On with Kara Swisher - Storytelling, Family & Tragedy with Griffin Dunne

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Actor and Director Griffin Dunne grew up surrounded by Hollywood fame and celebrity — his father was a TV producer, his aunt the renowned writer Joan Didion, his sister a blossoming actress and the late Carrie Fisher his best friend and onetime roommate. But the Dunne family became famous for tragedy when Griffin’s 22-year-old sister Dominique was murdered by her boyfriend. Dunne’s father, Dominick, chronicled the tumult of the murder trial for Vanity Fair, while privately struggling as a closeted homosexual. Kara talks to Dunne about the difficult decision to revisit these moments in his new memoir The Friday Afternoon Club. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find Kara on Threads/Instagram @karaswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature. Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees? And it takes forever to build a campaign?

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Griffin Dunn is my guest today. Actor, producer, director, and now author. You might remember him as the star of After Hours, the 1985 Martin Scorsese cult classic, which Dunn also produced, or his countless roles in film, TV, and streaming shows like This Is Us, I Love Dick, and more recently, The Girls on the Bus. In 2017, he also directed a great Netflix documentary about his aunt, Joan Didion, The Center Will Not Hold. Now Dunn's written a memoir

about his famous family and growing up in Hollywood. His father was a film producer and later a celebrity journalist. Dunn grew up surrounded by actors and writers, including his friend, the late Carrie Fisher, and her Star Wars co-star, Harrison Ford, back when he was just Aunt Joan Didion's weed-smoking carpenter. But Dunn's book is also about family tragedy. He writes about his father's alcoholism and struggles living as a closeted gay man, his mother's multiple sclerosis, and most unimaginable, the murder of his younger sister, Dominique Dunn, in 1982. I loved this book, and I was very surprised by what a deft and elegant writer Griffin Dunn is. It's a beautiful book where he goes there, and I say that in the most complimentary of ways.

It's very hard to do that, and he does it. Our question today comes from journalist, editor, and author Tina Brown, who also wrote a diary, The Vanity Fair Diaries, who has a personal connection to his family. Welcome, Griffin Dunn. Thanks for being here today. Thank you for having me. So I'm looking forward to talking about your memoir, which, as I told you previously, I really love. It's called The Friday Afternoon Club. But I'd also like to go back in time to talk about the documentary you did, The Center Will Not Hold, and obviously your career as an actor.

I just finished watching you, and I didn't realize for the longest time it was you in Girls on the Bus, where you're the perfect editor figure. And the scarf did a lot of talking in a lot of ways. Yes, that was borrowed from David Carr. Yeah, you reminded me a great deal. He was a friend of mine. You had a very David Carr-like. Thank you. You really did depict him.

He's a wonderful guy. So let's start talking about the memoir. Again, beautifully written. It's an elegantly written book. You're a terrific writer. And you have a great bunch of characters, which happens to be your family. You are quite a family of storytellers, from your father, your uncle and aunt, you and your sister, your producers, directors, actors, writers. Do you think it's an inherent trait in your family? Or, you know, there's an idea that Irish

people tell stories well, but I think a lot of people tell stories well. Well, I think it's certainly a trait in ours. There's not one member I can think of in my family, but I think a lot of people tell stories well. Well, I think it's certainly a trait in ours. There's not one member I can think of in my family, and I'm including my cousins, who doesn't know how to spin a pretty good yarn. You know, we were told stories about our family. My mother told me the story that's very early in the book of my great uncle who died on board a yacht with his mistress, and then the Griffin Wheel Company vice president calls his widow, soon to be. And she's in bed with her mistress and brings him to the funeral. Yeah, she's a mistress of an admiral, correct? Yes, that's right.

Brings Admiral Bastido to the funeral. And then we were shown the article. It was called Widow for a Day in the New York Times. And it's framed on our wall. That was a story we were told very young that had us in hysterics. Yeah, it's this idea of larger-than-life characters who misbehave all over the place. Misbehaving. Always misbehaving. And one of the themes, of course, in the book is the stories we tell about ourselves and which ones we pick course, in the book is the stories we tell about ourselves and which ones we pick. Early in the book, you talk about your fascination with JFK, for example,

and how it became a lie about a lie. Talk about the difference between lies and stories, because my family is Italian. It's full of stories I know aren't true, but maybe they're sort of true, right? My grandfather was arrested during Prohibition when the still blew up. I was like, did it happen? Was that true? Or was it the story that seemed funny and interesting at the time? Well, you know, there's a lot of wiggle room probably in the stories that we were told. And, you know, for example, in terms of the Kennedys, my story about having met the Kennedys when I was a child was just a blatant lie.

