Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017) on Netflix
NR20171h 34mBiographyDocumentary
Joan Didion looks back at a writing life that carried her from a California childhood to Vogue and then to novels, essays and screenplays. Archival footage traces the eras she covered.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.5/103,417 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Joan Didion describes a writing life that started at five, when her mother handed her a journal. She grew up in California and Sacramento, won a Vogue writing contest and joined the magazine, where her first piece, on self-respect, was more personal than its pages usually allowed. Her first novel, Run, River, sold eleven copies. She married the writer John Gregory Dunne, and when she was twenty-eight the couple left New York for California, buying a house in Portuguese Bend while he researched a book on the grape strike. A call about a baby girl at the hospital brought them Quintana, baptized at the kitchen sink. Her essays on rock and roll and on the hippie culture then growing in California reached readers in New York.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Griffin Dunne is Joan Didion's nephew, and he wanted to write a play about her life; at that time she weighed about 75 pounds and he helped her become healthy again in preparing for the play.
- Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne adopted their daughter Quintana after Dunne got a phone call saying there was a baby girl at the hospital who needed a home; they named her Quintana and baptized her at the kitchen sink.
