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| The multi-talented Griffin Dunne (with his Louis Kahn hair) with Anne-Katrin Titze on his Oscar-nominated short Duke of Groove and his fabulous memoir The Friday Afternoon Club: “That was based on the thing in the book, actually, when I went to my aunt's party where Janis Joplin was going to be and Otto Preminger.” |
During the 24th edition of the Tribeca Festival at their Lisboa launch party, hosted by co-founders Robert De Niro (featured in Matt Tyrnauer’s Tribeca highlight Nobu on chef Nobu Matsuhisa) and Jane Rosenthal, Griffin Dunne, who had been part of the inaugural Lisbon delegation in 2024, spoke with me about his intimate documentary on his aunt, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the Monica Vitti Cinecittà retrospective at Film at Lincoln Center, and a possible documentary on The Dakota building in his future. We also made plans to talk in depth about his witty, thoughtful, and entertaining family memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club (Penguin Books).
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| The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne (Penguin Books), collection Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
In the first installment with the multi-talented Griffin Dunne we discuss his earliest baby sitter, Elizabeth Montgomery, of subsequent Bewitched fame and an infatuation by the young boy with the Kennedys, that shows how embellishments run in the family. Animals abound in the various households and the party described by Griffin in his directorial debut, the Oscar-nominated short, Duke of Groove, is put into perspective in the memoir where we learn that Otto Preminger joined Janis Joplin and was a bit out of sorts. We talk about the place to spot Johnny Weissmüller as a satyr in New York, and Griffin’s upcoming film, directed by Max Korman, in which he stars as architect Louis Kahn.
We also go into some of the incredible vignettes about his illustrious ancestors. From the cattle ranch and the Griffin Wheel Company to a shocking Palm Beach story scandal on his mother’s side, to his father, Dominick Dunne’s, scorned boyhood love of movies like Becky Sharp, and how the Hepburn family behaved as their neighbours in Hartford, Connecticut - the stories unfold cinematically and in delightful detail.
From Upstate New York, Griffin Dunne joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on The Friday Afternoon Club.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi! How did your fitting go?
Griffin Dunne: Well, the clothing was the least dramatic, I think. You see, my hair is white and so they dyed the hair, and had the fittings and the extensive makeup. I play architect Louis Kahn, who is a brilliant American architect, who died in 1974. He was a burn victim from childhood. So I've got prosthetics for burns all over my face. It’s a great part.
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| Meeting Griffin Dunne at the Tribeca Festival Lisboa event, hosted by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: What is the film? Who is directing it?
GD: It's a first time director/writer, a guy named Max Korman. We start shooting on Monday. And it's about the last commission in Louis Kahn's life, that was a a home. He mostly did museums and the Parliaments for Pakistan and the Jonas Salk Institute, these vast huge buildings. The last thing was for a young guy who hired him to do his family home. So it's about their relationship. It's sort of all that.
AKT: Sounds good.
GD: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
AKT: Okay, there is not a single snake in your family memoir!
GD: Ha! No, I sort of used all the snakes in the documentary I made about Joan [Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold].
AKT: I noticed it because otherwise animals abound. There's cats and dogs, and a parrot, and a lost calf in a song, and every animal under the sun. And because you started your wonderful documentary with the snakes, I thought, will there be a snake? There's not a snake.
GD: Yeah, no, that was more her story than mine. But I'm glad you noticed all the animals in mine. Each one was so unique and otherworldly. It was fun to write about them.
AKT: And so important. And about your mother's cat I just noticed going back to the very beginning of the book, the flowers it brought are there. You have all these breadcrumbs throughout we may not see at first glance. Yet here they are, all connected.
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| Elizabeth Montgomery (here as Samantha with Erin Murphy as Tabitha in Bewitched) was Griffin Dunne’s first babysitter |
GD: There we go. Oh, thank you for noticing that.
AKT: How did you work with these elements? Were they clear to you at the start or did they come while writing?