But the presence of the Kennedy family, another Irish family, in my father's generation, and the Kennedys and the Duns both had domineering fathers, deeply religious wives. And we were called the Kennedys of West Hartford. And the Kennedys of... Brookline. Brookline. They'd had no idea who the the end of Prohibition. They ran liquor, and then Joe Kennedy sold the liquor behind the back. It's not really been particularly verified.

I even looked at it in the biography of Joseph Kennedy. It's not quite there. It's sort of there. But nonetheless, the mythic proportion of that made the Kennedy family for generations really powerful presences in our lives, even though the Kennedys had no idea who we were. Who you were. Right. Well, there was a lot of envy, too, especially with your father. Oh, without a doubt, yes.

I think this is a book about your father, the entire book is. I can see why you would think that. Yeah, and your mother peripherally. But let's stick with the Kennedy story, because it's also about the lure of celebrity and fame, which I think hangs around this book quite a lot, because there's a lot of bold-faced names, although they're regular people, which you don't, of course, think about. You grew up around a lot of famous people who would become famous, like Harrison Ford and things like that. He was a carpenter when you met him, and you spoke pot with him. The idea of being close to it gives you a

level of worthiness. And it wasn't so much you, it was more your father. You write very candidly in the book when it comes to your father, Dominic Dunn, who later got best known for writing about crime, actually. Talk about his relationship with fame and how it shaped your own. And in the New York Times review of your book, which was very positive, it said, he's gingerly attitude towards fame, having witnessed its costs firsthand. That comes out loud and clear. Yeah, very much so. You know, when my father was a young parent and very much in love with his wife, but though closeted, he never quite felt worthy.

But if he surrounded himself and befriended famous people, which were so important to him, from a child of the, putting up pictures of Tyrone Power and Betty Davis on his childhood bedroom walls, he valued celebrity so much. It was so important to him. And then it became, it kind of transformed into sort of a social climbing. And when he arrived in Hollywood, he was very good at social climbing because he gave extraordinary parties. But he hung his hat on who he knew,

on, this is his early years, the telegrams of acceptance to his parties and the thank you notes that he would iron into his scrapbooks. And as a child, I was kind of embarrassed of him. You know, I couldn't quite articulate it. No, that's clear. I didn't feel like he was a man.

Like, I had an idea what a man was, and it was a guy who got in fistfights in bars and like the movie star fathers of my best friends who, you know, played gunslingers and lumberjacks. And so because he hung so much on that, when all that was taken away through his own self-destruction with drinking and, you know, probably not fooling anyone with his closeted life, and he was not successful enough. He was in television. I don't know how to this day he befriended so many movie stars because in those days the two professions did not overlap. so many movie stars, because in those days, the two professions did not overlap. But he was a television executive, and then everything fell away. Everything was pulled away. He lost his

career. He started doing very interesting movies, but he screwed that up, you know, by his own admission. And I saw what happened. His decline in the movie business was exactly as I was entering it. And I saw the cost it took on him. But you also said in the book, you realized later he was showing you what a real man was, which was a damaged person, could be damaged because men weren't supposed to be, and he couldn't avoid showing you that weakness. You mean my conception of what a real man was? Yes, your conception versus, you know, macho or whatever. Yeah, he, you know, again, back to storytelling and lies, my two best friends had these really tough guy fathers, and when they challenged my father, they said that their fathers could beat mine with one hand tied behind his back. I told them that my father could beat them up as soon as he

got out of prison. And they said, what? And I said, he robbed a bank. And the lie went around like smallpox, and the principal called my father. And so my father, when he came home from work, he pulled me aside, and I could see. He could tell I was embarrassed of him. And he said, is that what you want me to have done? Rob a bank with that? And I could have died right there. I could die right while I'm telling the story. It was so uncomfortable.

But he did not come up to my vision of a man. It was a little boy's idea of what a man was. And he became a man in my eyes after having lost everything and really taken a look at himself and lost all that fear. All that when, you know, at the end of his life, he wasn't scared of anyone. All that when, you know, at the end of his life, he wasn't scared of anyone. And he was tough and he was funny. And as I say in the book, you know, I had this idea of what a man was, but as I got older, I realized I'd been raised by one all along. Which is really a revelation. I mean, having those ambivalence about your father is really important because you also have an ambivalence about fame.

