Here’s an eerie coincidence I noticed this weekend. I was browsing through one of my usual RSS feeds, Give me something to read, when I came across an article on Gregory Dark, a one-time porno director who transitioned into the mainstream, making music videos and now major motion pictures. The article was written by Tom Junod, who’d known Greg back in the 80′s, and was interested in learning if Greg had truly changed in the 10 years since.
The article mainly revolves around one music video set, and the interaction Greg has with the star of the show – Leslie Carter, a 14 year old budding starlet. The music video is nothing much to write home about, and to be perfectly honest I’d never heard of Leslie Carter before I read the article. However, my particular tendency when reading, watching or hearing some form of interesting media – is to dig deeper into the meta information about it. Watching a film? I wonder if the director has worked with this actor before. Reading a book? Is this book typical of the authors style? Reading a review? I wonder if the reviewer tends to give positive reviews to movies I like. That kind of thing. I’m sure I’m not uncommon, and this behaviour has certainly been trained into me, by my interaction with the Interntet.
Nevertheless, I looked deeper into this music video, since the finely detailed description given by the author of the article implied it was exemplar of the directing qualities of Dark’s work. I found the video, then stopped short. A related article mentioned a family’s mourning. A further article mentioned overdose.
It just so happened, not 3 days before I read the article and discovered the existence of the young starlet, she had died of an overdose at the age of 25.
I was surprised, to say the least. The article hadn’t been written about Leslie, nor had it glorified her role in the video. It had portrayed her as a small & fragile part in a much larger industry. At the time (some 12~ years ago), she was a 14 year old soon-to-be music star, propelled into the limelight by her family’s success in the music business (think Nick & Aaron Carter). She was tired. She seemed alone. She had ‘issues’ (i.e. she was overweight). She wasn’t professional, like Mandy Moore or Britney Spears. She was a child.
I’d read the article in full, fascinated by the description of Dark, how he’d learnt the ropes of manipulating people and knew he was good at it. I’d felt my way through the description of his hardcore porn work, and the transition into a new kind of exploitation, of sexualisation, and it was fascinating. To then be rubber-banded back to the present day and to discover that the young lady described in the article had grown up with depression and anxiety, that she had decided to take her own life only a matter of days before – it struck me as quite the coincidence.
I’m sure the article wasn’t timed to coincide with her passing, GMSTR doesn’t work that way – or at least I don’t think so. This simply is yet another sad, tragic and ultimately all too familiar story. I’ll never know what Leslie Carter is really like – and honestly I wouldn’t have given her more than a moments thought had this been under different circumstances – but it leaves me wondering how much foresight this article may have contained, and the myriad of actions people close to her could have taken to prevent this sad fate.
I suppose I’ll never know.
