How Griffin Dunne’s Dad Dominick Channeled Grief Right into a Crime Writing Profession

Within the face of unspeakable tragedy, Griffin Dunne’s father, Dominick, discovered his footing in a brand new profession — crime journalism.

Talking with PEOPLE forward of the publication of his new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Membership: A Household Memoir, Griffin Dunne, 68, is wanting again on his star-studded — and infrequently outrageous — life in Hollywood. The memoir, which particulars every little thing from the After Hours star’s treasured friendship with Carrie Fisher to his acclaimed profession in movie and TV, is essentially a household memoir, and examines his father Dominick’s journey towards changing into a author.

Dominick was initially a Hollywood producer identified for movies like 1970’s Boys within the Band and 1971’s The Panic in Needle Park. Whereas writing, Dunne recalled hardships that his father confronted, resembling his divorce from Dunne’s mom, Ellen, when Dunne was 10, his struggles with alcohol and his closeted sexuality.

“Earlier than I wrote the guide, I reached a spot of empathy and love and respect for his bravery,” Dunne says, including that his father “had needed to turn into a author for many of his life.”

Dominick authored a number of novels, together with 1982’s The Winners and 1985’s The Two Mrs. Greenvilles, which was changed into a TV miniseries in 1987. In 1982, Dominick’s daughter, Poltergeist actress Dominique, was strangled and killed by an ex-boyfriend when she was 22. Dominick stored a diary all through the homicide trial on the request of former Vainness Honest editor-in-chief Tina Brown, which he expanded into an in-depth article for the publication.

“He wrote this devastating piece about what a household goes by, who had no expertise within the court docket judicial system; what we went by,” Dunne says. “It is a doc that is like a handbook for what households ought to put together for.”

Within the many years to observe, Dominick would cowl a number of high-profile circumstances for Vainness Honest. He was one in all two reporters granted full entry to the O.J. Simpson trials in 1995, and was within the courtroom to cowl the notorious trials of the Menendez brothers in 1993 and Phil Spector in 2007. His son, nonetheless, says that although Dominick was a journalist, he was “not a really unbiased one.”

“If he wrote about Phil Spector, he talked about Lana Clarkson and never as a third-rate actress, because the media proceed to explain her,” Dunne says. “Or throughout O.J., he sat with the Browns and Nicole’s household … he at all times checked out it from the rights of the sufferer.”

Dominick additionally wasn’t the one author within the Dunne household. His youthful brother was novelist and journalist John Gregory Dunne, and his sister-in-law was essayist and critic Joan Didion. Dunne recollects the fraught relationship between Dominick and John, which started in childhood.

The brothers’ father beat Dominick but had a “loving” relationship with John, Dunne says, and the 2 solely reconciled their variations in 2002, once they met in a heart specialist’s workplace after the brothers every had coronary heart assaults.

“I relived what it was prefer to be within the center,” Dunne says of wanting again on their relationship. “As a result of I liked them each. And it was very poisonous between these two males based mostly on lifelong experiences that they noticed in a different way.”

Regardless of the stress, Dunne says that turning to his household’s work helped him to write down The Friday Afternoon Membership — although, he additionally has some regrets because the publication date approaches.

“It is a guide I actually am sorry the three of them aren’t round to have learn,” he says. “I feel they’d’ve preferred it. I form of channeled their honesty. I admired the best way that they, all of them … had been no strangers to sharing the private, which is what I attempted to do.”

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