For example, the way you write about your deep friendship with Carrie Fisher, the late Carrie Fisher, about how her fame changed things. Can you talk a little bit about her and that relation? Because it's clearly a critical relationship in your life. Yeah. My brother met her first. My brother's two years younger than me. He was by far the most intelligent person in the family. And I'm talking both generations. He just was born with a brain

and a voracious reader, but also, you know, very sensitive and empathetic and loved people very, very much. And so when he loved someone, he loved hard. And so when he was 14 or 15, he met Carrie and he fell right in love with her. And she came over to the house and Alex said, don't you trick her into liking you. And I tried to respect my brother's wishes, but she started to open her mouth and she was so damn funny. She was just killing me. I couldn't stop laughing. And we immediately connected. And it was a bit like East of Eden or something, you know. And we just knew, I think, within three days, it was like, you're not going anywhere. And we, you know, we were brought together by humor. We could not

stop singing fake musicals to each other. In the most mundane conversations, we would break into song. And, you know, later when we became roommates, you know, she'd be in her room, I'd be in my room. We had an IBM Selectric typewriter that had just come out. And I'd hear her typing. I went, ah, game on. And she'd go to her bedroom, I'd come out of mine, I'd add another line, and this would go on all night long.

And I also ran interference, because I wasn't the only one who loved her at first sight, even though I always knew my relationship was platonic, and we were very clear about that. But it was very different when, you know, I was very serious about acting. And I was very seriously doing everything but. You know, I was really struggling. And, you know, Carrie gets this movie.

And she tells me it's in London. And, you know, my first impulse is, without knowing a thing, it's like, how come I'm not in it? And then she tells me a guy named Mark Hamill's going to be in it. And we're like, how old is he? He's my age. What are you talking about? So I'm already one of those guys. And then Harrison, who I idolized when he was a carpenter and building my aunt and uncle's deck.

And we'd smoke weed. And, you know, I just had a real idol worship. You could tell. I didn't think of him as a movie star. I didn't even know he was an actor. I just thought he was the most charismatic guy I ever met. And so here she was off to London to do a movie she swore was stupid. And, you know, to be with someone, really close with someone,

who becomes not just like successful or, oh, great reviews in the play, but to be with someone who explodes all three of their lives as actors, their lives exploded. And it was, I was still a waiter. I was counting my tips. I'd come home and count my quarters, you know, where there'd be rock stars that I'd listened to albums, I'd listened home and count my quarters, you know, where there'd be rock stars. I'd listen to albums. I'd listen to all my teen lives sitting on my bed, you know, and people doing blow off my countertop while I got my quarters. And I went, I don't belong here. This isn't my time.

And I grew up like that. I didn't belong, you know, I didn't earn to be around all those kids, all those famous people when I was a child. How did it impact your relationship? Well, it was, it was, it was tense for a little while, you know, not up to her. She was, she was, if anything, like, come on, get your shit together. What are you pissed off about? Like, and I could only come across as like someone who was jealous of, of her, but I was actually having a personal qualm. You know, I recognized that I was going back to my childhood, the kid in the bathrobe wandering among to say goodnight to the grown-ups,

you know, who had long careers behind them. And here I was, then I was just a little boy going to bed, and here I was, a guy going off to wait at tables at Beefsteak Charlie's. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer

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Do you feel like your leads never lead anywhere? And you're making content that no one sees. And it takes forever to build a campaign? Well, that's why we built HubSpot. It's an AI-powered customer platform that builds campaigns for you. Tells you which leads are worth knowing. And makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. So I want to switch gears a bit because one of the through lines from the very beginning of the

book is about your sister to the end, actually. She opens and closes the book, who was tragically killed, your younger sister Dominique. She was 22 years old when she was killed by her ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, who was a sous chef at Amazons, I believe. Talk to me a little bit about her influence in this memoir, Friday Afternoon Club, the party she used to have for her acting class. Talk a little bit about bringing her into this, because I think she's, you know, I think this is about your dad, but your sister framed the entire book. Yeah, I consider sort of the pulse of the book. And before I started writing, well, I had some pages, but I made a proposal. And what I proposed to the various publishers was almost a series of anecdotes about my family, sort of like David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty. Sure.

