Hella Nation - Evan Wright [141]
But as tolerant as Alicia was, Dollard’s increasing drug use plunged her into despair. While he controlled it at the office, after hours he typically functioned in a chemically induced haze. She says, “Those guys at William Morris loved Pat. They saw him as this happy-go-lucky dude. They didn’t see Pat locking himself in his bedroom at our apartment, him high as a kite, and me and his mother finally having the police and firemen get him because we’re afraid he’s killing himself in there. I saw he hated himself for what he was doing. After these runs Pat would just be balled up on the floor crying.”
Dollard estimates that he wound up in emergency rooms half a dozen times for overdoses.
By 1995, at age thirty, Dollard was barely functioning. Mike Simpson tried to intervene. He says, “I talked to him, kind of like up against the wall, and said, ‘What are you doing, man? You’re gonna kill yourself.’ ”
According to Simpson, Dollard simply laughed and said, “You’re right.”
That year, he was fired from William Morris. Pat and Alicia moved back to her hometown, near Baton Rouge, where initially she supported them by working at a hair salon. “We lived on clipping coupons for pizzas,” Dollard recalls. He began attending AA meetings and took a job at a Baton Rouge commercial-production house, and in 1996, Alicia gave birth to their daughter. He and Alicia produced two independent films, Notes from Underground and Lush, a portrait of a man suffering from alcoholic blackouts who is accused of murder. Neither film put Dollard back on the map. Nor was Soderbergh, who remained a client, doing especially well. After he failed to connect with audiences with films like The Underneath and Schizopolis, Soderbergh’s relations with major studios had chilled. “For a while there,” says Dollard, “the most successful film I was involved with was a Louisiana State Lottery commercial I worked on.”
Everything changed in 1998, when Soderbergh’s Out of Sight was released to critical acclaim. Dollard’s career came roaring back to life. In short order he set up lucrative deals for Soderbergh to make The Limey, Full Frontal and Erin Brockovich. But Traffic was Dollard’s biggest coup. Dollard is credited by Soderbergh and others with getting the film made after it fell apart during preproduction. When Traffic won four Academy Awards, including Soderbergh’s first as a director, Dollard was a made man in Hollywood.
Propaganda Films hired Dollard to be president of its management division. Then at its peak as a commercial- and feature-production company, Propaganda’s stable included some of the hottest directors in town, including David Fincher, Michael Bay and Spike Jonze. Dollard moved into a home in Bel Air. He and Alicia had separated in 1999, but continued to work together as a producing team.
With Traffic having moved the national debate over the war on drugs to the forefront, Dollard spoke candidly to the press about his own struggles with addiction, telling one reporter that his practices as an agent were now “consistent with AA principles.”
Despite preaching about sobriety, Dollard began using again. Initially, he attempted to hide it. “I would take drug vacations,” he explains. “I’d check into a hotel on Sunset and just binge for a few days.” Soon his addictions spilled into his work life. According to Dollard, in 2001, after starting at Propaganda, he initiated monthly drug-and-hooker parties, which he called “the Hotel Club.”
Dollard claims that the Hotel Club became part of his executive plan at Propaganda. “I’m not saying we expensed any of this,” Dollard says. “Once a month, a select group of executives at the company would have non-wedding-connected bachelor parties with drugs and hookers we’d book at all the different trendy hotels—the Avalon, the Four Seasons, the Argyle. We would invite potential clients and get them loaded and