March 12 2003

By Johnny Ray Huston

FROM CHOREOGRAPHER TO pornographer, Walter Wakefield Poole III has lived what biographers (he's one of those too) like to call "A Life." Poole's book, Dirty Poole, has to be one of the few porn-related bios that waits 140 pages – until the halfway point – to get to that part of the story, and his other passions are one reason why his movies aren't just factory-stamped visions of sex. Liza Minelli and Cecil Beaton ripple across Dirty Poole sooner than a bronze god appears in its sin-ematic surf. Before Poole stepped behind the camera, he danced and choreographed on Broadway; before he directed porn, he directed Mickey Rooney (not an easy job).

"Once a pornographer, always a pornographer – it really is true," Poole says via phone from his Greenwich Village apartment, and if there's amused annoyance in his voice, there's no regret. "Everyone has pornography these days, yet the stigma attached to it hasn't changed. I went to a reunion for [the Broadway show] George M a couple of years ago. Some people were surprised I came. They acted as if I was going to bring a camera and gang of sleazebags with me."

Poole can be proud that with Boys in the Sand (1971), he made one of the hottest documents of gay lib; when it was shown at Anthology Film Archives last year, he was rewarded: "I had people say to me, 'You changed my life; yours was the first gay movie I ever saw.' " Before Deep Throat, Boys provided porn's breakthrough, a movie advertised in the New York Times that couples went to on dates. Linking three trysts that feature Redford-like Casey Donovan, its sun-dappled Edenic atmosphere climaxes with a segment that counters the racist role-playing and sterile niche consumerism of current porn. "We didn't treat it as race," Poole says. "I didn't see a black man there, I saw Tommy Moore. And neither did [Casey]. Tommy probably had more to deal with than we did. One of the funniest things initially was that a lot of people [who saw the movie] assumed I was black. The Amsterdam News, a black newspaper here, called to interview me thinking that I was black. When I told them I wasn't, they went ahead with the interview anyway."

Creatively speaking, Poole's sole hardcore peer at the time was Fred Halsted, whose butch-er fantasies suggest the hallucinations of a Kenneth Anger motorcycle man. "When I took Boys in the Sand to Los Angeles to do some private screenings," Poole remembers, "Fred came to one and said, 'Hey, do you mind if I show my movie [L.A. Plays Itself] tonight too?' I said, 'Yes.' He never forgave me for that; he used to kid me about it all the time. We became friends, and we would talk. He thought my movies were silly. But I liked Fred."

In 1971's The Bijou, Poole's sensibility drifts toward Halsted's rough and ready acid trips, into the dark. When a glamorous maybe-hooker in a fur coat is hit by a car, construction worker Bill Jennings responds by stealing her macramé purse. It contains a 'guest only' pass to a place called Bijou, and – after lathering up in his apartment's shower to remembered images of the fallen woman – Jennings heads to the mysterious site. Inside he finds a supernatural maze riddled with mirrors, four-screen fantasy images, and men who emerge from blackness like phantoms, only to disappear again. His odyssey is accompanied by a soundtrack that veers from Led Zeppelin to dissonant jazz and electronics. "After Eyes Wide Shut came out," Kubrick fan Poole says, "I got three or four phone calls from people telling me, 'It's The Bijou with dialogue.' "

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' retrospective also features some short documentary films, including 1974's wonderful Pride Parade, in which Poole's ever skillful editing is attuned to crowd movements and the passage of (one day's) time, resulting in a portrait of '70s-era San Francisco and its landmarks that's more accurate than images found in commercial films. The Market Street procession begins with a sprinkle of Cockettes and closes with some muscular men using a fountain in front of City Hall to skinny dip. "Nobody believes I didn't set that up," says Poole, who had been living in the city for less than two weeks at the time. "When I came to S.F., I got my apartment through Harvey [Milk]. He also developed all the stills from my movies at Castro Camera."

For the past 16 years Poole has been a chef, catering for Calvin Klein. "It was a good choice for a second career – I should say sixth career," he says, adding, "It's the last hedonistic thing I hadn't done." Though his passion for directing has vanished, he still goes to the movies and to Broadway shows. One recent highlight was the film version of Chicago: "Rob Marshall has choreographed with the camera and with the editing. He's made those people look like dancers. I saw it at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, and it was like the old days of taking acid and laying down on the floor to watch 2001 there. It's staggering to see it so large."

When his memoir was published a few years ago, Poole received fan letters from some unexpected readers, including an 82-year-old woman who concluded, "Gay life is so mysterious." Next he plans to write a children's book. "It's about a little boy who has the fate of the world in his hands," he says. "Just like Mr. Bush does now."