But then my editor, John Burnham Schwartz, suggested I write chronologically, which I found, wait a minute, I've got to go back to the Mexican Revolution. Oh, and if I'm going to do that, I have to go back to the Great Famine that brought them over. As I was writing, and then I hit my parents' childhood, living in the world of what their intense loneliness and humiliation on my father's side and loneliness of my mother's, I just got, you know, then I was born and my childhood and Alex. I just got, you know, then I was born and my childhood and Alex. When Dominique arrived on the scene, I, and we saw her brought home from the hospital, I felt the book take on a different, it was just a different life. And I mean life. It was just so full of life.

And it was such a joy to like reimagine her childhood and how bossy she was and how much we adored her. And as she got older and how quickly she became an actress, I again have gone on to ad nauseum about how I was struggling. No such thing with her. She told me she wanted to be an actress. I said, it's the worst profession in the world. She auditions for something called Diary of a Teenage Hitchhiker, and she plays the hitchhiker. Like, she's on a soundstage in two weeks. And then it was her career, which was really

starting to take off in this acting class, that all these young actors who we're going to hear from, like George Clooney and Tim Hutton and Miguel Ferrer. There are quite a few others who became heard of. But everybody was at the beginning of a very exciting time. And she gave a party every Friday at my mother's house. And she called it the Friday Afternoon Club. And every Friday afternoon, all these young actors would go and they'd drink and laugh into the night.

And I just loved the hopefulness of that. But all the time while I'm writing this, I know what's coming. I know what's coming. You know, and I'm... So I'm bracing for it, you know. And then it, you know, you can see I'm still like an open nerve. But I'm like going into it.

And I realized, you know, I had to call it part two of a book because this was now going to be the book. This was going to be that part of the book, okay this was now going to be the book. This was going to be that part of the book. Okay, if you had your laughs. What did you do to prepare yourself for writing about this? Did you have anything that helped you get through that? Because at the heart of it is this terrible tragedy. And you write very clearly about what happened when you saw her in the hospital, which I found devastating, the description, the ability to describe what she looked like. You talk a lot about her being disparaged during the murder trial and how devastating that was.

At some point, you write that a mobster offered to have Sweeney killed. It's quite honest about these terrible things at the same time. Talk about preparing yourself to write for this to get through it. Well, my father wrote, the very first thing he wrote that was ever published was about this very trial. And it was about family. It was about him, but it was about the family going through. Tina Brown commissioned him. He had no experience as a magazine writer. And so he, at great cost, found his voice, a voice that carried him through the rest of his life, made him cover trials.

So this had been covered. And quite honestly, when it first came out in Vanity Fair and it got all that attention, I had a lot of mixed feelings about it. It felt so, it was still so new and it felt... That your father benefited from something, that he was benefiting from tragedy. Yes, I had lots of conflicted feelings. It then came to a point where anyone I thought might be in my life, significantly, they had to read it in order to understand me, you know, where I'm from. But what hadn't been in that article, because he's a father, is the brother, and my brother, and our point of view of what was happening. our point of view of what was happening.

And I, that was a story I felt compelled to tell. Yeah, and as you mentioned, your father wrote a famous story for Vanity Fair, Justice, a father's account of the trial of his daughter's killer. And it was sparked by then soon-to-be editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown. Every week we get a question from an outside expert, so listen in. Hi, Griffin, it's Tina. Loved the book. It was so great to be reminded of that wonderful, epic evening when I urged your dad to write a diary at the trial of Dominique's killer,

and it became his very first piece, of course, for Vanity Fair. One of the things I really loved about his pieces was he not only penetrated the inner worlds of celebrity and high society, but he also really understood the struggles of the losers and the down-and-outers on the fringes of it all. He has so much compassion for characters like Vicki Morgan, the discarded mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale. Do you think that Nick's own experiences of being rejected

by the Hollywood A-listers informed his reporting at all? And was that a wound that ever really healed with his success at Vanity Fair? Hi, Tina. Wonderful question. It's lovely to just hear your voice and, you know, talk about that night you guys met that changed his life and consequently our lives. guys uh you guys met that changed his life and consequently our lives um you know dad was never a as much as he loved rich people as loved much as he loved you know the best car and was terribly materialistic uh he was never a snob uh and never more so than when the shit got kicked out of him. And he was down and out.

But he was always, you know, he really, he got along with every kind of class. And what really dialed it up was when he got sober and he was in AA meetings with firemen and dispatchers and airline hostesses, you know, flight attendants who lost their jobs from drinking and people really just in the skids. And they were all, had all tasted the gutter. And he felt at home there. He felt at home with, it didn't matter who you were. If you touch bottom, I'm there for you. And I think it had a tremendous, I think AA just saved his life, not just in a breathing way. I think it just inspired him.

