Nicolas Noxon dies at 79; Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker

Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker Nicolas Noxon, who, with his late partner Irwin Rosten, was dubbed “one of the finest” young filmmakers in the nonfiction genre by a Times critic, died May 3 at his home in Westlake Village.

The cause was pancreatic cancer. He was 79.

Noxon made National Geographic specials beginning in the 1960s, during an era of exploding public appetite for documentaries. He also set up a documentary unit at MGM with Rosten. Over a four-decade career, he wrote and produced dozens of programs.

“He was Mr. National Geographic,” said friend and fellow filmmaker Robert Kenner. “It was not that he broke a new style, more that he knew how to connect with a large audience.... He had the enthusiasm and joy of a little boy.”

Noxon won Emmys for his National Geographic specials “The Great Whales” and “Tigers of the Snow” and numerous other laurels. Among the popular works he helped make were television documentaries on Louis S.B. Leakey’s discoveries in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania and the wreck of the Titanic in a special called “Secrets of the Titanic.”

His work “had a simple elegance to it,” said friend and colleague Steven Reich. “It wasn’t sensational; it was just compelling.”

Dennis B. Kane, Noxon’s former boss and friend, said Noxon was a thorough researcher and “a delight to work with because he knew what he was doing. So many people sort of fake it.”

Noxon once joked in The Times that trying to sell a documentary and get it aired on television was “by strict logic, impossible.”

“In many minds,” he wrote, “documentary is a synonym for all that is lifeless and depressing.” The form was, in fact, more entertaining than much that passed for drama on TV, he argued.

Noxon was born July 29, 1936, in London and raised in Canada. His mother, Betty Lane, was a painter, and his father, Gerald Forbes Noxon, was a writer. He studied filmmaking at Antioch College in Ohio.

He is survived by his wife, Nicky Noxon, his five children — producer Marti Noxon, writer Christopher Noxon, Carlton Dodd, Traci Norris and Megan Weaver — and 11 grandchildren.

jill.leovy@latimes.com