Booze-Soaked Shoots, Hot Gay Sex, and Elizabeth Taylor’s Poop Problems: On Dominick Dunne’s Infamous Last Film

In his middle age, the TV and film producer Dominick Dunne miraculously reinvented himself as a best-selling novelist and Vanity Fair writer. He was so popular in 2002, seven years before his death, that New York magazine called him “America’s most famous journalist.”

The 1970s, however, were a much different time. After being a midlevel TV executive in the previous decade, he produced three low-budget movies in the early 1970s: The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park, and Play It as It Lays.

Then he met agent Sue Mengers, already renowned for being the most powerful woman in Hollywood. It was she who handpicked him to produce what would be his fourth and last film, Ash Wednesday. In the beginning, the Paramount Pictures movie fulfilled Dunne’s every dream: it starred his idol Elizabeth Taylor. However, before shooting finished in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, in May 1973, it was the star who told Dunne, “You know, this is your last film.” Yes, the production had gone that badly.