I met him four years ago. He was making pornography then. He was famous for it, sort of—famous for making the worst pornography, a pornography of transgression and violation, a pornography that seemed intended less to glorify sex than to advertise the death of the soul. People were calling him the devil back then—in fact, that’s exactly what he said when I met him: “People call me the devil”—but I liked him immediately. He was solicitous, and he was smart. He talked about surrealism and breaking down the wall between viewer and participant. Then I went to watch him make a pornographic movie out in the Valley and saw something so irredeemably obscene that I figured, Okay, Gregory Dark really is the devil, or at least someone I should stay away from.

Then, last year, I watched a Britney Spears video for a song called “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart” on MTV. I kept waiting for that adorable little cutlet to break out into a suggestive hootchy-koo, but she never did. The video was aggressively wholesome—given over to a wholesomeness that was unreal and fetishized—and at the end of it, when I looked for the name of its director, I saw that it was Gregory Dark. Then I saw a video by Mandy Moore, another teenage glamour-puss, who is marketed to little girls who are still too innocent for the coy come-ons of Britney Spears and the frank sexual howling of Christina Aguilera. Gregory Dark directed the Mandy Moore video, too. I called him up, and he said, “Oh, yes, I remember you—we were sort of friends.” He said that he didn’t make pornography anymore but had, in the years since, made about a hundred music videos. He said that he was in great demand, and that in fact he was trying to work out a deal to direct a feature film for New Line. I asked him what he was doing next, and he said he was directing a video for a fourteen-year-old girl. I asked whether I could come out and see him, and he hesitated—he was, he said, a changed man, and he didn’t want to be judged as a pornographer anymore. I pressed. I said, C’mon, man, you know me. At last he gave in, and I went out to see whether Gregory Dark was indeed a changed man or had simply cut some kind of crafty deal to take control of the hearts of America’s virgin daughters.

There’s a lot of talk online about how to make business on the web work. Can one sell work (by “work” I here mean anything ranging from songs to articles to books) online without using the middle men? The usual answer is “yes,” and people like Radiohead or Louis CK or Neil Gaiman are given as examples. Inevitably, the argument is then extended so show that “sharing” of work really is no problem (the counter-argument is that “piracy” destroys business).