Patrick Dollard is an American documentaryfilmmaker. In the 1990s he was a Hollywood talent agent, manager, and producer most known for helping to build the career of Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh.[1]
Dollard has been known as a Hollywood conservative since the mid-1990s, and promotes himself as a conservative[2] filmmaker, blogger, and pundit. Dollard has been alleged to be an alcoholic and drug abuser who has struggled to overcome his addictions, as claimed in an article by Evan Wright in Vanity Fair[3] and in Wright's subsequent book Hella Nation.
While still running a management company, representing Soderbergh and helping to service Soderbergh and George Clooney's production company at Warner Brothers' (Section 8 Films), in 2004 Dollard decided to do a side project for a few weeks in three combat zones in Iraq: Fallujah, The Triangle of Death, and Ramadi. The project began as a 2–4 week rapid-production documentary project, but eventually grew to include a 7-month stay in Iraq with a Marine unit and over 200 hours of footage. The resulting documentary, Young Americans, has been released in segments on the Internet and clips have been shown on television. Dollard and footage from Young Americans are featured in a new French documentary for Canal Plus called Hollywood and Politics, directed by David Carr Brown.
Political views
Dollard has argued that there were more important reasons for the Iraq war than weapons of mass destruction: "The root causes of terrorism are the lack of capitalism, the lack of democracy, and the lack of modern education."[5] Dollard contends that the Iraq War has successfully removed some of the barriers to the causes of terrorism in the Middle East.