her to lunch at the Savoy when she was 3, and lunches at Bob’s Big Burgers in Los Angeles. “He liked fancy places and dives, a combination of high and low,” she said.
He taught her to appreciate the films of Alfred Hitchcock when she was 4 and to jitterbug when she was 5.
But Sylbert, now a professor of film and English at Brooklyn College and a mother of two, said Laughlin’s style of parenting led to disappointment and hardship when, as an undergraduate, she followed his advice to drop out of Columbia University to try to be an actress.
“All the fun’s been had,” Sylbert remembered saying, after she’d posed for head shots at a studio where portraits of stars from the ’60s and ’70s lined the walls, and while Laughlin replied that wasn’t true, she sensed he secretly agreed.
In Laughlin’s later years in Hawaii, Sylbert said, “He wasn’t really interested in people his own age anymore, He said old people just talk about their health and he wanted to find out what was happening now.”
One of his many young friends told her Laughlin loved to take her into the fanciest boutiques — “Hermes, Chanel, Vuitton (he, dressed to the nines, as always) — and proudly tell the sales staff, ‘Bring us the cheapest thing in the store.’”
Sylbert added he was charming and generous with his time equally to people of all ages, circumstances and walks of life.
Nasser said her parents loved Laughlin, who dined with her family every Christmas Eve for the last 10 years.
“I always called him ‘the Last Gentleman’ because he epitomized an era that is now gone,” she said. “He will be missed.”
In addition to Sylbert, Laughlin is survived by stepchildren Christopher Hall and Jennifer Caron Hall, of London.
Sylbert said Laughlin did not want a memorial service, but donations towards purchasing a headstone, to place alongside his parents’ graves in Bloomington, Ill., can be made at club968.vip.
