It helps to stay alive, literally, as pornographer Wakefield Poole has been raised to a pedestal of greatness by sycophants in his old age, as he gets to give a one- sided (and sketchily remembered) view of porn history, dictated to an admiring coterie of young brainless "film historians". Having watched in retrospect his small body of work, count me out of the fan club.
Case in point is this final feature (a video, not a film) he made in 1985, reportedly as a fund-raiser for the fight against AIDs. Ironically, the film's claim to fame, which Poole explains put him into retirement for good, was the early death from AIDs of one of its leading players, Dave Connors, whose typically unprotected sex in the video led to Poole being castigated in the Gay Community for supposedly spreading AIDs by shooting porn with infected players. He denies this charge, but I found his extremely lame description of followup damning: basically personally contacting the actor Steve Kaye who he cast opposite Connors for a sex scene but quickly losing touch with Kaye and having no idea whether he ever got infected or what happened to him.
Beyond this dark cloud hanging over the project, the video itself is junk - more of the gonzo sex footage that Poole is so highly praised for, due to his pretentious presentation. It's merely three sex scenes, conforming to the title as solo, boy/boy and then troilism, followed by a 5-man circle jerk from the cast. Only interesting footage is provided by J.D. Slater, credited with a lengthy monologue which fits in with the performance art movement of the period - think of artists like Penny Arcade.
What infuriates me is how Poole and his coterie of admirers try to make silk from sow's ears. This tedious exercise is shot entirely against black backdrops with harsh lighting, its minimalism supposedly some sort of artistic triumph. As in his prior pretentious films notably BIJOU, gimmicks and filigrees added to the loop level sex content represent The Emperor's New Clothes syndrome at its most obvious.
The oft-repeated myth surrounding Poole, which he concocted himself, is that he was so disappointed at the poor quality of (gay) porn that he watched in the early days of theaters showing XXX material, that he, untrained in cinema, decided he could do better "and the rest is history". Yes, he scored a couple of hits with explicit homosexual themed sex movies, but no amount of revisionism can convince me that they are anything more than gussied-up examples of the same mindless gonzo content he decried.
Case in point is this final feature (a video, not a film) he made in 1985, reportedly as a fund-raiser for the fight against AIDs. Ironically, the film's claim to fame, which Poole explains put him into retirement for good, was the early death from AIDs of one of its leading players, Dave Connors, whose typically unprotected sex in the video led to Poole being castigated in the Gay Community for supposedly spreading AIDs by shooting porn with infected players. He denies this charge, but I found his extremely lame description of followup damning: basically personally contacting the actor Steve Kaye who he cast opposite Connors for a sex scene but quickly losing touch with Kaye and having no idea whether he ever got infected or what happened to him.
Beyond this dark cloud hanging over the project, the video itself is junk - more of the gonzo sex footage that Poole is so highly praised for, due to his pretentious presentation. It's merely three sex scenes, conforming to the title as solo, boy/boy and then troilism, followed by a 5-man circle jerk from the cast. Only interesting footage is provided by J.D. Slater, credited with a lengthy monologue which fits in with the performance art movement of the period - think of artists like Penny Arcade.
What infuriates me is how Poole and his coterie of admirers try to make silk from sow's ears. This tedious exercise is shot entirely against black backdrops with harsh lighting, its minimalism supposedly some sort of artistic triumph. As in his prior pretentious films notably BIJOU, gimmicks and filigrees added to the loop level sex content represent The Emperor's New Clothes syndrome at its most obvious.
The oft-repeated myth surrounding Poole, which he concocted himself, is that he was so disappointed at the poor quality of (gay) porn that he watched in the early days of theaters showing XXX material, that he, untrained in cinema, decided he could do better "and the rest is history". Yes, he scored a couple of hits with explicit homosexual themed sex movies, but no amount of revisionism can convince me that they are anything more than gussied-up examples of the same mindless gonzo content he decried.