• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1284 0

bounced back, playing a critical role in getting Soderbergh’s Traffic made. Propaganda Films tapped him to head its management division, and in 2002 he produced Auto Focus, the Paul Schrader- directed biopic about the murder of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane—a film in which Dollard has a cameo in drag. Dollard cofounded Relativity, a firm that would assist the Marvel Entertainment Group in its half-billion-dollar production deal and went on to produce, after Dollard’s exit, Talladega Nights. But by 2004, Dollard was bingeing again. His fourth wife left him, and his third wife was suing for sole custody of their daughter. News that his daughter would be spending Thanksgiving at the home of Robert Evans—for whom his ex-wife worked as a development executive—sent Dollard into a morbid depression. Late one night he phoned a friend and suggested that everyone might be better off if he were dead. Then he sent his good-bye e-mail.

But Dollard was not planning a suicide, at least not a quick one. Dressed in what he would later describe as his “scumbag hipster agent’s uniform”—Prada boots, jeans and a black leather jacket—he boarded a plane for New York, then Kuwait City. From there he hopped a military transport to Baghdad and embedded with U.S. Marines in order to make a “pro-war documentary.” Given the decades of substance abuse, the idea of the chain-smoking, middle-aged Hollywood agent accompanying Marines into battle was sort of like Keith Richards competing in an Ironman Triathlon. But Dollard thrived. “My first time in a combat zone, I felt like I had walked into some bizarre fucking ultra-expensive movie set,” he would later say. “I had this vivid clarity, like when I used to take LSD. I felt joy. I felt like I had a message from God, or whoever, that this is exactly what I should be doing with my life. I belong in war. I am a warrior.”

To those at home it seemed that Dollard had entered dangerous mental territory. Around the New Year in 2005, he e-mailed a photo of himself to friends. In it he is clutching a machine gun, surrounded by Marines. Dressed in combat gear, his hair in a Mohawk and the word “DIE” shaved into his chest hair, Dollard looks like the mascot of Camp Lord of the Flies.

“THE H’WOOD WARRIOR”

MIDSUMMER 2006. Dollard sits across from me at a hotel restaurant near the Los Angeles airport, tearing into a breakfast of waffles, bacon and black coffee while talking about his ambition to become a “conservative icon, the Michael Moore of the right.” He is well on his way, thanks in no small part to a terrible incident that occurred last February in Iraq. While Dollard was filming U.S. troops in Ramadi, a Humvee he was riding in was struck by a bomb. Two Marines were killed, but Dollard—in keeping with a streak of freakishly good luck—was thrown clear from the fiery wreckage and emerged unharmed but for a two-inch cut on his right leg. The bombing was, appropriately enough, first reported in Variety. Dollard was soon invited on Tony Snow’s radio show on Fox and spent as much time railing against Hollywood liberalism as he did talking about Iraq. Snow, weeks away from becoming White House press secretary, loved it. He called Dollard a “true believer” and invited him back for two more appearances. Dollard was soon hailed by conservative columnists in U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Times. The New York Post dubbed him the “H’wood Warrior.” No small part of his appeal to the right is the fact that Dollard was once a “doctrinaire liberal” who could even boast of close ties to Robert Kennedy, Jr., but now speaks of his pro-war stance in the most militant terms: “This is a propaganda war, and if I can fight with a camera the same as a Marine with his rifle, I will.”

Last May he launched a website (patdollard.com) and began airing a five-minute trailer of his as yet unfinished documentary, Young Americans. The response was overwhelming: one hundred thousand hits in the first week, hundreds of supportive e-mails, and unsolicited offers of money. “Dude, I’m becoming a national hero,” Dollard tells me.