The disc: "Dominick Dunne: After the Party."
The details: This is a strange, strangely affecting documentary about the one-time movie producer and chronicler of rich and infamous murderers for Vanity Fair. The filmmakers shadow Dunne as he covers the Phil Spector trial for Vanity Fair, jumping back and forth from his past to his present.
The outlines of Dunne's story are well-known, but in telling it, and in offering up a full panoply of snapshots of his past, the full extent of his identification of he and his late wife Lenny as some sort of latter-day Scott and Zelda becomes clear, complete with a tragic "Tender is the Night" ending. Also unusual is Dunne's own ambivalence about his life and its meaning, which is matched by the filmmakers'.
Dunne seems proud of his work covering trials and continually blowing the whistle on various rich malefactors, but he also seems very close to a guilty self-loathing. At one point, Dunne alludes to his prostate cancer, and the fact that he told his doctor he couldn't care less if he lost his functioning sexuality as a result of surgery. The doctor told him he was the only patient he ever had that said that.
Dunne is more a scourge/scold/chronicler than a journalist, with a strange fixation on latching on to whatever tidbit he's just been told by an invariably anonymous source as the bona fide truth, which led to a considerable embarrassment when he broadcast ridiculous assertions about the Chandra Levy murder case.
The film was shot on several different kinds of video, from state of the art to fairly low-tech, but the difference in textures keeps things interesting and the film moves along very well. Extras include a trailer and interviews with the films directors, Australians Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.