thedrifter
03-06-07, 08:02 AM
Pat Dollard, Hollywood Guy Gone Gonzo
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; C08
After his fourth wife left him because she got upset about his hobbies, which included cocaine and hookers, Hollywood agent/producer Pat Dollard decided to get his head together by flying to Iraq to hang out with Marines and fight insurgents and film a pro-war documentary that would make him "the Michael Moore of the right."
A few weeks later, he sent his Hollywood pals a photo of himself with a Mohawk haircut, a machine gun and the word DIE shaved into his chest hair. After that, things started to get weird.
Dollard, 42, admits all this stuff -- and much, much more! -- in a wonderfully bizarre profile in the March issue of Vanity Fair. It's the strange story, writes author Evan Wright, of how "a confessed *****-loving, alcoholic, coked-out Hollywood agent" became "the great hope of conservative America."
"Pat Dollard is the only person I know in Hollywood who's crazier than me," says actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was one of his clients back when Dollard was an Armani-wearing agent. He had a unique business style: He'd treat colleagues and prospective clients to what he calls "non-wedding-connected bachelor parties with drugs and hookers."
The booze and dope fueled many crazy antics, and in the spring of 2004, cops handcuffed Dollard and carted him off to the psych unit of an L.A. hospital.
"Around this time he began his political conversion," Wright notes. "Somewhere between the Roman orgy and the mental ward he became a staunch supporter of George W. Bush's."
He showed his support for the war in Iraq by accessorizing his Hummer with a vanity plate that read US WINS. Then, after another epic binge of cocaine and call girls, he went to Iraq to shoot a documentary.
Somehow he got embedded with a group of Marines, who gave him an affectionate nickname, unprintable here. One day while the Marines were on patrol in a town called Musayyib, Dollard encountered an Iraqi selling whiskey. He bought three bottles, got crazy drunk and ripped a sign off a mosque, which angered the locals and sparked a gunfight. On another occasion, according to Dollard and several Marines, he walked into a pharmacy, showed the owner his gun and stole a cache of drugs, including liquid Valium, which he shared with some of the Marines.
In March 2005, Dollard returned to Los Angeles and began editing his 243 hours of videotape into a movie called "Young Americans." He also announced that he was starting his own anti-jihadi movement.
"I'm a warrior, dude," he told Wright. "My role is to fight the battle against Islamic fundamentalist Fascism."
Alas, his progress as both warrior and filmmaker stalled when he went on another epic booze-and-dope binge. When he got out of rehab, he hired an ex-con to keep him sober but the two of them ended up smoking meth and making a porn movie starring Dollard and the ex-con's girlfriend.
Meanwhile, he showed parts of his still-unfinished film to conservative activists and soon he was hanging out with Ann Coulter and appearing on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes," jabbering about Iraq and evil Hollywood liberals.
"Isn't somebody going to notice he's insane?" Wright wondered as he watched Dollard bantering with Sean Hannity. Apparently not. "In the pro-wrestling world of opinion TV," Wright notes, "Dollard is a natural."
In the last scene of the story, Dollard is being feted by conservatives at a Hollywood party, babbling about how the liberal media is "literally allied with the Islamic Fascist Imperialists." Meanwhile, Coulter is pigging out on guacamole and chips and questioning the manhood of conservatives who are insufficiently pro-war.
"A male guest approaches, slips Coulter his number, and delivers what must be the ultimate pickup line at a conservative party. 'I'm having dinner tomorrow night with Richard Perle. Would you like to join us?' ''
This deliciously demented tale deserves a place in the vast history of Hollywood weirdness -- and also in the history of the ongoing, spectacular flameout of neoconservatism.
Good's Best
Good is a good magazine that likes to salute good things. In its third issue, the L.A.-based bimonthly has a piece called "The 51 Best Magazines Ever." It's one of those lists that are fun to argue about, and magazine lovers will enjoy arguing about it.
Personally I have no problem with the choice for No. 1 -- Esquire in its heyday in the 1960s, when it published Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and other writers who were inventing what came to be called the "new journalism." And I won't beef about the next few choices -- the New Yorker, Life, Playboy, New York Times Magazine and Mad (in that order).
But I started grumbling as I moved down the list. Should Wired No. 8 and Andy Warhol's Interview (9) really be rated higher than Rolling Stone (11) , National Geographic (12) and the Saturday Evening Post (26)? Why did the Atlantic Monthly (15) make the cut and not Harper's?
I'm glad the list includes Ramparts 18, the feisty, outrageous and visually zippy radical mag from the '60s. But where is McClure's, the feisty, influential, muckraking magazine from the turn of the 20th century? And how did the cheeseball shopping mag Lucky (44) find a place in this august company?
The editors of Good made these selections and then they had the good sense to get Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair (31) and co-founder of Spy (7), to write the introduction. Carter reminds the magazine world of an important but oft-forgotten truth:
"For a publication to succeed it has to have a point," he writes. "It can't just come into being because the owner wants to impress his friends. Or because market studies have shown an opening in a certain line of interest. Many of the big magazine companies, such as Time Inc., are run these days not by people who love magazines but by people in search of profit. Great magazines come from the gut and the heart."
