Gregory Dark is an American film director, film producer, music video director, and screenwriter. Dark is one of the few adult filmmakers to successfully transition into mainstream Hollywood film-making. He has also been credited as Alexander Hippolyte, Gregory Hippolyte, Gregory Brown, and as The Dark Brothers.
Early career
Dark began his career as a fine artist of both paintings and conceptual art and installations. After graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree from Stanford University, he moved to New York City to pursue graduate studies in film at New York University. From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Dark directed hardcore and Rated Rfilms. His work from this period helped create the current "alt porn" genre as well as inventing the noir-romance genre of the erotic thriller. Sight & Sound the journal of the British Film Institute considered Dark's erotic thrillers groundbreaking films of the genre. In the 1980s Dark along with Richard Lerner and Wendy Apple directed and produced, Fallen Angels, the seminal documentary about the early Los Angeles porn scene. Dark directed or produced more than 30 action films and erotic thrillers as head of production for Axis Films, a B movie company, from 1987 to 1995. Dark's erotic thrillers in the early 1990s such as Animal Instincts I and II, Body of Influence, and Mirror Images II featured Shannon Whirry in various stages of undress. In 1994, he directed the film Stranger by Night starring Steven Bauer. Dark's films of this period won him accolades such as "the Steven Spielberg of the soft-core set" and "the Martin Scorsese of the erotic thriller".
In 1996, Dark directed the music video for "Bar-X-The Rocking M" by the Melvins. In 1998, he directed the video for "Zoot Suit Riot" by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, which won the Daddies a nomination for "Best New Artist in a Video" at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. That same year, he directed "Fuck Dying" and "Pushin' Weight" for Ice Cube. Dark's 1998 video "What U See Is What U Get" for Xzibit remained at the top of the Charts on BET for almost a year and won a Source Award. On November 22 and 23, 1999, he directed the video for "From the Bottom of My Broken Heart" by Britney Spears. In 2000, Vitamin C's "Graduation " and Linkin Park's "One Step Closer" video, were shot in Los Angeles, sixty-three feet underground in an abandoned subway tunnel. In 2002, he directed the video for the A*Teens cover of "Can't Help Falling in Love" for the Disney feature Lilo & Stitch. In mid-2002, he also directed the video for the Breaking Benjamin single "Polyamorous". Dark directed the music video for "Undercover Funk" by Snoop Dogg featuring Bootsy Collins for the film Undercover Brother. The video featured acting performances by the film's stars Eddie Griffin, who morphs into Snoop Dogg at the beginning of the video, and dancing and lip-synching performances by Neil Patrick Harris and Denise Richards.
