Hella Nation - Evan Wright [151]
“No,” Soderbergh says, “I’ve known him a long time. When you get a call from Pat you never know what to expect. It could be ‘I just got married,’ ‘I’m making a new film,’ ‘I’m in Mexico getting an operation.’ Pat is sort of an adrenaline junkie.”
Dollard leans around me to bicker with Soderbergh. “I have no history of being the adrenaline junkie, an adventurer, blood-fucking-thirsty, or anything like that,” he says.
“I’m saying you were looking for a change in your life,” Soderbergh says.
“I didn’t change intentionally by going to Iraq,” Dollard argues. “It wasn’t so much this noble thing where I was trying to change myself.”
Soderbergh measures his words carefully. “I think you had created a circumstance last fall in which, if there was ever a time when going to Iraq would seem like an appealing thing, that was the time.”
“It’s really easy to say that,” Dollard says, “but I was not going to go to Iraq and risk my life just to not deal with some hassles. It’s almost insulting to, like, fucking say that.”
Soderbergh sticks to his point. “Do you think if you’d been totally happy and things were great, would you still have gone to Iraq?”
“There was no fucking way I was running away.” Dollard gives a feeble wave of his hand, running out of steam. “That’s my argument and whatever.”
Soderbergh turns to me, now animated. “When you look at Pat’s narrative, which I think for Pat is probably really exciting, for a lot of the supporting people it can be crazy.”
It’s an odd reversal that he, the star director, would cast himself in the supporting role with his agent. I ask Soderbergh about his friendship with Dollard, and he says, “The formative years of our relationship were strange because we were really young”—Soderbergh twenty-three and Dollard twenty-two when they first met. “We had nothing in common with people in Hollywood,” Soderbergh says, “no interest in the high school aspects of the social life in Hollywood.”
Dollard says, “We’d just sit around fucking talking about chicks.”
“Yeah, we would,” Soderbergh says, laughing. “We’d swap stories about fucking chicks.” Soderbergh corrects himself. “I don’t mean fucking chicks. I mean . . .”
“Steven, we would talk about fucking chicks,” Dollard insists.
Soderbergh leans closer to me. “I was just so close to Pat’s family. And of course because of the horrible event that happened, it stepped up the relationship with Pat several levels. It made us much closer.”
Dollard twists in his chair. The subject of his sister’s death makes him uncomfortable. He says, “Let’s talk about whatever, dude.”
Soderbergh ignores Dollard. He says, “There are certain people who have an integrity, whether you can articulate it or not.” He pauses. “I guess I fall back to the word ‘soul’ for lack of a better term. It’s just a feeling. You meet them and you have an instantaneous reaction to them. It’s certainly the reaction I had when I met Ann.”
ANN
IT WAS PAT DOLLARD’S great fortune and misfortune to have Ann as his sister. She was so good, when people talk about her, you wonder if canonization would do her justice. Robert Kennedy, Jr., says, “She was beautiful and she was charming and you couldn’t meet her without loving her.” Larry Jackson, the president of Northern Arts Entertainment and former executive VP of acquisitions and coproductions at Miramax, says, “There was something magical about Ann. She had such a rosy expectation of what the world could become.”
No small part of Ann’s expectations were poured into her little brother. Their mother, Eva, says, “Ann was probably more of a mother figure to Pat than I was.” Both Ann and Eva believed Pat would be the first in the family to attend college. After he dashed those hopes by dropping out of high school, Ann continued to try to guide him until finally hiring him as her assistant at Leading Artists.
Initially, Dollard cleaned up his act. Other agents nicknamed him “Beaver