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    ‘Another Body’ Review: A Cowardly New World

    This film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows a woman as she attempts to find the person responsible for posting her face on a deepfake porn video.When Taylor Klein, an engineering student, receives a message from a friend advising her to open a link, she’s cautious. Eventually she clicks, and finds herself staring back at herself. Taylor’s face has been stolen to make a deepfake video, which was posted with her personal information on a pornography site.The documentary “Another Body” takes us into this cowardly new world, one in which the images of a person — most often a woman — can be lifted from social media and digitally repurposed.When Taylor contacted the police to report what she thought was a crime, she didn’t get far. Currently only five states have laws making nonconsensual deepfake pornography a criminal act.The film, directed by Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, follows Taylor as she attempts to track down the person responsible. Along the way, she discovers two others whose faces have also been used for deepfake porn: Julia, a woman she recognizes from college, and Gibi, an ASMR actor and streamer.The twist is that Taylor’s and Julia’s names are pseudonyms and that they are portrayed by “face veil” actors (that technology came to the fore in the documentary “Welcome to Chechnya”).“Another Body” is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse. That the documentary does this by utilizing some of that technology to protect Taylor and Julia’s identities raises its own ethical questions — ones that, even with the filmmakers’ compassion and transparency, “Another Body” doesn’t quite resolve.Another BodyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’ Review: A Clear Eye on an Industry

    This documentary looks at the offenses of the pornography industry through interviews with performers and activists.In December 2020, the journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column in the Opinion section of The New York Times detailing the stories of young survivors whose sexual abuse was posted on the website Pornhub. The piece, which urged the site to make changes, led to Pornhub’s banning of uploads from unverified users, and to Visa and Mastercard’s prohibiting the use of their cards on the website. Kristof’s article plays a complicated role in “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary on Netflix that shrewdly puts center stage some of the professional porn performers seeking autonomy in the industry.Through interviews with workers and their advocates (and with Kristof), the documentary filmmaker Suzanne Hillinger (who also produced and directed episodes of The Times’s “The Weekly,” a television show on FX, in 2019) persuasively argues that campaigns including Traffickinghub are aimed at curtailing abuse and helping victims but end up hurting another marginalized group: the sex workers and porn actors who thrive on these platforms, which enable them to work independently. Hillinger also spotlights the fact that some of the loudest anti-Pornhub voices have ties to the extreme political right‌.Recent years have seen a slew of streaming documentaries about tech-world horrors, from dating hoaxes to crypto schemes. “Money Shot” includes some clichés from this subgenre — if I see one more tweet pop up onscreen with the chirp sound effect, I will fly away myself — but it mostly pushes against tropes. Hillinger steers clear of re-enactments, and instead favors relaxed scenes with porn professionals. Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.Money Shot: The Pornhub StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Kamikaze Hearts’ Review: Truth or Fiction

    Juliet Bashore’s porn-world quasi documentary is a delirious and distressing portrait of two women’s tempestuous relationship.Juliet Bashore’s “Kamikaze Hearts” is a porn-world quasi-documentary about the underground scene in 1980s San Francisco that shivers spit and cold sweat. Originally released in 1986, it is now receiving a national rollout courtesy of a new 2K restoration.A prism of ideas about performance, sex, identity, addiction, labor and much more, the film also plays like a bout of frenzied, opioid-induced delirium. It’s not exactly pleasurable — and it’s filled with disorienting longueurs — but it really sticks.The apparent drama centers on the tempestuous relationship between the unhinged porn star Sharon Mitchell and her hapless lover Tigr. We follow these women over the course of a few days working on the set of a new adult film based on the opera “Carmen.”That project will never be completed, because there is no adult “Carmen” film. The entire work — the tensions on set between the women performers and their sleazy male bosses, Mitchell and Tigr’s increasingly intense spats — was scripted and storyboarded, with the performers, many of them actual adult film professionals, improvising and playing versions of themselves.Much like porn, in which real sex acts are performed in fake contexts, this self-referential haze of a film blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. Perhaps the technology-inundated audiences of today, numb to the unstable realities and meta-universes that characterize the online experience (and franchise films, for that matter), won’t feel as impressed. Yet Tigr and Mitchell feel as alive as a fresh fever. And when we see the two women, who are actual heroin addicts, shoot up on camera, what could be more real?Kamikaze HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Pam & Tommy’: A Story of Sex, Crimes and Videotape

