Hella Nation - Evan Wright [136]
Compactly built, Dollard dresses in clothes—jeans, Wal-Mart work boots and an olive-drab T-shirt—that look like they’ve been slept in. His hair is close-cropped, but nevertheless manages to appear disheveled. He hasn’t shaved in a few days. His teeth are cracked and stained, and, worst of all, from a health standpoint, his right eye is obscured by a milky blob: a cataract that developed in Iraq, which he has never treated. Also in need of attention is a wretched cough, which sounds like a snow shovel scraping on the sidewalk. If he were a homeless man, you’d probably wash your hands after giving him your change.
Beneath the unkempt appearance, Dollard projects unnerving vitality. Even with the cataract, his green eyes are alert and engaging. Words tumble from his mouth at a rapid clip, his voice a parched growl acquired from a lifetime of cigarettes and liquor. One moment he is laughing about the time he picked up hookers on the set of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, a film his second wife worked on as an assistant to producer Raffaella De Laurentiis—a moment later he is pounding the table, railing against Cindy Sheehan’s antiwar protests. “Cindy Sheehan is pathologically self-centered. It’s a tragedy she lost her son. Anyway, we all lose family members. So fuck Cindy Sheehan.”
From hilarity to rage in less than two minutes. In layman’s terms, Dollard is “intense.” Some might use words like “manic” or “bipolar”—a condition Dollard’s mother believes he might suffer from—but Dollard bristles at any suggestion he is clinically off balance. “True,” he says, chewing a strip of bacon, “I was told to get a CAT scan”—after being blown up in Iraq—“but I feel fucking fine.”
And true, Dollard was pretty much the same before he got blown up. He possesses a quality common among celebrities, children and the insane. You are compelled to watch him because you never know what he will do or say next. His third wife, Alicia Allain, sums up her ex-husband, saying, “He may be the biggest asshole I’ve met, but he’s got twisted charisma.”
Not everyone succumbs to it. When Dollard first posted the story of escaping death in Iraq, his younger sister, deeply opposed to the war, speculated that her older brother was just “too evil to die.” (Dollard dismisses her as a “nutcase—even nuttier than I am.”)
When it comes to practicing the Hollywood art of salesmanship, Dollard was among the best. Steven Soderbergh says, “Pat has a quality that’s essential to selling movies: making people see things that can’t be seen yet. I mean, if Pat says he saw a UFO, he will convince me it was there, even if I didn’t see it.”
Upon returning from his second trip to Iraq, last March, Dollard moved from Los Angeles to an undisclosed location out of state to complete his film. (He is so obsessed with secrecy he recently had the OnStar system yanked from his SUV, fearing it might be used by “enemies” to locate him.) He is in L.A. today at the invitation of Andrew Breitbart—longtime contributor to the Drudge Report and self-described “right-leaning Hollywood basher,” but a freethinker who helped create the Huffington Post. Breitbart plans to introduce him to potential financial backers.
Dollard’s film teaser is less like a documentary than agitprop. It opens on two young Marines hunched over their machine guns at a roadblock. It’s the winter of 2005. Both are shivering from the cold, warily eyeing the civilian cars that at any moment they may be called upon to shoot. The Marines pass the time speculating about what kids their age might be doing back home. One of them turns to the camera, concluding, “They’re over at home smoking blunts, fucking watching MTV, sitting on their fat ass. Well, fuck you.”
A montage of violent clips slides past—an Arab fighter being shot to death by American soldiers; a Marine rifleman dancing and clutching his groin, then firing a machine gun into an Iraqi town; the minaret of a mosque being blown to pieces. The violence is intercut with iconic images from American pop culture—the smiling face of Jackass prince Johnny Knoxville, college