Harrison Ford was Joan Didion’s handyman earlier than he hit it large

To Griffin Dunne, she is Aunt Joan. He received first editions of her books as Christmas presents and went to her parties as a teenager, where one met “homicide detectives next to Warren Beatty next to Christopher Isherwood.” She let him drive her banana yellow Corvette Stingray.

“It was pretty easy to pick up chicks with this thing,” Dunne, 62, tells the Post.

To everyone else, she is Joan Didion, the acclaimed author whose grief memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” won a National Book Award in 2005 and whose essays on California culture, particularly “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” chronicled its destructiveness San Francisco's aimless hippie scene made her a celebrity. Born in Sacramento, a descendant of pioneers who crossed Donner Pass in the 19th century, she helped redefine journalism in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Dunne, who is also an actor (“After Hours”) and son of writer Dominick Dunne (“The Two Mrs. Grenvilles”), convinced his aunt to sit in her Manhattan apartment and talk about her early successes and their devastating long-term consequences speak. Life tragedies. The result is a moving documentary, “Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold,” premiering Friday on Netflix and also showing at the Metrograph Theater.

Harrison Ford helped build this patio at Joan Didion's house. Also seen in the photo are Didion's daughter Quintana and her husband John Gregory Dunne.John Bryson/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Didion's penchant for cool, to-the-point observation may make her seem like an intimidating subject, but Dunne says she was cooperative.

“Her answer to my question was, 'Oh, sure, go ahead.' There was no real arm twisting,” he says. “Then I had [this] Great responsibility: I can’t screw this up.”

As Didion's nephew (she was married to Dominick's brother), Dunne had access to anyone who really knew her. Anna Wintour discusses Didion's employment at Vogue, where she worked during her senior year at UC Berkeley after winning the magazine's 1956 Prix de Paris writing competition. Didion's 1961 essay “On Self-Respect” first appeared in Vogue magazine and was later included in her collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published to great acclaim in 1968.

“I was struck by the charisma of this 23-year-old girl, a woman in training,” says Dunne, “and all the personal choices she talks about, being a person you can live with .”

Harrison Ford talks about her work as a carpenter for Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, whom she married in 1964 and with whom she wrote five screenplays. They wanted to build a deck for their home in a remote part of Malibu, where they moved in 1971 with their adopted daughter Quintana.

“I had a young family and became their carpenter for the same reason I became their friend,” says Ford. “I was overwhelmed. I didn't know where I wanted to go. But they always made me feel welcome.”

Griffin Dunne with Didion earlier this month.Getty Images

There was no question in Dunne's mind that Ford was destined for something much bigger than building bookshelves. “I met him when I was 16. He smoked Marlboro cigarettes. “He was the most charismatic guy I ever met,” he says.

Didion and her husband's early success as screenwriters of 1971's “Panic in Needle Park” created a lucrative source of income beyond magazine writing, drawing the likes of Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese to their home .

“They had great dinner parties,” Dunne says. “People were getting stoned and drinking, and it was a harrowing ride home.”

Of all the parties Dunne, who grew up in Beverly Hills, was invited to, he remembers best the one celebrating the release of Tom Wolfe's “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” in 1968 at the Didion Dunne House in Hollywood . Janis Joplin was on the guest list.

“I was 12 years old and obsessed. “I didn’t want Janis to know that I was there with my mother,” he says. “She gave a concert at the Palladium. I left just before she arrived.”

It was pretty easy for Didion and her nephew to talk about the good times in California, where she lived with her family for 24 years, but she lost her breath in 2003 when her husband died of a fatal heart attack at the dining room table in their apartment in the Upper East Side. At the same time, Quintana was in a medically induced coma after suffering septic shock during a bout with pneumonia.

Didion received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2012.Getty Images

“One of the downsides for me as her relative was asking her to relive those moments,” said Dunne, who was at his home in the northern part of the state when it happened. “I got a call in the middle of the night. It was the last thing I saw coming.”

The only way for Didion, now 82, to survive the experience was to write the book that became her masterpiece: The Year of Magical Thinking. Quintana recovered and was able to fly to LA in 2004, but fell on the airport sidewalk and suffered a massive hematoma, requiring six hours of surgery at UCLA Hospital and another long recovery period. In August 2005, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis at age 39 while Didion was on a book tour for Magical Thinking.

“It was a situation that was getting worse and worse,” said Dunne, who was 10 years older than his cousin. “It’s been a long decline and very sad to see.”

These days, Dunne says, Didion, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012, is “doing very well” with a core group of friends with whom she has dinner several nights a week. “She just got a dog,” Dunne says.

To what does he attribute her strength of character? “It is made of robust, local material,” he says. “That’s why she outlived so many of her friends.”

And her husband and her daughter.