Downtown Looks Back At Griffin Dunne

by | Jan 5, 2016 | Culture, Downtown Living

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Photo: Courtesy of Leslie Hassler

Over a recent lunch in the Financial District, Griffin Dunne told me, along with about two hours’ worth of other stories, that his apartment building is basically falling apart.

“We are having a real New York experience…actually every New Yorker I’ve talked to has never heard of this.” Looking for more space for his growing family, Dunne recently moved into a beautiful old apartment in TriBeCa, only to quickly learn that nothing in the entire building was built correctly.

“For the plumbing, they used the wrong material, so all the plumbing has to be ripped out,” he starts to explain. “Then they put every window in the place wrong….The whole building is not built to last; it’s like a set. Nothing works. It’s a catastrophe. So it’s a rough beginning to the new neighborhood, but I love the neighborhood.”

Not only does Dunne love his new neighborhood, he clearly loves the city.

Dunne is a real New Yorker. Now 56, he moved to New York City as an 18-year-old aspiring actor and immediately began an intense love affair with the city that has never let up. As an actor, writer, producer, director, activist, son and father, he has both embraced New York as his own and worked to show it off to everyone.

Born to Dominick Dunne, a writer and investigative journalist who spent much of his later career documenting the lives of celebrities for Vanity Fair, and Ellen Griffin Dunne, an activist who founded a homicide victims’ rights organization, called Justice for Homicide Victims, following her daughter’s murder in 1982, Griffin spent most of his childhood in Los Angeles before attending school for a short time in Colorado.

From a young age, Dunne initially planned to avoid show business altogether. Because of his father’s affinity for celebrity culture and his many famous friends, Griffin’s upbringing was outside the norm, filled with a lot of the glitz and glam of Hollywood. “I was always on movies sets; I was used to meeting famous people when I was growing up,” Dunne says. “James Bond would come over and swim in our pool.”

The celebrity lifestyle Dunne observed at his father’s lavish celebrity-filled parties didn’t appeal to him; instead he had aspirations to be a journalist, to have “nothing to do with show business.” However, on the encouragement of a high school acting teacher, Dunne shifted his focus toward acting and producing and found he was excelling at both. But around the time Dunne was seriously thinking about going into acting, his father had hit a low in life: broke, friendless and battling addiction.

“I saw what Hollywood can do if you bite its hand. I just didn’t think people treated each other like that in New York. I wanted to start off on my own.” This, along with an ever-present desire to leave Los Angeles from a young age, moved Dunne to head for New York City, where he was immediately enthralled.

“It was love at first sight the moment I saw my first Manhattan street: the noise     and the rudeness and the energy and the pace of walking…and just walking.”

Dunne says this continuous infatuation with New York has helped his careers in numerous ways, especially in terms of developing his ability to tell stories. Because “you see confrontations and human stories developing all the time,” he feels that New York is an excellent source of inspiration. And after living and observing life in New York for so many years, Dunne’s gift for storytelling has reached great heights, as was clear throughout our conversation.

“The very first place [I lived] was a room in some lady’s house. It was the guest or maid’s room or something like that. And she was an old AP reporter, a real old city desk bird who smoked like a chimney. I lived in the back area and I never had my own cigarettes, so I used to crawl into her bedroom on my stomach and steal them all. And she’d catch me every time and go, ‘What the fuck are you doing in my room?’ I pretty much stayed there until she kicked me out.” Until moving Downtown in 1980, Dunne lived in various parts of the Upper West Side, trying to make it as an actor and producer, waiting for his career to take off.

In the late 1970s, Dunne’s career in show business began to blossom when he and fellow producers Amy Robinson (with whom he has since coproduced a number of other films) and Mark Metcalf optioned a book and produced their first movie, Chilly Scenes of Winter. Dunne gave himself a small part in the 1979 film, naturally leading to his acting career. And with these first steps, producing and acting have been on his plate ever since. “It started off and stayed that way,” Dunne explains.

Since then, Dunne has been actively producing and acting in films and television shows, including the feature films An American Werewolf in London and After Hours, two of his most well-known works. After Hours, the 1985 Martin Scorcese–directed black comedy, tells the story of Paul Hackett (Dunne) paying a visit to SoHo and spending the rest of his night desperately trying to survive a number of strange characters and get home to his own bed. It’s a movie that perfectly captures one of the things Dunne loves so much about New York City: that everyone has their own, very interesting story. On an almost Odyssean journey to get back home, Dunne’s character experiences SoHo in its most raw state, which was an accurate account of what Dunne says SoHo was like in the 1980s.

“It really was a ghost town. You could lie in the middle of the street and no one would come by. I only knew that someone lived there when on the tenth take of screaming ‘What do you want from me?’ some lady artist working in the middle of the night looked out the window and screamed, ‘Shut up, just shut the fuck up!’”