His perspective was so expanded. And did he ever recover from it? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He totally recovered. You know, a kind of a lesser man would have had a different answer to the question I asked him. I said, how, during the O.J. trial, he was so popular. Mm-hmm. He was. And all the people who, you know, kicked him when he was down, all those people, when he was a famous reporter writing about O.J. and had the inside story, he was invited to every dinner party in town.

And he wrote about O.J. and had the inside story. He was invited to every dinner party in town. And he wrote about that. And he wrote about it. And I go, how could you go to these people's houses after what they did you? He goes, I love it. I love it. And this time, they need me. I don't need them. Yeah.

So I think he really reveled. It was a turn. He loved the turn. To go from worship and being looking in from the outside to being the inside. He was no longer scared. He knew where he was. He knew where he fit. Nothing would shake him. Power was something to be written about and examined. Yeah, he hated power. He seemed to hate power in many ways. And injustice, I guess. Absolutely. His version of injustice. No, that theme was in everything he wrote. Yeah. One of the most incredible moments of your book, though, was when you discover a diary entry from the trial that your father did not publish.

It revealed that a relationship with a close friend of Dominique's, a man named Norman. This just stopped me when I read about it. Norman testified during the trial. In the diary entry, your father worried that John Sweeney's team knew about the affair and would uncover it during cross-examination. Can I ask you to read a few lines? Oh, sure. This is from his diary.

This loathsome and cruel man will expose our relationship to discredit his testimony and my character. You have carried on a secret affair with the father of your close friend all these years? What kind of friend does that make you? What kind of father has an affair with the friend of one of his children? The chances there is not at least one homophobic juror are slim, and I can already imagine the disgust the baggage handler will feel toward me.

If Adelson uses my relationship with Norman to affect the verdict in Sweeney's favor, I will kill myself. I will not be able to live with the disappointment Lenny and the boys will rightly feel toward me. How did it feel to discover that note? That was a real gut punch to me. I was like, what? It was a gut punch. And all I could think of was, oh, Dad, oh, Dad, I wish I knew. I'm so sorry you had to go through that. It must have been horrifying.

You know, just if things were bad enough to have this. And, you know, for whatever reason, we never talked about it, but for whatever reason, he felt like even in 1983 during the trial, when nobody cared who was gay. I mean, all people cared about then was everybody was losing their friends from AIDS. But even then, I think from his generation being closeted, young person in the 30s and 40s, it gets you killed. And I think he thought, oh, my God, my sexuality is going to get—

I'll get caught again. I felt it. Even though I'm much younger than your dad, the closet was a terrible place. It really was. It made you terrified. And he was gay from a young age. He kept that part of his life private, as you talked about. Talk about how you found out and what it meant for your relationship.

And do you think things would be different between you if he had come out earlier? And did you feel conflicted about publishing that note or those details? No, because I think, well, one, anyone could have seen them, I think. I think they were for public viewing in his archive. The only time he actually came out was on the last three pages of his book. They came out

posthumously. And he wanted me to go and promote it. He said, just do a couple of that. I did Fresh Air and I did GMA. Good Morning America. But, you know, if he came out much earlier, it wouldn't have affected me in the least. It might have affected him. I think it would have been one less thing to have to lug around.

Right. It is heavy. To come out. And, you know, men like Gore Vidal, you know, who were completely out, they knew he was gay, and it infuriated them. Gore and my dad hated each other right to the end of their lives. And I think somewhere in the middle of it, it's like, oh, you think you can get away with that? Who do you think you're fooling kind of thing? But, you know, the interesting thing is one of the reasons Gore probably knew was, you know, right after the war, of which my father fought in and was a decorated war hero, which I wasn't to find out for years later, you know, soldiers couldn't – they couldn't go on vacation in Europe. Obviously, it had been bombed. So a lot of the soldiers went to Central America and South America. And dad went to Central America. And he's walking down the street,

and he sees Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal had just come out with his book that was very bold and dealt with homosexuality. And it made him quite rich in comparison if you're in Central America. He had a huge villa and a swimming pool. And there were other young men there. And Anais Nin. I don't know what the heck was going on there, but I remember Dad telling me when I was a younger teenager that he had a little thing with Anais Nin in the swimming pool.

And I went, oh, okay. And then years later when he couldn't get a job and he finally got a job that was really kind of degrading of just packaging laser discs, he had this idea. He wanted to do a documentary about Anish Ninh who came over to his office, now a much smaller, dumpier office. And I went to the office.

