thedrifter
05-06-06, 07:30 AM
May 6, 2006
Patrick Dollard's Journey From Hollywood to Iraq
By SHARON WAXMAN
LOS ANGELES, May 5 — For the movie world, the war in Iraq has become a powerful fixation, with filmmakers struggling to tell the story of that conflict as they see it, through documentaries and dramas.
But no Hollywood player has pursued that fascination quite as far as Patrick Dollard.
A veteran agent, manager and producer, best known for having helped build the career of the director Steven Soderbergh, Mr. Dollard, 42, has spent the last five months in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, in the Sunni Arab stronghold of Ramadi, on a solitary mission to make a documentary about marines living in the combat zone.
He has seen action, and has nearly been killed more than once. In mid-February the Humvee patrol he was in hit a roadside bomb; the marine seated beside him in the back seat was killed, as was the marine in the front passenger seat. Mr. Dollard was wounded, but headed back to see more combat after just a few hours.
Whether Mr. Dollard's planned documentary will ever see the light of day is far from certain. When he first went to Iraq with a camera for three months in early 2005, Mr. Soderbergh and George Clooney were involved with the project, and Mr. Dollard said he was negotiating with HBO and Mark Cuban, owner of the cable network HDNet.
Earlier this year, however, HBO found the scenes it was shown too unconventional for its use, according to a senior HBO executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid further embarrassing Mr. Dollard. The manager turned director failed to show up for the meeting, the executive said, instead sending an emissary whose behavior caused him to be escorted from the building.
Mr. Soderbergh, who ended his 15-year manager-client relationship with Mr. Dollard last year, did not return calls asking about the project, and Mr. Clooney said he was no longer involved. Through a publicist, Mr. Dollard initially agreed to an interview with The Times, but stopped responding to e-mail messages over several weeks of requests.
Yet Mr. Dollard, once part of the film industry's inner circle, has caused something of a stir here and abroad by pursuing his passion for involvement in the Iraqi struggle to the brink of destruction. He has been offering his gung-ho views in widely circulated e-mail messages from Iraq, and through a Hollywood blog since returning from the war zone in recent weeks. In them he explains that going into the combat zone gave him a purpose that life in Hollywood never could.
"By age 40 I was a Hollywood pimp with a seven figure income and Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh as my flagship client," Mr. Dollard wrote on the blog, Hollywood Interrupted (hollywoodinterrupted.com), on April 3. "I had about 15 employees, a wife, a daughter, and no one believed I was going to lock horns with Al Qaeda, especially because my only motivations were to keep more American civilians from dying, and to honor those who were already risking their lives for that very reason."
He went on to compare himself to Kurtz, the renegade colonel played by Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now," and to explain: "There was never a time when I felt like my life had much of a purpose, other than making money and indulging myself. Except for parenting."
Mr. Dollard's exploits have been praised on right-wing radio, as well as on the blog, edited by Mark Ebner, which tends to conservative views. They have also earned the regard of some soldiers on the ground.
"After he got blown up, to go out again — I have a lot of respect for that," said First Sgt. Joseph Breze of the Third Battalion of the Seventh Marines, the company with which Mr. Dollard lived. But, he added, "You come out there with a camera, he doesn't have a weapon, in my eyes that's a little crazy."
Sergeant Breze said that over time Mr. Dollard won his place with the marines with whom he lived. "Initially he was pretty arrogant, pretty cocky," he said. "I think Pat became connected with the guys, and in turn the guys respected him a lot. He ended up getting a Marine Corps haircut, he was in a marine uniform. He became somewhat more of a buddy than a reporter."
At home, however, Mr. Dollard remains more of a puzzle. Family members say his Iraqi missions have consumed him at the expense of personal relationships. He has not been in touch with his mother in months, said his sister, Christine Massey, who added, "He forgets there are other people besides him."
Alicia Allain, one of Mr. Dollard's four ex-wives, said: "He'd rather deal with a fantasy than a reality. Reality is very difficult."
And former colleagues in the broadly liberal and often antiwar Hollywood establishment are fascinated by his deepening entanglement not just with a very different set of ideals, but also with life-threatening action.
"From the time I knew him, he was a hard-core right-wing hawk, of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz variety," said Jeremy Barber, a United Talent Agency agent who was once president of the production and management company Catch 23 and hired Mr. Dollard. In liberal Hollywood, Mr. Dollard proudly drove a Hummer with the license plate "US Wins."