Since that role, Dunne has appeared in more than 50 films and televisions shows, produced seven movies and directed nine movies and shows. And while he has always been fond of acting and producing, he has found himself especially drawn to directing, ever since he had the opportunity to direct the 1996 television short Duke of Groove, which he also wrote. From that first experience behind the camera, Dunne knew he and directing were a good match, partially because its hectic and multifaceted nature fits his mind.

“I’ve always struggled with dyslexia. Now it’s called ADD or something. I found that having that kind of fast mind constantly going was perfectly suited for directing. People with dyslexia or ADD aren’t in a state of total distraction; it’s just a state of noticing things so much that your focus is dispersed. So when you’re working on a movie you basically have that focus, but it’s all-encompassing and you’re working on all cylinders all the time. You use everything. So it just felt completely natural, and from my years as a producer I understood the problems, and from my years as an actor, I understood the actors.”

Although Dunne has thus far avoided acting in and directing the same movie, partially because of his feelings about the contradicting natures of acting and directing and the different breadths of focus needed for each, he admits he might be interested in trying it if the right opportunity came up. He envies someone like Warren Beatty, who cowrote, produced, directed and starred in the 1981 epic Reds.

“I envy that: having something you love that you can immerse yourself in. It’s great. You never come out and deal with the real world. You want to hang onto that as long as you can, you never want it to end. Some directors have a hard time finishing a movie, of emotionally letting go of the film after having such an intense relationship with it. And it also means you’re going to have to get you’re own cup of coffee the next morning.”

Over the past 16 years, Dunne has directed such films as 1997’s Addicted to Love, staring Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan; 1998’s Practical Magic, with Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock; and 2005’s Fierce People, starring Diane Lane, Donald Sutherland and Anton Yelchin, which he also produced.

Of all the projects in which he has been involved, Dunne is somewhat ambivalent regarding a preference for acting, producing or directing, but finds he is most attracted to a particular character or a project he is involved in generating.

“It gives me a certain kind of security to it,” he says. “You know, I like throwing the party, rather than being the guest.”

But having said that, and once again with parties  on his mind, Dunne says that recently he has come to prefer acting and directing over solely producing.

“[As a producer] there was always a sense of being the guy who provided the party but not really being able to have the fun on the creative side. It was a very creative venture to develop the script and get it off to production, but once in production, if we had done our jobs right, there really wasn’t that much for us to do except pay the bills and deal with studios and agents.”

Because of this, Dunne admits he had “fallen out of passion with just producing” and, with the exception of 2005’s Game 6, he has been mainly acting and directing. In 2011, Dunne directed an episode of The Good Wife after being brought in by his dear friend and Good Wife star, Julianna Marguiles. Dunne also directed Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin in part of the upcoming Movie 43, a feature film comprised of a collection of short comedy segments due out this spring.

Dunne has also added a number of acting credits to his name lately. “Well, it’s certainly not the money,” he says, with a laugh, about why certain television shows appealed to him. “All of those shows are of the highest caliber in television.” Lately, Dunne has appeared in episodes of Trust Me, How to Make It in America, White Collar, Leverage (which “from season one, [he was] just completely addicted to”), Damagesand House of Lies.

About Showtime’s House of Lies, Dunne enthuses, “It’s a really funny show. [It’s] very provocative and it’s the first time in a while I’ve been asked to sign a nudity waiver, which I did with great, great gusto.”

Although attracted to a television series’ ability to develop story arcs and characters over multiple episodes in a season, he generally is less concerned with the medium than with the part or the people with whom he would be working. Dunne found himself drawn to parts in the upcoming movie Broken City, with Russell Crowe and Mark Wahlberg, and in The Discoverers, of which he says his role “was really one of the best parts I’ve ever had.”

Currently, Dunne finds himself back in producing, working to get a new project off the ground, “a project that would have a longer life than a movie.” He is teaming up with BBC America to develop a show called Blood on the Tracks, a series set in New York City, where he would be the hands-on producer.

In addition to that series, Dunne is collaborating with producer Susanne Rostock (whose film about Harry Belafonte, called Sing Your Song, was short-listed for the Academy Awards) on a documentary about the history of the Chateau Marmont and “all of the stories that went on in the fortress over the past 80 or so years.” Dunne is also in the early stages of putting together a documentary about celebrated author—and his aunt—Joan Didion. “So as you can see,” he adds, “I’m all over the place.”

Any of the movies and television shows Dunne has directed, produced or acted in are set in, or in some way feature, New York City. For example, both starring in and producing the 1985 film After Hours was an experience Dunne still holds dear. Now, after living near the film’s location for so long, Dunne has been able to relive certain iconic moments from the movie, while seeing how the area has changed over the years.

