In his middle age, the TV and film producer Dominick Dunne miraculously reinvented himself as a best-selling novelist and Vanity Fair writer. He was so popular in 2002, seven years before his death, that New York magazine called him “America’s most famous journalist.” The 1970s, however, were a much different time. After being a midlevel TV executive in the previous decade, he produced three low-budget movies in the early 1970s: The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park, and Play It as It Lays. Then he met agent Sue Mengers, already renowned for being the most powerful woman in Hollywood. It was she who handpicked him to produce what would be his fourth and last film, Ash Wednesday. In...
↧