(Dad: What will set you apart is not talent but will and a...)
Dad: What will set you apart is not talent but will and a certain kind of humility. A willingness to let the world show you things that you playback as you grow as an artist. Talent is cheap. Me: OK I will ponder these things. I am a Carr. Dad: That should matter quite a bit, actually not the name but the guts of what that name means. A celebrated journalist, bestselling author (The Night of the Gun), and recovering addict, David Carr was in the prime of his career when he suffered a fatal collapse in the newsroom of The New York Times in 2015. Shattered by his death, his daughter Erin Lee Carr, at age twenty-seven an up-and-coming documentary filmmaker, began combing through the entirety of their shared correspondence - 1,936 items in total - in search of comfort and support. What started as an exercise in grief quickly grew into an active investigation: Did her father’s writings contain the answers to the question of how to move forward in life and work without her biggest champion by her side? How could she fill the space left behind by a man who had come to embody journalistic integrity, rigor, and hard reporting, whose mentorship meant everything not just to her but to the many who served alongside him?
Erin Lee Carr is an American documentary film director, writer, and producer best known for her HBO documentaries Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop and Mommy Dead and Dearest. Carr was listed in Variety's Documakers To Watch in 2015 and was recently named in Forbes 30 under 30 list of most influential people in media.
Background
Carr was born on April 15, 1988, in Minneapolis, Minnesota to David Carr, the late New York Times media columnist, and his girlfriend Anna. Carr and her twin sister, Meagan, were born two and a half months early. David Carr and Anna lost custody of the twins because of Anna and David's drug addictions. This placed Erin Carr and her sister into foster care for summer. When her father got out of rehab, he regained physical custody of the girls. In 1994 he married Erin's step-mother, Jill Rooney, and they all lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Education
Carr graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Arts.
Carr began working at Vice through an internship in 2010 which quickly turned into a job after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and continued on at Vice for three years. She worked her way from intern to an Associate Producer position for Vice's Motherboard, a sub-set online magazine and video channel which focuses on the intersection of technology, science, and people. She especially liked to cover "weirdos and the internet".
Carr was an assistant producer and a producer for Spaced Out series. There are twelve videos in the series, nine of which Carr helped create. She helped produce UFO sightings in Colorado, 'Using the Sun to Make Music, Man who Hunts spy satellites, "Save the last Great Telescope", and "The First Animal To Survive in Space." She was an assistant producer for "Building a Homemade Space Craft," "Blowing up Asteroids with NASA and Neil deGrasse Tyson," "New York's strangest Astronaut," and "Homemade mission to Mars by Tom Sachs." "The First Animal to Survive in Space" has over 13 million views.
My Life Online is a 2013 series developed for Vice's Motherboard intended to shine a light on some of the interesting characters that make a living from working on the internet, Carr said. She produced three videos for this series: "Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame", "The Story of Karl Welzein, According to @dadboner Creator Mike Burns", and "Jerome LOL on Remixing the Internet and the Ageless Beauty of Web 1.0". "Shoenice22 Will Eat Anything for Fame" amassed over 2 million views. She was noticed for her style of finding people on the margins of society and having them illustrate large issues.
A short 2013 documentary, Click. Print. Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement, is about Cody R. Wilson, the owner of Defense Distributed. This film shows how 3D-printing is creating new issues with gun production. Wilson is against gun control and is working to create a full blueprint for a completely 3D printed gun with hopes to put it online for anyone to have access.
Click. Print. Gun was created for Vice and was published on March 25, 2013. Carr won a 2014 Webby Award for her work creating this video and it has had over 12 million views on YouTube. Carr told a journalist from the University of Wisconsin – Madison that she knew this documentary would be a big deal when she was working on it. "In the moment, I could feel how big it could be, and I never felt that way. Breaking a news story, especially when it relates to video – it's the energy. It was so kinetic, and I was so excited".
In June 2013, Carr left Vice for the Verge. She had a short six-month position as a producer with Vox media. Here, she curated and produced long and short stories for The Verge. She moved on from Vox in November 2013 when she became a freelance director for HBO Documentary Films.
Carr currently works for HBO Documentary Films.
Thought Crimes is a 2015 HBO film about Gilberto Valle, an ex-New York City Police Officer who was arrested on two counts; one for kidnapping conspiracy and illegally gaining access to a law-enforcement database. Valle's wife had installed spyware on their computer to see why her husband was staying up so late at night. She found he had been subscribing to a number of fetish websites and chatting with some unsavory characters about how to kidnap, torture, kill, cook, and eat women.
The film follows Valle after his conviction on the charge of conspiring to kidnap in March 2013. Carr includes a number of interviews with lawyers, a juror, journalist, and other professionals. They discuss if they think Valle could have, would have, or could he still commit these crimes. She also opens the conversation about the "unexpected consequences of our online activity". She first contacted Valle while he was in prison and conducted her first interview after he was released from prison in 2014.
Thought Crimes Premiered at The Tribeca Film Festival On April 16, 2015, and aired on HBO on Monday, May 11, 2015. Reviewers at the New York Times praised Carr's cheeky attitude in the film, juxtaposing the confession of a supposed cannibal with many scenes of Valle cooking something ghoulish-looking.
Carr was praised for her ability to show both sides of this complicated argument by both the New York Times and The Guardian. Carr said the goal of the film was not to argue for guilt or innocence and that it was important to her that no knows what she thinks about the topic.
Mommy Dead and Dearest is a documentary film directed by Carr about the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard, allegedly by her daughter Gypsy Rose Blanchard, which debuted on HBO in May 2017. It was an official selection for SXSW, HotDocs, and DocAviv and was one of the most-watched documentaries on HBO in 2017.
Carr directed an episode of the Netflix series Dirty Money called "Drug Short" which examines how big pharmaceutical companies exploit patients seeking life-saving drugs.
As of early 2018, Carr is finishing a project for HBO on the Michelle Carter criminal case. She is also in production on a sex abuse scandal in USA Women's Gymnastics.
Entertainment Weekly announced that Erin Carr was working with Ballantine, an imprint at Random House, to publish a memoir about her late father. The book is called All That You Leave Behind, and was published on April 9, 2019.
Quotations:
"That's what being a journalist is – it's going out into the world and finding people and things that are more interesting than you are and telling that story. It's not a story until you have somebody to tell that story."
Personality
Carr likes to find stories that pertain to the internet and the people that use it. She finds issues and subjects that illuminate a larger issue. Her style is to show connections to a larger issue without having to encompass every part of the story into a short video or documentary.
After the death of her father, Carr turned to alcohol, but she managed to overcome the addiction. Carr says that sobriety is proving to be a gift in her life.
Carr was recognized for her ability to bring an "uncomfortable question" to light as a "primer for the century ahead".
Quotes from others about the person
"Carr has a terrific knack for knowing when to cut, just when your sympathies are veering too far in one direction. From a cinematic point of view there's definitely added benefit that the "patient zero" for the new thought police, as one civil libertarian puts it, it is a guy who is so creepily great on camera. Whether or not he belongs behind bars is far more ambiguous." - The Guardian.
Connections
Carr is a twin to her sister, Meagan. After her father remarried, he and Carr's step-mother had a little girl, Maddie. Carr's father supported her through her career until his sudden death in 2015. She said he was the person she would talk to about all her big events and that his death was hard on her.