“The buildings are the same, but the feel and the commerce and the turnover of businesses diverge,” Dunne recalls, thinking back to how different SoHo was while he was filming After Hours. “It’s unrecognizable.…I mean now, [Broadway] looks like one of those pictures of the teeming masses in Shanghai or Bombay, with people as far as you can see.”

Over a span of 30 years, Dunne moved a few times, but always within a few blocks, confined by 10th and 11th streets between Fifth and Sixth avenues. While there, he tended to spend a lot of time in his neighborhood and nearby SoHo and TriBeCa. And because of this, he’s a first-hand source on how New York has culturally changed, how its neighborhoods have evolved and how they have all become so different, each with their own unique character.

“When I walk west [from his home in TriBeCa], one block I’m in China, two blocks over I’m in Italy and go the other direction I’m in totally groovy Downtown Manhattan. And they’re all within a two-minute walk from each other. The only thing that all three have in common is rats.”

Dunne says that besides avidly biking around the city in the warmer months, he prefers to walk everywhere and “rarely leaves [his] own neighborhood, unless [he] has to.” This mixture of accessibility and neighborhood-by-neighborhood diversity is, according to Dunne, completely unique to New York and is something he continues to love about the city, the geocultural variation in particular.

“Doing a movie that’s about people Downtown and then doing a movie about people on the Upper West Side…I mean they’re like two different foreign movies. And that’s what fascinates me about the city. I continue to be interested in stories that are set here.”

While Dunne’s captivation with New York is clearly strong, he is confident that he’s not alone.

“People all over America are fascinated by the city. When 9/11 happened, I don’t think the rest of America realized how much they loved New York. They even loved hating New York. And so when it was injured—I get goose bumps just thinking about it—just the love and support that came from all over the world for the city. That’s kind of why New York is surviving during some really hard times in this country.

“It’s very hard to tell that there is a recession going on in New York. The hotels are packed, there are tourists everywhere, it’s mobbed in the shopping districts in SoHo and TriBeCa. I mean it’s mobbed. I see more tourists here than I do residents sometimes. And that’s all post 9/11.”

Having lived in the same areas for so long and loved everything about the city for just as many years, Dunne has a good sense of how the city has changed and is nostalgic about both the New York of his younger years and that of years from well before his lifetime.

“I was born too late. I always feel like I was just born at the wrong time,” Dunne laments. “I would love to have been in New York right after World War I up to the Depression. That would be so cool, so many things were going on in New York, just creatively and politically. It’s one of the things about the city: so much life already happened before you get here.”

But Dunne was not exclusively an impartial observer of all of the changes happening in New York over the last 30 years. Some were a bit more personal, like when in the early 1980s, Griffin’s father, Dominick, moved to New York.

After spending some of his younger years living in New York City, after serving in the military, Dominick Dunne lived and worked in Hollywood, where he developed the aforementioned friendships and affections for so many celebrities, as well as his subsequent financial and addiction problems. With nowhere to turn, in 1979 Dominick moved to rural Oregon, where he spent several years working on his writing and overcoming his alcoholism. Within a few years, he moved to New York City and lived in a tiny apartment on 9th Street, just a few blocks away from his son, Griffin, who, by then, had established himself in show business.

“He stopped drinking and just started his life all over again. And that’s when we became very close,” Dunne recalls. “We saw each other, we had lunch with each other, we called each other on the phone everyday, right up until he died.”

During this close time with his father, Dunne says he eventually learned to appreciate his own celebrity status, after observing how giddy his father would become when he was recognized. A few years after relocating to New York, Dominick became a celebrity, not for hanging around other famous people like he did back in Hollywood, but for writing a number of successful books and cataloguing the lives of celebrity and numerous high-profile legal cases in the pages of Vanity Fair.

Dunne remembers that around the time his dad moved to New York, he was going through the “requisite phony ‘Oh, I hate this!’ phase that so many celebrities go through when they become famous. As if you didn’t work for it your whole life to get to it.” But he was soon inspired to put everything in perspective after spending time with his dad, “who worshiped celebrities so much that when he actually became one, after being totally in economic and spiritual despair, he loved every minute of it. He worked really hard for it and it was based on work of which he was proud.

“Whenever my phone rang before 7:30 in the morning, I knew it was him, calling to cackle that one of us was in the paper. He just loved any mention of me and he loved mentions of himself. It was something that really brought him a lot of joy.”

Some of Dominick’s first self-produced fame came from an article he wrote for Vanity Fair, which, Griffin has described as “probably his best work.”

“I think it’s kind of a cruel irony that he found his voice at such a cost. That loss defined him and gave him a voice in the cause,” Dunne says.

