Hello to All That: The Joan Didion Documentary Hype Begins

Those who say what gets the greenlight in Hollywood are clearly eating their metaphorical hats right now, as the Kickstarter for a Joan Didion documentary has well surpassed its $80,000 dollar goal after only one day. The movie, titled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (taken from the opening line of Didion’s short story collection, The White Album) will be directed by Joan Didion’s nephew, Griffin Dunne (who was at his best acting in 80s movies like After Hours and Who’s That Girl).

The film crew, which has already shot around sixty hours of footage, has been overwhelmed by the response, and hopefully feels beholden to make the best documentary since Exit Through the Gift Shop if they want to live up to the hype they’ve built up around the necessity of telling Didion’s story, which, if we’re being honest, has been told many times already through her own work.

One gets the sense that this is Dunne’s attempt to capture as much of Didion’s, fast approaching 80 in December, time left before there’s nothing left to document. Considering her last work–in the non-fiction genre–was in 2011, it seems that We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live could be the last piece of Didion we have. So hype or not, you should probably donate money in honor of the one person from Sacramento who ever really made something out of herself. Barring, of course, Molly Ringwald.