Basketball Diaries Director Scott Kalvert Dead at 49, Considered Possible Suicide

Filmmaker directed Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1995 adaptation of Jim Carroll's memoir

By Natalie Finn Mar 08, 2014 2:54 AMTags
Scott Kalvert George Best/Getty Images

Another creative flame has been snuffed out before its time.

Scott Kalvert, who directed a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the 1995 drama The Basketball Diaries, was found dead at his home in Woodland Hills, Calif., on Wednesday afternoon.

He was 49 and coroner's investigators are treating his death as a possible suicide, according to The Hollywood Reporter. No other information was available yet as to what authorities found when they arrived at his house.

Mark Wahlberg recently stirred up some Basketball Diaries dirt when he told THR that DiCaprio tried to keep Wahlberg out of the movie because he was sore over some trash-talking 

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.

"Leonardo was like, 'Over my dead f---ing body. Marky Mark's not going to be in this f---ing movie,'" the Lone Survivor star recalled. "Because we'd had a thing—I didn't even realize it, [but] I was a bit of a dick to him at a charity basketball game. So he was like, 'This f---ing a--hole is not going to be in this movie.'"

But it turned out that Wahlberg had an in with the director.

Before making his feature directorial debut on The Basketball Diaries, Kalvert was best known for directing music videos, among them Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Good Vibrations," D.J. Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince's "Parents Just Don't Understand,"" and Taylor Dayne's "Tell It to My Heart."

Kalvert also directed New Kids on the Block's 1993 video for "Dirty Dawg," an association remembered fondly by NKOTB's Donnie Wahlberg.

"#RIP to a dear friend; Scott Kalvert," he tweeted this morning. "The role you played in mine, and my brother [Mark's] career success, can't be measured. You'll be missed."

Kalvert's directed one other feature film, 2002's Deuces Wild, starring the rather even-more-interesting-in-hindsight ensemble of Stephen Dorff, Brad Renfro, Drea de Matteo, James Franco, Frankie Muniz, Fairuza Balk, Norman Reedus, Debbie Harry and Matt Dillon

More recently, he produced a Bad Religion concert movie in 2006 and served as an executive producer on the Nick Cannon-directed School Gyrls.

Information on survivors wasn't immediately available.