Hella Nation - Evan Wright [142]
Propaganda soon went belly-up—industry-watchers blame a post-9/11 recession in commercial production, not Dollard—but he landed on his feet, taking a senior position at Catch-23, the management firm that represented Renée Zellweger, among others. In 2004 he and manager Ryan Kavanaugh cofounded Relativity Management, with up to $150 million in financing and ambitious plans to produce films as well as manage talent. “My career had never been better,” Dollard says. “My personal life was this ongoing disaster.”
In 2000 he had married for the fourth time. He and his wife moved into a Hollywood Hills mansion previously inhabited by Kirstie Alley. It was owned by Alley’s former boyfriend Melrose Place actor James Wilder, who lived next door. After Dollard reverted to old habits and began locking himself in the master bedroom to binge in privacy, his new wife enlisted Wilder’s help breaking in—by climbing across a walkway that connected the two homes—in order to check on her husband. She says, “Poor James went from Kirstie Alley to Pat and me.”
At a dinner party at Stockard Channing’s house, Dollard’s third wife, Alicia, heard alarming stories about her ex-husband. She says, “Pat was seen running naked down the street waving a sword.” (Dollard disputes key details of the account, saying, “I was wearing my boxers and I never left my balcony.”)
What’s not in dispute is that police were called to Dollard’s house in the spring of 2004, handcuffed him and took him to the psych unit at Cedars-Sinai for observation. Around this time he began his political conversion. Somewhere between the Roman orgy and the mental ward he became a staunch supporter of George W. Bush.
To show his support for the war in Iraq, he acquired vanity plates for his Hummer that spelled “US WINS.” He told friends, “President Bush is the Che Guevara of our time. He’s already liberated two countries from tyranny. Those kids walking around in T-shirts with Che on them in a red beret, someday they’ll be wearing shirts with Bush’s face on them in a cowboy hat.”
Paul Schrader, who became close to him during the making of Auto Focus, says, “Pat is a passionista, just like Jimmy Toback or John Milius. These are guys who have never allowed logic or, actually, their own thought process to interfere with the progress of an interesting argument. The danger with Pat comes when he moves into that territory where everything gets blurred, and he becomes the object of his own imagination.”
Soon, Dollard was telling people that it was his intention to “personally fight Al Qaeda.” As he told me, “If I could, I’d kill jihadis with my bare hands. That’s really the goal.”
KIDNAPPED
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH DOLLARD takes place in the spring of 2004. We are introduced by a mutual friend who believes Dollard might be interested in representing the film rights of a book I wrote about Marines in Iraq. “He’s a little crazy,” my friend warns, “but he’s Steven Soderbergh’s agent. This guy makes movies.”
We meet in the offices of Relativity, on the fourth floor of a reassuringly Modernist concrete-and-glass building on Beverly Drive. The reception area is a jumble of cardboard boxes and partially assembled desk components, with phone lines snaking through the mess. It looks like the company is just moving in, rapidly expanding or folding. (As it would turn out, it was doing all three at once.) It’s populated by attractive, young, female assistants who seem to be doing nothing when Dollard—still in his Prada-boots-jeans-and-silk-T-shirt phase—strides in, shakes my hand and tells me he’ll be right back. He has to go to the bathroom. I can wait in his office down the hall.
Dollard returns twenty minutes later. We sit on black leather chairs around a chrome-and-glass coffee table. He smokes, ashing in a paper cup, and rambles about killing jihadis and his dream of making a pro-war film.
Despite his ease in discussing his travails with drugs, he lowers his voice when discussing his incipient Republicanism. “Dude,” he says,