Film / News
American Werewolf in London star comes to Bristol
Best known for playing Jack Goodman in John Landis’s cult 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf in London, Griffin Dunne has certainly had an eventful life and career. At the age of eight, he was saved from drowning by James Bond (Sean Connery, for it was he). By 13, he was so desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin that he attended his aunt Joan Didion’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his twenties, he shared an apartment with his best friend Carrie Fisher while she was filming a little science fiction film called Star Wars.
After An American Werewolf . . ., Dunne teamed up with Martin Scorsese for another cult 1980s arthouse staple: After Hours, in which he starred and served as producer. A rare Scorsese flick that is neither a biopic nor an adaptation, this award-winning black comedy casts Dunne as a humble office worker who endures a series of misadventures while trying to get home after an ill-fated date with a crazed Rosanna Arquette in New York’s SoHo district.
While all this was going on, Dunne suffered a family tragedy when his 22-year-old actress sister Dominique (best known for her starring role in Poltergeist) was killed by her ex-boyfriend. This led to one of the decade’s most high-profile trials and a miscarriage of justice that prompted their father Dominick to forge a career as a writer of true crime narratives, mostly for Vanity Fair. His last assignment was to cover the O.J. Simpson trial.
is needed now More than ever
All of which means there’s no shortage of material for Griffin Dunne’s autobiography, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, which is published on June 13. On July 2, he’ll be in Bristol for a conversation with Andrew Kelly of Bristol Ideas at the Watershed, followed by a screening of An American Werewolf in London. Go here for tickets and further information.
Main image: Griffin Dunne in ‘An American Werewolf in London’. Pic credit: Universal Pictures.
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