Hella Nation - Evan Wright [138]
Most important from Dollard’s standpoint, he is reaching his target audience, the MySpace crowd. Typical of the many e-mails he receives is this: “Hey Pat im a 17 year old high school student. I lived most of my life as a liberal and over the last year realized I was only a product of the leftist school system and the media. The clips I’ve seen of ‘Young Americans’ are an inspiration and it’s time someone tells the truth. Thanks for putting your life on the line for the better of the country.”
When you consider that just eighteen months earlier Dollard was a confessed whore-loving, alcoholic, coked-out Hollywood agent, his transformation into the great hope of conservative America is nothing short of astonishing. “It’s fucking crazy, dude,” he admits as he stands at the entrance of his hotel, smoking and watching planes take off from LAX. “I was afraid conservatives wouldn’t have me, but they’re fucking all over me.”
He brings up George Clooney and Steve Gaghan, both of whom he knew through his work with Soderbergh. In Dollard’s view, the two of them represent everything wrong and shallow about Hollywood liberalism. Dollard claims that he was having lunch with Gaghan—who wrote Traffic—a few years ago when Gaghan was struck by his inspiration to make Syriana. “He literally held up the bottle of olive oil on the table and said, ‘Oh my God! It’s all about the oil.’ ”
(Though Gaghan remembers the lunch, his version of events differs from Dollard’s. And by that point, Gaghan says, he was already a few years into his research for Syriana, which was based on Robert Baer’s 2002 book See No Evil.)
Nothing irks Dollard more than the praise Clooney received for making Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. “Clooney actually goes around letting people say he was ‘brave’ for making those movies. Everybody in Hollywood is obsessed with wanting to be perceived as tough. Is it brave making films that serve the agenda of every liberal in Hollywood, when real heroes are spilling their blood in Iraq?” Dollard sputters. “Clooney is a pompous jackass.”
Another plane takes off from LAX. Lighting another post-breakfast cigarette, Dollard turns to me and laughs. “Dude, I spent twenty years being a pimp for the stars—now I’m becoming a political star.”
THE YOUNG TURK
BILLY BOB THORNTON, at one point a client of Dollard’s, once told a mutual friend, “Pat Dollard is the only person I know in Hollywood who’s crazier than me.” When Dollard was a teenager his goal in life was to become a “stoned artist.” Inspired by his hero, Jim Morrison, Dollard dreamed of spreading a “metaphysical message throughout the world.”
He grew up, the second eldest of five children, in a “Puerto Rican-Irish welfare family.” When Dollard was three his mother, Eva, packed up the kids and fled from their alcoholic, Irish-American father in New Jersey, moving to Paramount, California, a smog-bound blue-collar city on the southern fringes of the Los Angeles basin, where Eva took a job as a night-shift switchboard operator.
Dollard’s father stalked the family to California. Living on skid row, the elder Dollard would show up at his ex-wife’s house and terrorize the kids. As Dollard remembers it, his dad would inevitably end up leaping onto the cinder-block wall in the backyard to punch and threaten imaginary enemies. “My dad thought we were being attacked by pirates, and the police would come,” he says. “But it wasn’t my mom who called them. My dad would call the police to help him fight the pirates.”
His mother again moved the family, but Dollard’s father found them. Dollard was in first grade, a scholarship student at a Catholic elementary school, when his dad took a job parking cars nearby. During recess his father would