The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

Dominique and I could barely look at each other when we’d finished reading the script. The picture of us doing these unspeakable things took days to scrape from our minds, and we called Tony to pass on the first movie either of us had ever been “considered” for. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said when we told him. “It was just a thought.” One afternoon in 1984, I sat in the back row of a near-empty Rialto Theatre in Times Square to see The Hotel New Hampshire. Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster played the incestuous siblings, and they had lots of scenes where they kissed with tongues and fiddled around naked under the sheets. I laughed out loud, alone in the dark, imagining that Dominique was sitting next to me, both of us rolling in the aisles at the sheer ridiculousness of us playing these parts. When I stopped laughing, I got out of my seat and left the theater before I started to bawl.