He called me up and said, get over here. You think I lied about that story? Anna Easton is here right now. And I rushed over. And there was Anna Easton. She must have been mid-'80s with a cane. And she looked at me, and she walked toward me. She put her hands on my face and just stroked and she goes,

oh, you're just like your father in the swimming pool. Oh, that's great. So he was not lying. He wasn't even establishing. He wasn't lying. Yeah. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact.

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their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. I want to finish up talking a little bit about the documentary, which I thought was wonderful, about your aunt, who was in this book, too. Your aunt and your uncle are quite big characters. It's so interesting. Everyone, all the big characters are not living.

I know. All of them, all the key ones, which probably freed you to write about them if you look at the cover of the book um um the only family member uh left is alex and i yeah exactly um and it's really quite something and i think that frees you you know i was talking to my mom and she said are you ever gonna you didn't write about me much in the book and and i said well you're not dead yet so yet. So when you are, and she's like, you bitch. And I was like, that's her. And everybody kind of consumes, oh, you have to be dead so I can write behind your back.

Right, exactly. I needed them to be dead. Not needed them, but I mean, the longer that we were apart, the more perspective I got, the more. That's correct. The clearer I could see them. And behind this laptop was a punch board just filled with pictures of all different periods of my life. And the pictures of my family while I was working, they just looked

different. It was like they were alive. But when they were alive, I'd pass them back and forth. I don't even remember looking at them. One of the most famous quotes from your aunt was, we tell ourselves stories in order to live, right? And I think that's what you're doing in this book. Let's talk about that documentary, which I thought was also very touching and sad and poignant at the same time, especially the photos of, you know, she's very skinny, her eating. It was really, and you had that camera real close to her, which was a real choice, I have to say. It was called The Center Will Not Hold, which is, of course, based on the Yeats poem that she used in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Why did you decide to make it? Was it just too good and people have such a reverence towards her?

How did you decide to do that? Well, I mean, I have been long aware that she had been approached probably on a monthly basis from someone wanting to make a documentary about her. Her book, Blue Nights, had come out, which would be her last book, and which was about, she dealt with magical thinking about the loss of her husband, and Blue Nights was about the loss of Quintana. And she wrote this devastatingly sad book, and also painful to read because she was so tough on herself, what kind of mother. And one day, after she turned in the manuscript,

and I'd read the book, as I always did for everything, long before it was published, I got a call from Sonny Maeda, who was her publisher, and a legendary man himself. And he said, Joan asked me to call. You know, these books, we do these videos. And, you know, Joan wanted to know if you'd be interested in doing a video for Blue Nights. And I looked at a video, I think even in real time, and they were all kind of cheesy. And I said, you know, I've actually, and I've realized I've seen these kind of videos. I really want to do one really well.

And it's probably, these don't look, you look like they're on very tight budget. I'd like to use a little more money. And he said, done. So Joan and I and a camera crew, while we're making this movie short about the book, which is a devastatingly sad subject, we had so much fun making it. And, you know, Joan loved piling in the van with all these young kids who couldn't believe they were with Joan Didion.

And we'd race up to St. John's, and then we'd go over to the Botanical Gardens. And we, you know, cut it together, and it looked great. And everybody was very pleased. And I just decided I knew there was a future there. It wasn't like, oh, this is a good career move. It was like, you know, nobody's going to be able to do this but me. Correct. There was nobody but you who could do it.

No, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Yeah. It reminded me of the Sondheim doc, which I thought was also great. Yeah, I loved that. Which is a great thing. So I want to play you a clip from the doc where you ask her about one of her most visceral scenes in her 1968 book of essays, which sort of made her career. Yes. And everyone who's a writer has read it 16 times, slouching towards Bethlehem.

For those who don't know, it's a very immersive look at hippie culture, particularly in San Francisco. I hate Ashbery. Didion wrote her essay about meeting a five-year-old girl who'd been given acid by her mother. Let's listen to the clip of you talking to her. What was it like to be a journalist in the room when you saw the little kid on acid? Well, it was...

Let me tell you you it was gold I mean that's the long and the short of it is you live for moments like that if you're doing a piece good or bad wow that was

an amazing question and that was an amazing answer. Well, you know, it's fascinating to hear it, too, because I've only seen it. But to hear it, and you see the time code, I didn't realize how long that pause was. You know, if you don't see it, you're just, because you're not thinking about time, because you're just looking at her, just coming up with, do I say this? Do I not? Do I?

