Hella Nation - Evan Wright [140]
When Dollard was twenty-two, Ann performed a career intervention, hiring him to answer her phone at Leading Artists. He lasted two years before she fired him. But destiny, which he still believed in, had other plans. He would get his break, but only through enduring the greatest tragedy of his life. Two days after Ann fired him, she was killed in a freak horse-riding accident. Dollard was offered her job and her client list, which included a then unknown Steven Soderbergh, about a year away from releasing his breakthrough, Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Dollard was twenty-five when Soderbergh shot to fame, and quickly proved himself in his own right. In the early nineties he moved to William Morris, where he worked with Mike Simpson, today a senior vice president of the agency, whose best-known clients are Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Craven and Trey Parker and Matt Stone. “Pat was outspoken, very articulate, and knew how to operate in the world,” Simpson says. “He became an important soldier in our army.”
His biggest contribution was to help establish the agency’s independent-film division, which, Simpson says, “was extremely important to our success in the nineties.” In addition to Soderbergh, Dollard represented Billy Bob Thornton and his writing partner Tom Epperson; Mike Werb, who wrote The Mask and Face/Off; Don Mancini (writer of the Child’s Play movie series); director Alan Rudolph; writer Fina Torres and actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
To Dollard, the sudden success felt as if “someone handed me a basket of power.” One of his favorite movies as a teenager had been Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, based on the Thackeray novel about a fatherless Irish rogue who fakes his way into the aristocracy. For Dollard, becoming an agent fulfilled this fantasy. “It was like being a fucking duke or count in Europe back in the day,” he says.
Dollard did what many other twentysomethings in his shoes would have done: he became a swine of the first order. He wore Armani suits, drove whatever car was “tasty” at the time—from a Miata to a Porsche, to a Range Rover—and “plowed through more pussy than I thought was imaginable.”
Outwardly, Dollard was the consummate Hollywood player. A former client says, “Pat seemed like the archetypical agent. He was hyperslick in that hyperglib, dismissive, hipper-than-thou, bullshit-Hollywood way. He was your basic Young Turk prick.”
Simpson saw something different in him. “The main thing I always liked about Pat from day one is that I felt like he had a soul. There was something else going on besides just who his clients were, what the deal was, that kind of agent veneer.”
Dollard was earning a reputation for intense but passing infatuations, such as the time in the early nineties when he converted to Judaism and took the name Schlomo Bin Avrihim. (“The rabbis who held my beth din,” says Dollard, referring to the council that determines a candidate’s suitability for conversion, “told me afterwards that they wished all converts could reach my spiritual level.”) The conversion didn’t last. Dollard’s second wife, for whom he’d become a Jew, divorced him not long after his romp with hookers on the set of Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
While visiting his wife on the Dragon set, Dollard found the time to chat up one of the hairdressers, Alicia Allain, who would become his third wife, in 1994. Alicia, nineteen, had come to Los Angeles from Louisiana with ambitions of becoming a producer, but was still relegated to the hair-and-makeup department.
The Dollard whom Alicia met “always wore these very tasteful Italian suits and was so gifted I believed he was going to end up running a studio.” Alicia was open-minded in a way that should have made theirs the ideal Hollywood marriage. When I ask her if she was aware that her