Amen.
Ellie
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 6, 2007; C08
After his fourth wife left him because she got upset about his hobbies, which included cocaine and hookers, Hollywood agent/producer Pat Dollard decided to get his head together by flying to Iraq to hang out with Marines and fight insurgents and film a pro-war documentary that would make him "the Michael Moore of the right."
A few weeks later, he sent his Hollywood pals a photo of himself with a Mohawk haircut, a machine gun and the word DIE shaved into his chest hair. After that, things started to get weird.
Dollard, 42, admits all this stuff -- and much, much more! -- in a wonderfully bizarre profile in the March issue of Vanity Fair. It's the strange story, writes author Evan Wright, of how "a confessed *****-loving, alcoholic, coked-out Hollywood agent" became "the great hope of conservative America."
"Pat Dollard is the only person I know in Hollywood who's crazier than me," says actor Billy Bob Thornton, who was one of his clients back when Dollard was an Armani-wearing agent. He had a unique business style: He'd treat colleagues and prospective clients to what he calls "non-wedding-connected bachelor parties with drugs and hookers."
The booze and dope fueled many crazy antics, and in the spring of 2004, cops handcuffed Dollard and carted him off to the psych unit of an L.A. hospital.
"Around this time he began his political conversion," Wright notes. "Somewhere between the Roman orgy and the mental ward he became a staunch supporter of George W. Bush's."
He showed his support for the war in Iraq by accessorizing his Hummer with a vanity plate that read US WINS. Then, after another epic binge of cocaine and call girls, he went to Iraq to shoot a documentary.
Somehow he got embedded with a group of Marines, who gave him an affectionate nickname, unprintable here. One day while the Marines were on patrol in a town called Musayyib, Dollard encountered an Iraqi selling whiskey. He bought three bottles, got crazy drunk and ripped a sign off a mosque, which angered the locals and sparked a gunfight. On another occasion, according to Dollard and several Marines, he walked into a pharmacy, showed the owner his gun and stole a cache of drugs, including liquid Valium, which he shared with some of the Marines.
In March 2005, Dollard returned to Los Angeles and began editing his 243 hours of videotape into a movie called "Young Americans." He also announced that he was starting his own anti-jihadi movement.
"I'm a warrior, dude," he told Wright. "My role is to fight the battle against Islamic fundamentalist Fascism."
Alas, his progress as both warrior and filmmaker stalled when he went on another epic booze-and-dope binge. When he got out of rehab, he hired an ex-con to keep him sober but the two of them ended up smoking meth and making a porn movie starring Dollard and the ex-con's girlfriend.
Meanwhile, he showed parts of his still-unfinished film to conservative activists and soon he was hanging out with Ann Coulter and appearing on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes," jabbering about Iraq and evil Hollywood liberals.
"Isn't somebody going to notice he's insane?" Wright wondered as he watched Dollard bantering with Sean Hannity. Apparently not. "In the pro-wrestling world of opinion TV," Wright notes, "Dollard is a natural."
In the last scene of the story, Dollard is being feted by conservatives at a Hollywood party, babbling about how the liberal media is "literally allied with the Islamic Fascist Imperialists." Meanwhile, Coulter is pigging out on guacamole and chips and questioning the manhood of conservatives who are insufficiently pro-war.
"A male guest approaches, slips Coulter his number, and delivers what must be the ultimate pickup line at a conservative party. 'I'm having dinner tomorrow night with Richard Perle. Would you like to join us?' ''
This deliciously demented tale deserves a place in the vast history of Hollywood weirdness -- and also in the history of the ongoing, spectacular flameout of neoconservatism.
Good's Best
Good is a good magazine that likes to salute good things. In its third issue, the L.A.-based bimonthly has a piece called "The 51 Best Magazines Ever." It's one of those lists that are fun to argue about, and magazine lovers will enjoy arguing about it.
Personally I have no problem with the choice for No. 1 -- Esquire in its heyday in the 1960s, when it published Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and other writers who were inventing what came to be called the "new journalism." And I won't beef about the next few choices -- the New Yorker, Life, Playboy, New York Times Magazine and Mad (in that order).
But I started grumbling as I moved down the list. Should Wired No. 8 and Andy Warhol's Interview (9) really be rated higher than Rolling Stone (11) , National Geographic (12) and the Saturday Evening Post (26)? Why did the Atlantic Monthly (15) make the cut and not Harper's?
I'm glad the list includes Ramparts 18, the feisty, outrageous and visually zippy radical mag from the '60s. But where is McClure's, the feisty, influential, muckraking magazine from the turn of the 20th century? And how did the cheeseball shopping mag Lucky (44) find a place in this august company?
The editors of Good made these selections and then they had the good sense to get Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair (31) and co-founder of Spy (7), to write the introduction. Carter reminds the magazine world of an important but oft-forgotten truth:
"For a publication to succeed it has to have a point," he writes. "It can't just come into being because the owner wants to impress his friends. Or because market studies have shown an opening in a certain line of interest. Many of the big magazine companies, such as Time Inc., are run these days not by people who love magazines but by people in search of profit. Great magazines come from the gut and the heart."
Amen.
Ellie