    A new Hulu series starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan is a picaresque romp through the history of the stolen sex tape that changed pop culture.Back when 1995 was young, Pamela Anderson and her new husband, Tommy Lee, the drummer for the flashy metal combo Mötley Crüe, were on top of the world. She was starring in the TV hit “Baywatch,” and while his band was past its 1980s prime, he could still live la vida rocka in their Malibu mansion.You can’t blame them for wanting to preserve some of their happiest moments — including some very naked, very sexual ones — for posterity, with the help of a Hi8 camcorder.And then, much to the couple’s dismay, the footage got out. And got around.Those events and their fallout are dramatized in the eight-part scripted series “Pam & Tommy,” a wild, picaresque romp through the nightclubs, palaces and porn dens of mid-90s Hollywood, which debuted Wednesday on Hulu. But the show has more on its mind than celebrity antics or period-perfect riffs on the outlandish trials and tribulations of its lead couple — although it has those, too.The series uses the scandal — which begot fortunes, ruined lives and made the celebrity sex tape a defining artifact of the internet age — as a guide through a transitional period in American culture. It depicts a time when glam gave way to grunge and when cheap video and dial-up modems exponentially expanded the reach — and the invasiveness — of the business of sexual imagery.“We’re still living in that today,” said D.V. DeVincentis (“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), a writer, executive producer and co-showrunner of the series. “You could argue it all comes from, if not this moment, then this period, and it’s something you’ll never get back in the bottle.”It is hard now to grasp the scope of the affair, which has become shrouded in a mist of 1990s nostalgia.“Obviously Pamela was so a part of everyone’s world, and even just that time in the ’90s is very sort of romanticized in my head — this wild time of crop tops and Spice Girls,” said Lily James, 32, who portrays Anderson in “Pam & Tommy.” “But we also talked about how there’s this deeper, untold story that was largely missed by the headlines.”A depiction of Anderson and Lee’s wedding (with Alberto Manquero, left) in “Pam & Tommy.” In real life, they met, fell in love and were married in the course of four days.Erin Simkin/HuluSeth Rogen, left, and Nick Offerman play the miffed contractor who stole the tape and the porn producer who helped him distribute it.  Kelsey McNeal/HuluSeth Rogen, 39, who is among the show’s executive producers, plays Rand Gauthier, the real-life electrician who stole, duplicated and distributed the tape. Rogen recalled by phone his first awareness of the footage. “I was 13, 14 years old when it came out, so I did not know the full story by any means,” he said. “I just knew it was this thing that was floating around my social group a little bit — that was looked on as this mythical thing, like ‘Lord of the Rings’ almost.”But how to tell such a story, with its obvious sex appeal, in a way that is entertaining but doesn’t add to the exploitation? (Anderson and Lee were not involved in the production.) It was a tricky proposition, especially since the truth is so fanciful that it might enhance the myth.Based closely on an eye-popping investigative Rolling Stone article from 2014, written by Amanda Chicago Lewis, the show takes off with the narrative equivalent of a Miata’s screeching tires. The man who sets the wheels in motion — and who, in early episodes, appears to be the show’s moral center — is Gauthier, the son of minor Hollywood royalty. (In 1975, his father, Dick Gautier, played Robin Hood in the short-lived Mel Brooks sitcom “When Things Were Rotten.” Rand modified his own last name’s spelling.)As depicted in “Pam & Tommy,” Gauthier was helping remodel Lee and Anderson’s mansion when he was fired, with money still owed by a capricious and stingy Lee (Sebastian Stan). Already out thousands of dollars, Gauthier returned to recover his tools, when, as Gauthier alleges in the article, Lee stuck a shotgun in his face. (Lee and Anderson declined to comment for the Rolling Stone article.)Incensed, he plotted an elaborate scheme to recoup his losses by stealing a six-foot-tall safe from Lee’s home, contents unknown. One of the show’s funniest scenes depicts Gauthier trying to fool Lee’s security camera by covering his back with a white pelt and getting down on all fours to look like Lee’s giant dog.