Death Spiral

Brad Renfro had insisted over the phone that he was clean. That's what the teen actor, hot from his performances as a troubled youth with sad eyes in such films as "The Client" and "Sleepers," told director Larry Clark. Clark, one of America's foremost chroniclers of teenage desperation, had just cast Renfro as the lead in "Bully," his true-life tale of a bunch of pot-smoking Florida teenagers who murder the local bully.

But then Clark met his 18-year-old star.

The director, who'd once battled heroin addiction himself, stopped by Renfro's Knoxville, Tenn., home on the way to the film's Florida location. It was the summer of 2000, and Renfro emerged from the house that he shared with his grandmother with blood streaming down his arms. He was bloated and looked 35. And so continued a painful, downward spiral -- one of the most excruciating Hollywood has seen of late.

"I said, 'What the [hell] are you doing?' " recalls Clark. "He'd been banging coke. He has tracks running down both arms. He looks horrible. I just saw the whole movie going down the drain." (Financing was contingent on Renfro's participation.)

Clark spent the next three days with Renfro. They talked. The young actor cried a lot, and continued to shoot up cocaine. Clark hatched a plan to get him clean for production.

"I kidnapped him," says the director. The pair jumped in the car one day, on the director's pretense of going somewhere, and Clark just "gunned it" for Florida. "He kicked in the car. He had a seizure. There's nothing you can do. It doesn't last that long."

In Florida, the production hired a trainer and a minder for Renfro. Clark took Renfro to 12-step meetings. Still, in the evenings, Renfro would manage to finagle alcohol.

Clark adds, "I've been around a lot of addicts and alcoholics, and I remember thinking at the time, this is one of the worst cases I've ever seen."

Brad Renfro died Jan. 15, 2008. He was 25.

A week later, 28-year-old Heath Ledger was found dead in his New York apartment. He died of a lethal cocktail of prescription drugs -- among them medications that go by the brand names OxyContin, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, Restoril and Unisom.

Saddening, not surprising

The cycle of destructiveness seems to have accelerated. It was shocking in 1993 when River Phoenix overdosed from heroin and cocaine at age 23, shocking because of his youth. Now we live in a time when the Associated Press is pre-writing Britney Spears' obituary. Has Hollywood become an incubator of abuse or a mirror of society? Or are we all just more aware of its troubled denizens because of the hyper 24/7 coverage?