GD: I mean, I was visited by every family member and every animal I wrote about. They were vivid memories that I probably wouldn't have recalled with such detail had I not just been in a zone of writing, as I would describe things and recreate the dialogue. Everything from the colour of the walls and bookshelves, the details became more and more vivid as I was writing whatever scenes were taking place.
AKT: As your aunt says in the documentary about writing a book, “it unfolds as you write it.”
GD: Absolutely, absolutely.
AKT: This was your experience as well?
GD: Yeah, oh, very much, very much. I'm working on a second book. It’s too early to even mention it.
AKT: Which begins where this one ends?
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| Griffin Dunne on Duke Of Groove: “It was nominated for an Academy Award and sort of started my career as well as it did Tobey Maguire's.” |
GD: No, not necessarily. It's more fiction. But the writing on this was really like a first time familiar experience I've been familiar with from the first movie I directed, or the first time I starred in a movie. You are ready and compelled just to write. It was like a task I couldn't wait to get back to when I would leave my office, and be on set and go to my dressing room between camera setups. I could pick up the sentences right from where I left off and then be called and pick it up again. It went on like that for a year.
AKT: Did you ever write a screenplay?
GD: Not of this. I've written screenplays before.
AKT: Different experience?
GD: They were either adaptations, or one thing was from a personal experience and it became the short movie that I directed, called Duke of Groove, that I should have made into a feature. But anyway, it was nominated for an Academy Award and sort of started my career as well as it did Tobey Maguire's. It was his first job and Uma Thurman, and all sorts of people were in that. Oh, that was based on the thing in the book, actually, when I went to my aunt's party where Janis Joplin was going to be and Otto Preminger.
AKT: The Otto Preminger anecdote is wonderful.
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| Griffin Dunne was part of the inaugural Tribeca Festival Lisboa delegation in 2024 Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
GD: Yeah, that wasn't in the movie. But that was the party.
AKT: Sam Shepard gets the first word, the epigraph of your memoir.
GD: Yeah!
AKT: About not necessarily escaping your family history but maybe going to see exactly what you inherited. Your descriptions of your family, your ancestors at the start, all the different parts are intensely cinematic. I mean, from the get-go, I can see the prairie, the railroad and then even your own personal Palm Beach Story!
GD: How about that? That is out of the Palm Beach Story!
AKT: But there's no connection [to the 1942 Palm Beach Story, directed by Preston Sturges], right?
GD: No, no connection. But except that the timeline of when Lubitsch was making these kinds of movies was probably around the same time, as when my dead great great uncle was checked into a hotel.
AKT: And the sister of Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst are a part of the intrigue, it’s incredible. Did all of those people visit you while you were writing?
GD: Well, with those, it was like a drive-by name-drop that just was organic to telling my own story. But it was someone like Marion Davies or Hearst, people I didn't know, they certainly didn't visit me. And President Kennedy, who I was obsessed with as a young boy, he never visited me either, but I remembered the way I was thinking then.
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| Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert in The Palm Beach Story were not directly connected to Griffin’s great great uncle’s Palm Beach story |
AKT: You talk about your father and your father's father and the detail of the Brooks Brothers belt. I think this is the first mention of a film in your book, and that is Becky Sharp [1935, directed by Rouben Mamoulian]. I thought, okay, Vanity Fair, was it actually Becky Sharp or was that your embellishing nature coming through?
GD: Well, my father had told me about how his passion for movies was ignored or reviled at the Dunne dinner table when he was a boy. And in his telling he mentioned this. Another one was Tyrone Power. He loved Tyrone Power. I think as he would tell me, the movies would change. That's just one of the ones I remembered him mentioning, and it was sort of appropriate, because it's a very feminine, female-driven movie.
My father was a delicate boy. That would be the kind of thing he'd be drawn to, one of those lush women stories and he would revel in the costumes and the sets. And when you're a little boy in the Twenties, and you got a really tough Irish Catholic dad and you're gushing about actresses and their clothes, you're going to get beaten up.
AKT: You describe it vividly. I just also thought about the irony that it’s Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
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| Griffin Dunne on Becky Sharp with Miriam Hopkins, based on Thackeray's Vanity Fair and his father, Dominick Dunne: “That would be the kind of thing he'd be drawn to, one of those lush women stories and he would revel in the costumes and the sets.” |
GD: Yeah, no, just coincidence, I guess. Even I hadn't thought of that.
