Hella Nation - Evan Wright [152]
Two days later, Ann went horseback riding with friends and fell while crossing a field. Though it was a relatively minor fall, Ann wasn’t wearing a helmet and her brain stem was crushed. She lingered for two days in the hospital before being removed from life support. Scott Kramer, a producer and close friend, arrived at the hospital about the same time as Dollard. “Pat literally couldn’t bear to see her,” Kramer recalls. “He began hitting his head on the wall to the point where we had to grab him and hold him down and take him out of the hospital.”
Dollard says, “I was blown apart by the horror. I’ll never forget trying to see Ann’s face and looking down at these two massive purple lumps of flesh sticking out like eggs where her eyes were supposed to be. For years after, if I saw a hospital I would start crying.”
Her death was no less mourned in Hollywood. Ann’s memorial service, held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, became an industry event, drawing more than seven hundred people. Julia Phillips described the gathering in her 1991 book You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again as “all of young Hollywood looking stricken.” Stephen Stills sang, and eulogies were delivered by filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd and Robert Kennedy, Jr., who later held a private ceremony with Ann’s mother, Eva, at his home in Mount Kisco, New York, where they spread her ashes.
Among Ann’s clients, Steven Soderbergh was one of the closest to her. When they met, Soderbergh was twenty-two and had just finished directing his Grammy-nominated documentary about the band Yes, but a couple years later he was drifting, uncertain of his next move. Their meeting wasn’t so much a typical agent-client encounter as the start of an intense creative collaboration. Ann encouraged Soderbergh to continue work on his own scripts. Scott Kramer says, “Ann believed in Steven in such a way that it filled him.” Production on Sex, Lies, and Videotape was about to begin when she died.
Soderbergh was devastated. “The idea of replacing Ann was something I couldn’t contemplate,” he says. He and a few of Ann’s other clients decided to ask Pat to fill her shoes, which, Soderbergh explains, “felt like a way to process and transcend the awful thing that had happened.” He approached Dollard and told him, “I want you to be my agent. If you won’t be my agent, I just won’t have an agent, because I can’t.”
“My family was ripped apart by Ann’s death,” says Dollard. “I felt like I had to take her job, to hold it together.” At the time of her death, Ann hadn’t yet come into her own as an agent. Had she lived another year, it would have been a different story.
In addition to Soderbergh, clients on her list such as screenwriters Michael Blake (Dances with Wolves) and Scott Frank (Out of Sight, The Interpreter ) became major successes shortly after her death.
Inheriting most of Ann’s list, Dollard had assumed his sister’s life (much as the protagonist of his favorite film, Barry Lyndon, had risen by assuming the life of a deceased nobleman), and though he loved the trappings of success and power that came with it, he says it filled him with self-loathing. “I had this idea that I was going to be a subversive inside the system and do great things,” he says. “But when they said, ‘OK, you’re Steven Soderbergh’s agent’—and suddenly Steven becomes the biggest filmmaker in the world in terms of the hype—all my greed and power lust and alcoholism kicked in.” He adds, “It’s like I went to hell when I became an agent, and I’ve been trying to fight my way out ever since.”
THE DARK ARTS
A DAY AFTER HIS MEETING at William Morris, Dollard sits across from me at Kabuki, a restaurant near his apartment, eating a celebratory meal of ribs and flan, while unloading on his former profession. All the clichés are true, he tells me: Agents are “assholes,