Mr. Dollard's turn to a military mission followed several years of failed business ventures — despite his lucrative position as Mr. Soderbergh's manager — and came in the wake of a lifelong struggle against drug addiction, which Mr. Dollard has discussed openly in the past.
Mr. Dollard came to represent Mr. Soderbergh unexpectedly, after his older sister, Anne Dollard, was killed in a horseback-riding accident in 1989. Ms. Dollard had been Mr. Soderbergh's agent, but died just as he rocketed to fame as the director of "Sex, Lies and Videotape."
In the early 1990's Mr. Dollard was an agent, but he eventually left that work to become a full-time manager to Mr. Soderbergh and others. In 1999 he joined the cutting-edge Propaganda Films to run its management arm.
While there, Mr. Dollard contributed to what he has called his proudest achievement in Hollywood: finding the financing for "Traffic," Mr. Soderbergh's award-winning film about the drug wars. Mr. Dollard, who during periods of sobriety attended Alcoholics Anonymous, has said he regards his efforts as part of his personal recovery.
In 2001 Propaganda folded under financial pressures, and Mr. Dollard became involved with several management and production ventures, each of which eventually closed.
"As the company disintegrated, Pat's warrior tendencies emerged," Mr. Barber said of Catch 23, one of the shuttered firms. "That was his fallback. Pat is a warrior, but Pat is also enormously fragile."
By early 2005 Mr. Dollard was headed for a three-month stay in the Sunni triangle, where he shot images of marines as they fought insurgents. When he came back, he wrote on Hollywood Interrupted: "I had no savings. But I had to go back to finish the work, to finish the story."
Now back from this second tour, Mr. Dollard is giving his friends cause for worry about where his urge to experience the war will take him. In an April 20 blog entry, he wrote about the experience of his Humvee attack in a frightening 3,500-word stream-of-consciousness rant that read, in part: "the body parts the dead and screaming dying as the first chunks of flesh and bleached white bones then in seconds as my rounding approach continued the piles, piles of bodies the howling wounded soldiers, civilians, marines."
Toward the end of that statement, he wrote: "Liberals must begin to understand that the removal of their oppressors, often necessarily by violence, is the only hope for the protection of the world's future."
Ellie
Patrick Dollard's Journey From Hollywood to Iraq
By SHARON WAXMAN
LOS ANGELES, May 5 — For the movie world, the war in Iraq has become a powerful fixation, with filmmakers struggling to tell the story of that conflict as they see it, through documentaries and dramas.
But no Hollywood player has pursued that fascination quite as far as Patrick Dollard.
A veteran agent, manager and producer, best known for having helped build the career of the director Steven Soderbergh, Mr. Dollard, 42, has spent the last five months in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, in the Sunni Arab stronghold of Ramadi, on a solitary mission to make a documentary about marines living in the combat zone.
He has seen action, and has nearly been killed more than once. In mid-February the Humvee patrol he was in hit a roadside bomb; the marine seated beside him in the back seat was killed, as was the marine in the front passenger seat. Mr. Dollard was wounded, but headed back to see more combat after just a few hours.
Whether Mr. Dollard's planned documentary will ever see the light of day is far from certain. When he first went to Iraq with a camera for three months in early 2005, Mr. Soderbergh and George Clooney were involved with the project, and Mr. Dollard said he was negotiating with HBO and Mark Cuban, owner of the cable network HDNet.
Earlier this year, however, HBO found the scenes it was shown too unconventional for its use, according to a senior HBO executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid further embarrassing Mr. Dollard. The manager turned director failed to show up for the meeting, the executive said, instead sending an emissary whose behavior caused him to be escorted from the building.
Mr. Soderbergh, who ended his 15-year manager-client relationship with Mr. Dollard last year, did not return calls asking about the project, and Mr. Clooney said he was no longer involved. Through a publicist, Mr. Dollard initially agreed to an interview with The Times, but stopped responding to e-mail messages over several weeks of requests.
Yet Mr. Dollard, once part of the film industry's inner circle, has caused something of a stir here and abroad by pursuing his passion for involvement in the Iraqi struggle to the brink of destruction. He has been offering his gung-ho views in widely circulated e-mail messages from Iraq, and through a Hollywood blog since returning from the war zone in recent weeks. In them he explains that going into the combat zone gave him a purpose that life in Hollywood never could.