The Vanity Fair article was titled “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of his Daughter’s Killer,” and it chronicled the murder trial of Dominick’s daughter and Griffin’s sister, Dominique Dunne, who was strangled by her former boyfriend in 1982 when she was just 22 years old. Dominick was extremely shaken by the ordeal, but used his emotions to fuel his burgeoning writing career, which turned out to be very successful, right up until his death from bladder cancer in August 2009.

Dominique’s death had a tremendous affect on the entire Dunne family. Left with a terrible distaste for the American penal system after her daughter’s trail (wherein the defendant was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison but served only two and a half), Griffin’s mother, Ellen, founded the Justice for Homicide Victims (JHV) foundation to establish harsher penalties for murderers in the American justice system, which, at the time, was surprisingly relaxed.

For many years, Dunne worked with his mother and JHV, especially, he says, while she was still alive (Ellen died in January 1997), while also focusing a lot of his energy specifically on putting an end to gun violence.

“I was looking for something that was related [to his sister’s murder], but not directly; something that actually didn’t have ‘victim’ in the title. I mean I don’t know how conscious I was of that because I supported and admired both groups my parents worked for [the other being the California Center for Family Survivors of Homicide]. But I kind of wanted my own thing. You know, [something] that would be sort of related that was born out of senseless violence.”

Dunne says that his sister’s trial brought to light some basic issues within the American justice system and the lack of severity in criminal punishments. In  search for another cause, he was eventually drawn to the matter of gun violence. By the 1990s, after seeing how terrible gun violence was and how it started to infiltrate schools and public neighborhoods, he became even more dedicated to controlling gun-related crimes. He recalls one specific incident he thought demonstrated how problematic guns in America had become.

“So I call up the national switchboard of the [National Rifle Association] and I put on my craziest, over-the-top lunatic voice and I said, ‘I was just watching the shooting in southern California. Man, that was awesome! It was done with an Uzi. I got to get myself an Uzi. Where do I go? Where do I get one?’ ‘Where are you from?’ [the operator said] ‘I’m from southern California.’ ‘What’s your zip code?’ I give it to her and she says, ‘There’s a dealership on such and such streets’…without missing a beat. The switchboard operator tells me where to get an Uzi!”

Dunne recognized how much of a hot-button issue gun control was and became a founding member of PAX (now known as the Center to Prevent Youth Violence), a nonpolitical grass-roots organization that treats gun violence as a health issue. Dunne is also passionate about the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which Dunne describes as “an organization that is against the NRA.”

Dunne has also worked with an organization called Scenarios USA, a national nonprofit that empowers inner-city youths by holding writing contests in which student contestants write scripts about major issues in their communities. The winner’s script is then turned into a film made by professional directors, producers and actors. “The works,” says Dunne.

Dunne directed one of these films in Laredo, Texas. It was based on a teenage girl’s essay about teen pregnancy in a town where there were so many pregnant teens that the high school had a day-care center. He found the experience rewarding both for him and for the many kids involved in the project.

“I would hear from kids saying, ‘That was a life- changing experience. I want to be in the movie business and do this.’ So when they come to New York, Scenarios or I will help them get intern jobs in whatever they want to do, and they end up living here and working in the movie business one way or another.”

As might be expected, with his strong background in film and the entertainment industry, Dunne has been committed to the Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) as a participant, juror, event attendee and just a fan. Like many other New Yorkers, Dunne was drawn to the TFF as a catalyst to help rebuild Lower Manhattan after 9/11.

“My office was in TriBeCa at that time. We had to go through barricades to get to the office and go through various checkpoints. We saw TriBeCa with two feet of soot and ash and probably human remains. It was devastating; no one had ever seen anything like it.”

Out of this tragedy, founders Jane Rosenthal, Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff worked quickly to pull the festival together with only 120 days of planning.

“It was one of those things that happened because people wanted it to,” Dunne says. “I don’t think they had one obstacle. And that was its starting point. So it started at the high level and it’s just grown and grown and grown.”

Over the 10-year history of the festival, Dunne has acted in, produced and directed a number of films that premiered there, including Fierce People, Game 6 and 2010’s Last Night. He has always felt there was something special about premiering a film at the TFF, saying, “It’s a film festival in your own backyard.”

Just as his father was famously infatuated with celebrities and celebrity culture for so much of his life and career, the same can be said of Griffin Dunne and his relationship to New York City. From the moment he came to The Big Apple, his appreciation and love for its history and his natural proclivity to feature New York City in so much of his work, has made Dunne a real New Yorker, and he is proud of it.

“My fascination with the place has never let up, even for  a day. You know, I always study people in the street and watch and notice things with the same curiosity and focus as when I first moved here. The city constantly fascinates me.”

-by Matt Essert

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