Documentary sheds light on private life of Joan Didion
Five things we learned from Griffin Dunne’s ‘love letter’ to the author
How do you make a documentary about one of the literary world’s most searingly personal figures? Keep it in the family.
For more than five decades, Joan Didion has gifted readers with her lyrical prose, wry wit and soul-baring meditations on grief. She wrote about the 2003 death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, in The Year of Magical Thinking, and the loss of her daughter, Quintana, two years later in Blue Nights.
It was around Blue Nights’ publication in 2011 that the essayist’s nephew, filmmaker Griffin Dunne, approached her about making Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (streaming Friday on Netflix).
“I know her about just as well as anybody,” Dunne says, though “I hardly approached it with the most balanced perspective. The movie is a love letter to her.”
Five things we learned:
1WARREN
BEATTY WAS A NOT-SO-SECRET ADMIRER.
A newly wed Didion moved to Los Angeles, where she would host parties for an eclectic crowd of writers, musicians, homicide detectives and celebs, including Janis Joplin, Roman Polanski and Beatty. The latter wasn’t shy about his crush on Didion, which “was a running joke for years,” Dunne says.
Once, Beatty told Didion that “he had a late call (to be on the set) and could hang out if she wanted. Joan just looked at him and said, ‘That is not feasible.’ ”
2HARRISON
FORD HELPED RENOVATE DIDION’S MALIBU HOME.
Before he blasted to stardom as Han Solo, Ford was a working actor with a side gig as a carpenter. Recommended by a friend, he set about building an “enormous deck and bookshelves,” Dunne says. “He was the most charismatic carpenter I ever saw. I couldn’t have been less surprised he became a major movie star.”
3SHE
LITERALLY FROZE MANUSCRIPTS WHEN SHE HAD WRITER’S BLOCK.
Whenever Didion would get stumped, she would put the unfinished draft of whatever she was working on in a plastic bag and stick it in the freezer until she was ready to come back to it.
“It’s pure Joan,” Dunne says. “On a metaphorical level, it tracks in her creative and personal proc- ess. In order for her to not be overwhelmed by grief, she had to compartmentalize.”
4DIDION
DROPPED TO JUST 75 POUNDS AS SHE GRIEVED.
The petite author suffered pronounced weight loss after the deaths of her husband and daughter.
Her health started to turn around when producer Scott Rudin suggested she adapt The Year of Magical Thinking for the stage. When the one-woman show starring Vanessa Redgrave opened on Broadway in 2007, Didion had a table backstage to work on rewrites and eat croissants and soup. The play “was her nourishment,” Dunne says.
5SHE’S
STILL WRITING.
Now 82, Didion keeps the company of close friends and a Wheaten terrier and closely follows world events, up to a point. “(President) Trump bores her,” Dunne says.
“Like many of us, she’s burnt out on too much chaos. There’s no subtext or subtlety in what’s going on politically that she would delight in pulling out for readers.”
As for what she’s currently writing about, “I’m loathe to ask.” When he was 11, “I said, ‘ What are you writing, Joan?’ And my uncle bellowed, ‘ You never ask a writer what they’re writing while they’re writing!’ ”