Filmmaker Les Blank dies at 77 Les Blank, a renowned independent filmmaker who made acclaimed documentaries on musicians and won a BAFTA for his film about Werner Herzog, has died at the age of 77. Harrod Blank says his father, whose 42 films earned him a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, died of bladder cancer yesterday at his home in California. Leslie Harrod Blank Jr, the son of a real estate developer, was born on November 27, 1935, in Tampa, Florida. Blank's early films were intimate portraits of musicians, including a 1965 study of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and a 1968 film about blues guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins. He made movies about the Texas blues guitarist Hot Pepper (1973), which features the zydeco accordionist Clifton Chenier; and Sprout Wings and Fly (1983), about the Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell. He also made a 31-minute film with Huey Lewis and a movie with Ry Cooder (Ry Cooder And The Moula Banda Rhythm Aces). He shifted his focus to food with documentaries, including 1980's highy-praised Garlic is as Good as 10 Mothers (he occasionally promoted what he called 'smellovision' or 'aromaround', cooking up garlic-spiced dishes in the cinema while the movie played), which was selected by the US Library Of Congress for inclusion in The National Film Registry. He also made 2007's All in This Tea and In Heaven There is No Beer, which won the Sundance Film Festival's Special Jury Prize. But Blank's best-known work was on fellow filmmaker Werner Herzog, including 1982's Burden of Dreams, where Blank's behind-the-scenes view of the making of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo in Peru became a classic chronicle of artistic obsession. It won a BAFTA for Best Documentary. He had made an earlier film with Herzog called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), in which Herzog eats his boiled shoe after losing a bet with fellow filmmaker Errol Morris. The man who had studied English, at Tulane University in New Orleans, was always coming up with original, witty titles for his films, including: God Respects Us When We Work But Loves Us When We Dance A Poem Is A Naked Person Gap-Toothed Women and Running Around Like A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off. Blank is survived by his sons Harrod and Beau, a daughter, Ferris Robinson, and three grandchildren. Robert Ebert had called him "a brilliant filmmaker," and director Taylor Hackford told the New York Times today: "I think he's a national treasure. Although his films are not well known at the moment, they'll take their place. Films are great when they live a long time, and I think Les will live.