Oh, God. Am I going to tell the truth here? Ah, what the fuck? I'm going to tell the truth. I'm going to tell the truth. And then she went, it was gold. I mean, that sound had been in the back of my mind for years. And it started when I heard her say that on camera.

My next thought was, that was gold. Yes, because she tells the truth. And a lot of her is like, well, it was difficult, and I knew I had to put it in, and yet I felt bad about it. But she didn't even bother. She's like, look, this was great for me. And such a journalist moment, which she talks about. Yeah.

And I'm a mother, and I've got a kid the same age that I left behind in Los Angeles while I lived here for four months in the hate with these filthy hippies. Yeah, right. No, absolutely. It was about her because she, of course, also wrote journalists are always selling someone out. She was just living that. She decided to say, that's exactly what I said. I'm going to stick with it as awful as it was. To make the documentary, you had to dig for this kind, as you said, journalistic gold and personal interviews. She was your subject, but also your aunt. Was it ever uncomfortable? Did the documentary give you an opportunity to ask questions you couldn't have asked otherwise?

I know you talked about the trial, and there was a break between your father and his brother, John, her husband, because of their behavior, or mostly his behavior during the trial or their behavior. Was there any part that was uncomfortable? Well, I felt at a tremendous disadvantage to be related and in love with my subject when I really had to talk about Quintana, her daughter, and her role as a mother. And it just, it was so difficult. While she was talking, it was like being, you know, at the dentist, just get this over with, just get this over with. Okay, do I have it? Do I have it? Do I have it? Okay, I can move on. I know, you know, a regular journalist would not be going through that. But, you know, you mentioned the trial, which was not, there was an avenue that I went down on camera

that it was a conversation I never had with her off camera or really with John, which was, where did you go? Why did you go during the trial? And that was as painful as anything. I didn't ask it. I think I said something like, you know, during the trial, our families didn't get along. And afterwards, it really caused a wound. Do you remember what that was about?

And then I could see out of her face, oh, my God, I can't believe you're going there. And I can't believe this camera's rolling. And then, you know, she's had a little chain with a ring on it, and she's pulling on it nervously. And she says, well, I think it had to do with us not being at the trial. Well, I think it had to do with us not being at the trial. And I went, well, this is an entirely different avenue. This is an entirely different movie. And I don't think I pressed it much further.

One, because I hated the discomfort, but two, that's not what the movie was about. But they went to Paris. Well, it's in this book quite a bit. I did it in the book. They were afraid of the repercussions for Quintana, who had troubles. Which is a perfectly understandable explanation. nightly news and the local news day after day. And, you know, all these people come out of the woodwork and people protest outside a courtroom. And you kind of go crazy. You don't know you're crazy, but you're actually kind of crazy. And your anger is so all over the place. And it's sometimes incredibly misplaced. And that wasn't where my anger went. But my father was really

driven, really driven. I believe she said that her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was the book she needed to read. Did you find anything you needed in her writing, too, through doing this and help you process grief? Because these are your losses, too. Sure, sure. Well, you know, I've written, I've been asked for Vintage, the publisher, they're putting together a collection of Euromagical Thinking Blue Knights, East and West. And I wrote the introduction to it. I was asked to do that.

So I went, I'd already made the doc, but I went back and reread these books for the first time. But I went back and reread these books for the first time. And I was kind of surprised how sort of my grief and our family's grief really was flying side by side hers. And, you know, the things that she described were just so correct, so right. were just so correct, so right. But I thought of her while I was writing the book, of her personal essays. I thought of her, I thought of goodbye to all that. You know, here I am writing as a young kid in New York and the excitement of that,

and she's writing about leaving that city that I still continue to live in. And I was writing about my years as being a dyslexic student and being held back and being kicked out of school and feeling stupid. And there, I remember an essay Joan wrote about the shame of not getting into Stanford. So I took that honesty. And my uncle and father, all three of them had this quality of being very honest about themselves. And I liked the way that they wrote about themselves.

I don't think you left anything not on the field. It feels like everything's here. Is there something more you left out or wanted to say in this thing? Well, every now and then something will occur to me going, oh, I wish I put that in. I wish I'm going to live the rest of my life like that. But to my surprise, while I was writing chronologically, I was never sure where I'm going to live the rest of my life like that. But to my surprise, while I was saying I was writing chronologically, I was never sure where I was going to end it. And, you know, at one point I was like at 300 pages and I was still only 15 years old.

