For six and a half seasons in the late seventies and early eighties, Dana Plato was America’s Sweetheart, as one of the stars of a hit family sitcom called Diff’rent Strokes. The country watched her grow up from a precocious 13-year-old girl into a lovely woman. Things got dark in the middle of season six when she developed substance issues and got pregnant. They wrote her out of the show, more or less, sending her figuratively to a farm upstate until a much-ballyhooed series finale in season eight, by which time she had given birth.
When the show’s run was over, work was difficult for her to come by, not because of a lack of talent, but because of her reputation for being undependable. Her drug abuse continued, and she fell into a life of crime, robbing a store in 1991, and forging prescriptions the following year. By the mid-nineties, she was living in a trailer, and the only good work she could get was in low-budget grade-Z films, including erotica like the crap you see below.
Different Strokes was just another cheap soft-core film, but it has some fairly sexy lesbian scenes between Dana and Landon Hall, and its production values made it seem like a James Cameron film compared to Compelling Evidence, which is the very bottom of the barrel. CE is rated 2.3 at IMDb, lower than The Human Centipede III, Gigli, or the movie version of Cats. That’s about as low as the ratings go. Among all the films ever made, there are only about a dozen rated lower than Compelling Evidence. Nobody reviewed it except Joe Bob Briggs, and his pithy summary was, “I won’t tell you what happens, but lemme put it this way: They won’t be studying these scenes at the Actor’s Studio.” Since Dana had substantial acting experience, she was by far the best actress in these films, but that bar was pretty low, as Joe Bob noted.
In 1999, shortly after she had finished an interview with Howard Stern, which was her big hope to revive her stalled career, she died of an overdose of a painkiller. The coroner ruled her death a suicide because of the vast amount of drugs in her body and her history of past suicide attempts, but the people close to her disputed that vigorously. They said she was actually in an optimistic mood because of the Stern interview, and she was simply reckless when it came to drug consumption.
Either way, she was dead at 34.
1995 – Compelling Evidence
1998 – Different Strokes
