For many years, Dominick Dunne was among the characteristic voices of Vanity Fair, a patrician gossip-columnist-cum-crime reporter. In the documentary Dominick Dunne: After the Party, the writer was given an opportunity to speak beyond the glossy pages of his magazine. After the Party was released on DVD last summer, shortly before his death at 83, and has been reissued with an additional disc of bonus material, including additional interviews and footage from Dunne’s private collection.
Dunne had his critics, especially overpaid defense attorneys and loyal relatives of well-heeled killers, and they are given their chance to speak. But the focus is on Dunne, who has used his coverage of the celebrity trails of Claus von Bulow, O.J. Simpson and others to investigate the unsocial habits of American high society and inveigh against the injustice of rich malefactors buying their verdicts. Dunne was especially tart on the subject of expert witnesses, those “whores of the court,” he called them.
Coming across as engaging, charming and sharp as a switchblade, Dunne’s reminiscences and observations are set against one of his final assignments, reporting from the murder trial of the paranoid, megalomaniacal Phil Spector. Directors Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley draw out the salient, formative experiences of their subject, especially his decorated service during World War II and the murder of his daughter, which turned him toward a life of crime reporting.
