wakefield poole

Dirty Poole Overture

Gorilla Factory Productions | Myspace Video

Wakefield Poole is an American dancer, choreographer, theatrical director, and pioneering film director in the gay pornography industry from the 1970s and 1980s.

Wakefield was good friends with Andy Warhol. To commemorate Andy’s first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Wakefield created this 10-minute film. As it was shot in the late ’60′s, it was made completely “in camera” – there are no special effects at all, only some editing tricks. Wakefield gave the film to Andy as a birthday present.

Here is a clip from the very rare “Wakefield Poole’s Bible,” a 1973 feature that came right after the enormous successes of Poole’s films “Boys in the Sand” and “Bijou.” It was a financial disaster and disappeared from screens within weeks of its release, rarely to be seen since. “Bible” is NOT a porn film, though it does have nudity, and that is one of the reasons for its failure to capture an audience at the time. Audiences saw Poole’s name and that fact that Georgina Spelvin was in it and wanted hard core porn. Instead, “Bible” is a lavish, visually gorgeous tone poem of a film, telling three Bible stories from the women’s point of view. There is no dialog, only musical accompaniment. Not exactly box office gold in 1973 (or today). In the Samson and Delilah sequence, we see the bully Samson murdering Delilah’s servant for trying to steal his knife. As part of working on my documentary “Dirty Poole” about Wakefield Poole’s life and work, I digitally remastered Bible from one of the two surviving prints (no negative exists) and had a scene-by-scene color correction done. The result lets this criminally under appreciated and rarely seen film shine.

Dirty Poole is a new documentary, currently in post-production, based on the autobiography of influential and pioneering gay filmmaker Wakefield Poole. For more information or to make a tax-deductible donation to help complete the documentary, visit http://www.dirtypoole.com