So I thought, you know, I better bring this thing in. And, you know, when I got to my daughter being born. And I felt, just what I just felt just a second ago. I went, I'm ending on life, you know. I opened with death and I'm ending on life. It was a perfect place. So now you have a part two,

which you've done since then. I had part two. It wasn't quite, but it was like, get me out of here. Let's get out while it goes good. No, it was the perfect way to do it because it was about your sister

and about life. It was about life amid so much tragedy and funniness, as you said. So, before we wrap up, I just want to very briefly ask you about the industry now. You've been immersed in Hollywood culture your entire life. You do live in New York. Your dad was in the business. You produced movies and television. You've been a working actor since the 70s. As I said, you were just on Girls on the Bus playing David Carr, which was a lovely thing. You're working with streaming companies. Your documentary came out on Netflix.

You were in the Amazon Prime show I Love Dick, which was great, with Katherine Hahn. Talk about where Hollywood is now. The Hollywood of your dad's age is gone. Yeah. And how do these major tech companies from Netflix to Apple to Amazon changed the industries? A lot of people would argue they've done serious damage. What is Hollywood now from your perspective? You know, when these companies came out, I was sort of a little bit in limbo, you know, developing things to direct and its major studios and having, you know projects almost start not quite and then

when streaming came along it was an immediate green light I was paid better than I was ever paid I love that whatever we did so I got the doc going and I love Dick with Joey Soloway who had done Transparent um Catherine Han Kevin Bacon I, one of the best parts I ever had in my life, and directing this documentary I was passionate about. Both Amazon, Netflix paid very handsomely. I lacked for nothing. It really saved me, and I was so excited. Now, as a viewer, I've got six billion things in the living room smashed up on the wall. And I keep putting, oh, save that, save that, save that. I'm going to get to that. I get to nothing, and I feel overwhelmed.

I don't know what I'm paying for. I don't leave my living room to rush to see the 12 o'clock show on a Friday of a movie I'm dying to see. I really miss that. You know, I never missed a Kubrick showing at 12 o'clock show on a Friday of a movie I'm dying to see. I really miss that. You know, I never missed a Kubrick showing at 12 o'clock on a Friday when his movie's open. And, you know, it makes me feel kind of old. I'm like, oh, no. But I really don't know.

I'm not an economist, but I don't see how the figures quite are going to really work. Right, you're correct. You know, a lot of people have different concerns about the future of moviemaking. AI is one, too much focus on franchise, too much content, lack of originality. Yeah, there's a great deal to worry about. So here's you writing about a story, a memoir of storytellers. So I'd love the last question. What is the future of storytelling and creative

work? And speaking of optimism, where do you find optimism? If you were a young Griffin Dunn right now? If I was a young Griffin right now, I would hope that I would be the kid I was then who heard everything, listened to everything. When I was a fan, I wasn't just a fan. I worshipped music, an artist, a movie, a director. Those stories would stay with me. They'd burn in my head. I would overhear.

I'd eavesdrop. I would have experiences, and I would tell stories about, you're never going to believe what just happened to me. You're not going to believe this one. And the storytelling, not cavemen passing along storytelling, but people are always going to be inspired to tell their stories and to pass them on. And, you know, I think anyone, not just, you don't have to have written a book, but if anyone did really sit down and think about their own family and their parents' parents and their parents, they'd find a line. They'd find these traits, good and bad, that they carry, this DNA.

You know, why does tragedy befall a certain family so many times over and over and generation after generation? Those are stories worth telling. Those are questions worth asking yourself. And so I have no doubt about that stories will continue to be told and be more inventive and become fantastic in inventing new ways of linear and structure. And I think all of that's very exciting. What the medium itself will be, the best thing, that I don't know. That I don't know. I love books.

I love holding books. Heck, I even like a Kindle. But I do think I have great faith in the written word as well. I think that that will survive every possible kind of climate change culturally. You can imagine there'll always be books. Well, you've written a lot of great words here, I have to say. What a wonderful memoir. And I recommend everyone to read it.

Again, it's a pleasure to read. Anyway, this has been wonderful. I really appreciate it. I wish you the very best and I'm looking forward to another memoir. I think you should keep going. Oh, thank you, Cara. Thanks so much. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Kristen Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher, Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, and Kate Furby. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda. And our theme music is by Trackademics.

If you're already following the show, you get to party with Gore Vidal and Anais Nin. If not, go buy a book which will survive the apocalypse. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back Thursday with more. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself.

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