Every journalist has favorite interview subjects, people who are so interesting and give such good quotes that you look forward to having an excuse to talk with them again and again.
Dominick Dunne is near the top of my list because no one tells a story better than him and few have as many good stories to tell. I’ve always wished that he wrote more books so that I would have more occasions to interview him.
The wonderful new documentary, “After the Party” (Mercury Media), takes us behind-the-scenes of the novelist and Vanity Fair correspondent’s life during his coverage of the first Phil Spector trial in Los Angeles in 2007.
Australian filmmakers Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley got Dunne to agree to be followed while he lived at the Chateau Marmont and went back and forth to the courtrooom. More crucially, however, they convinced the writer to sit for nearly 90 hours of interviews in L.A., New York City and Connecticut (Dunne has a house in Hadlyme).
Dunne was a TV and movie producer before he turned to writing and he knows the essence of dramatic presentation — how to get the most out of juicy anecdotes he has been telling and re-telling for decades.
“After the Party” uses the Spector trial as a contemporary framework for an in-depth exploration of Dunne’s extraordinarily exciting, surprising and tragic life.
de Garis and Jolley gracefully cut from the amusing footage of Dunne weighing in on Spector — we see in the courtroom visits that the writer is a bigger star than the fallen record producer charged with murder — to a full account of Dunne’s miserably unhappy Hartford childhood, his World War II heroism and then his rise from being a stage manager in the early days of television to a film producer of the 1960s and ’70s.
Dunne and his wife Ellen became social stars of Hollywood in the 1960s, throwing parties that attracted everyone from Jane Fonda to Joan Crawford. Dunne now is the first one to admit he was a starstruck social climber during his early Hollywood days, but we are lucky he was — both for the stories he tells and the pictures he took (many of which are displayed in the film and in a marvelous 1999 coffee table book called “The Way We Lived Then”).
Dunne’s handful of movies were more prestigious than popular. He came crashing down while making the 1973 Elizabeth Taylor flop, “Ash Wednesday” — he insulted the most powerful agent in Hollywood at the time, Sue Mengers, and was given that “you’ll never work in this town again” message by Paramount production chief Robert Evans.
Dunne descended into a booze and drug-filled period that cost him his career and his marriage. After hitting rock bottom — he was forced to sell his dog at one point! — Dunne got a gig writing a Hollywood tell-all novel for the columnist Joyce Haber. That led to his own breakthough as a bestselling novelist with “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” (two million copies in print).
Dunne was no sooner back on his feet than he suffered the worst imaginable tragedy — the murder of his actress daughter, Dominique. The horror of that event changed his life in multiple ways — bringing him closer than ever to ex-wife Lenny and launching his career as a journalist when editor Tina Brown urged him to keep a journal of the murder trial and the result was his first Vanity Fair piece.
In her interview, Brown says that Dunne played a vital role in the revival of Vanity Fair in the 1980s. She praises the reporter’s unique combination of “shoe leather and stardust.”
In the film, it becomes clear early on that Dunne really connected with the two Australian filmmakers — his interviews are so revealing as to verge on embarrassing at some points, but his justly fabled sense of humor comes through again and again (Dunne’s most charming trait is his ability to laugh at his own weaknesses).
“After the Party” will be released on DVD by Indiepix on June 16; this may be the most entertaining and enlightening 85 minutes you will spend this summer.