"By age 40 I was a Hollywood pimp with a seven figure income and Oscar-winning Steven Soderbergh as my flagship client," Mr. Dollard wrote on the blog, Hollywood Interrupted (hollywoodinterrupted.com), on April 3. "I had about 15 employees, a wife, a daughter, and no one believed I was going to lock horns with Al Qaeda, especially because my only motivations were to keep more American civilians from dying, and to honor those who were already risking their lives for that very reason."
He went on to compare himself to Kurtz, the renegade colonel played by Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now," and to explain: "There was never a time when I felt like my life had much of a purpose, other than making money and indulging myself. Except for parenting."
Mr. Dollard's exploits have been praised on right-wing radio, as well as on the blog, edited by Mark Ebner, which tends to conservative views. They have also earned the regard of some soldiers on the ground.
"After he got blown up, to go out again — I have a lot of respect for that," said First Sgt. Joseph Breze of the Third Battalion of the Seventh Marines, the company with which Mr. Dollard lived. But, he added, "You come out there with a camera, he doesn't have a weapon, in my eyes that's a little crazy."
Sergeant Breze said that over time Mr. Dollard won his place with the marines with whom he lived. "Initially he was pretty arrogant, pretty cocky," he said. "I think Pat became connected with the guys, and in turn the guys respected him a lot. He ended up getting a Marine Corps haircut, he was in a marine uniform. He became somewhat more of a buddy than a reporter."
At home, however, Mr. Dollard remains more of a puzzle. Family members say his Iraqi missions have consumed him at the expense of personal relationships. He has not been in touch with his mother in months, said his sister, Christine Massey, who added, "He forgets there are other people besides him."
Alicia Allain, one of Mr. Dollard's four ex-wives, said: "He'd rather deal with a fantasy than a reality. Reality is very difficult."
And former colleagues in the broadly liberal and often antiwar Hollywood establishment are fascinated by his deepening entanglement not just with a very different set of ideals, but also with life-threatening action.
"From the time I knew him, he was a hard-core right-wing hawk, of the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz variety," said Jeremy Barber, a United Talent Agency agent who was once president of the production and management company Catch 23 and hired Mr. Dollard. In liberal Hollywood, Mr. Dollard proudly drove a Hummer with the license plate "US Wins."
Mr. Dollard's turn to a military mission followed several years of failed business ventures — despite his lucrative position as Mr. Soderbergh's manager — and came in the wake of a lifelong struggle against drug addiction, which Mr. Dollard has discussed openly in the past.
Mr. Dollard came to represent Mr. Soderbergh unexpectedly, after his older sister, Anne Dollard, was killed in a horseback-riding accident in 1989. Ms. Dollard had been Mr. Soderbergh's agent, but died just as he rocketed to fame as the director of "Sex, Lies and Videotape."
In the early 1990's Mr. Dollard was an agent, but he eventually left that work to become a full-time manager to Mr. Soderbergh and others. In 1999 he joined the cutting-edge Propaganda Films to run its management arm.
While there, Mr. Dollard contributed to what he has called his proudest achievement in Hollywood: finding the financing for "Traffic," Mr. Soderbergh's award-winning film about the drug wars. Mr. Dollard, who during periods of sobriety attended Alcoholics Anonymous, has said he regards his efforts as part of his personal recovery.
In 2001 Propaganda folded under financial pressures, and Mr. Dollard became involved with several management and production ventures, each of which eventually closed.
"As the company disintegrated, Pat's warrior tendencies emerged," Mr. Barber said of Catch 23, one of the shuttered firms. "That was his fallback. Pat is a warrior, but Pat is also enormously fragile."
By early 2005 Mr. Dollard was headed for a three-month stay in the Sunni triangle, where he shot images of marines as they fought insurgents. When he came back, he wrote on Hollywood Interrupted: "I had no savings. But I had to go back to finish the work, to finish the story."
Now back from this second tour, Mr. Dollard is giving his friends cause for worry about where his urge to experience the war will take him. In an April 20 blog entry, he wrote about the experience of his Humvee attack in a frightening 3,500-word stream-of-consciousness rant that read, in part: "the body parts the dead and screaming dying as the first chunks of flesh and bleached white bones then in seconds as my rounding approach continued the piles, piles of bodies the howling wounded soldiers, civilians, marines."
Toward the end of that statement, he wrote: "Liberals must begin to understand that the removal of their oppressors, often necessarily by violence, is the only hope for the protection of the world's future."
Ellie