AKT: It's one of the many astounding overlaps, like living across from Dr. Thomas Hepburn. The Hepburns who ignored the Catholics! My, my!
GD: I know, it's hard to imagine there was a time, among all the bigotry that's going on now, that there was a time where you could be white, wealthy, and still be snubbed and that you were excluded from a class of people. No matter how cultured or educated you were at that time. But we've moved on to other forms of bigotry.
AKT: Indeed! On a more cheerful note, one thing I was very jealous about is that your first babysitter was Elizabeth Montgomery [my very first childhood TV memory is of her in Bewitched]! Did she tell you tales? Do you have an actual memory of her then?
GD: Not really. I just remember my dad telling me the filthy thing that Elizabeth Montgomery said [you have to read the memoir to learn about it], and that always struck me as really really funny. But no, I don't remember her or my dead nanny either. That's the thing where memory gets fogged with what you were told and what you remember, and while I have pictures in my head of that, it might be a different bathroom than where it really happened.
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| Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal at the Tribeca Festival Lisboa event Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: Did you encounter her later on?
GD: No, you know, my mother and she were best friends and for reasons I never understood, nor did my mother, who was very hurt, she was just sort of dropped, and something happened. Maybe she got into a new marriage, or whatever it was, but she never got back to my mom. When Elizabeth Montgomery was dying, like literally in a hospital on a deathbed, my mother had already passed, and she asked to see my father.
And my dad went to the hospital, I believe it was in New York, and she apologised. For ghosting my mother, 50-something years earlier. It stuck with her. Years later, I was in a television series called, This is Us. On a series you have a different director for every episode, and who is my director? It’s Elizabeth Montgomery's daughter. And I told her everything I was just telling you.
AKT: Things come in circles.
GD: It's always happened to me. It's always happened to my dad. These ironies and coincidences. And answers, payoffs, that come at unexpected moments.
AKT: Stories that you think are over, that aren't actually over.
GD: And they aren't over, exactly.
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| Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, directed by Griffin Dunne |
AKT: I have a number of little interesting details jotted down that were popping up in your book. Johnny Weissmüller is on the mural at Des Artistes? He is one of the satyrs?
GD: Still up on the wall. Still there!
AKT: I was just there for the luncheon of the Italian delegation connected to the annual Open Roads New Italian Cinema series at Film at Lincoln Center. When we talked about Monica Vitti, I had just been there a day or so before at The Leopard at des Artistes but I never knew about Johnny Weissmüller. Where is he?
GD: I think when you walk in the restaurant, the murals cover all the walls, but it's mostly like when you're facing it before it turns to go into the back room. I think there's a little elevation and the murals and it's on the lower part. And you wouldn't know it if you didn't know what you were looking for. He just looks like some buff guy with a fig leaf over his privates. But it's an interesting little detail. After I stopped living there, I found out.
AKT: Apropos buildings, now I understand even better why you mentioned that you would love to do a documentary about the Dakota.
GD: That's right. That's how. They read the book, and they came to me. They haven't got the money for it yet.
AKT: It’s fascinating, and there's Tennessee Williams again, another Suddenly, Last Summer connection [more on those in part two].
GD: Exactly, exactly.
AKT: Nothing disappears completely. Well, thank you for this!
GD: Well, thank you. This has been a delight talking to you, and I love hearing how carefully and closely you read the book and made all those connections. It was fun to talk about.
AKT: Great. Stay in touch with your upcoming projects!
GD: Yes, I just got this Louis Kahn movie I'm doing and then in August a film that I'm in that Darren Aronofsky directed, called Caught Stealing. That's all that's immediately upcoming.
Coming up - Griffin Dunne on The Kennedys, “the switch on the switch” and the “lie based on a lie, ”elementary school friends with famous parents, reconnecting with the past, the Million Dollar Movie, his uncle John Gregory Dunne’s influence, The Gift Of Fear and more on Suddenly, Last Summer.