“Because I’m involved in the show, people assume it was made up,” Rogen said, laughing.Lee had stored the precious video in that safe, alongside his guns and Anderson’s jewelry. The tape was out of sight and out of mind until early 1996, when the couple discovered that footage featuring their X-rated activities on a boat on Lake Mead had begun to surface publicly. Anderson and Lee, now the object of prurient attention, belatedly realized the tape had been stolen and were soon the butt of late-night jokes.James required four hours in the makeup chair daily and Stan three, many of them dedicated to the painstaking application of Lee’s many tattoos.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesIn a plot progression worthy of the Coen brothers, the caper metastasized, spreading into louche corners across North America. The real-life cast of characters grew to include bikers, gamblers, a brutal money lender named Butchie (Andrew Dice Clay) and assorted bottom feeders like Gauthier’s accomplice Milton Ingley (Nick Offerman), a pornographer in the San Fernando Valley.Bawdy touches accentuate the sleazy vibe of mid-90s Los Angeles, particularly in early episodes. In one scene, the famously well-endowed Lee discusses his love for Anderson with an animated version of his penis (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas). It is as funny as it is surreal, but it isn’t a flight of comic fancy on the screenwriters’ part: Such tête-à-têtes run throughout Lee’s 2004 memoir, “Tommyland.” (A spokesman for Hulu said the series’s dialogue is original.)Many times, such tricks are done with digital effects in postproduction, said Jason Collins, whose company, Autonomous FX, designed and built the many prosthetics used in the show. But Lee’s chatty member was brought to life by two puppeteers crouching out of camera range and armed with remote controls.“Doing it like this allows the director and the creators to feed lines to the puppeteers and to Sebastian,” Collins said, “so they can have maybe a little bit of extra improv and be a little bit looser on the scene that day.”As the episodes progress, viewers’ allegiances keep switching. Rogen, whose production company with Evan Goldberg, Point Grey, developed the series with Annapurna Pictures for Hulu, was drawn to Gauthier and his ambiguous role in the events.“I think you like him at first because he’s a simple dopey guy who is trying his best — you don’t think he’s doing anything that bad because he doesn’t think he’s doing anything that bad,” Rogen said.“The fact is that he truly didn’t consider anyone other than himself,” he added. “And he had a huge negative impact on people’s lives.”Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson had two children and were divorced in 1998, but they had an on-and-off relationship for many years after.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesEven Lee can be endearingly goofy, showering Anderson in affection and reveling in every rock-star cliché. But gradually, Anderson emerges as the story’s emotional and moral heart. And she is always a step ahead of most everybody around her, especially her husband, even as her instincts and intelligence are repeatedly ignored.“She’s ultimately our main character,” said Robert Siegel (“The Wrestler”), the show’s creator and a co-showrunner. “She gets the worst of it from a career and a public-perception standpoint, but she certainly gets out of our show as the best person.”To that end, the show took measures, DeVincentis said, to underscore the vastly diverging ways in which Anderson and Lee lived through the events. Lewis, who wrote the Rolling Stone article, was a consultant for the series; two of the writers were women, and later episodes were directed by women, including Lake Bell, Gwyneth Horder-Payton and Hannah Fidell. (Craig Gillespie, who directed “I, Tonya,” directed the first three.)“These two people had the exact same experience on film, that film was shown to the world, but she was slut-shamed out of the business and he was saved from being a has-been and reinvented as a sort of sex god,” DeVincentis said. “The only difference between them was gender.”Some early reviews have accused “Pam & Tommy” of trying to have it both ways — to seek redress for Anderson’s humiliation while also capitalizing on the inherent sexiness of the subject. It tells the hidden story of a non-consensual leak, but it was made without Anderson’s consent. The sex and nudity are mostly matter-of-fact, but they’re hardly disguised.Citing anonymous sources close to Anderson, multiple news outlets, including Entertainment Tonight, US Weekly and The Sun, have reported that she is unhappy about the series. Producers said that they tried: Anderson declined multiple requests by the production to be involved with the series, a Hulu spokesman said. (Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)“We were constantly monitoring the fine balance of revealing how Pam was victimized while portraying people who lived rock ‘n’ roll lives,” the showrunners said in a follow-up email. “Everyone involved in making the show was in a near-constant dialogue about how our portrayal would thread that needle.”James, a British actress best known for parts in “Downton Abbey,” “Cinderella” and “Baby Driver,” said that her attempts to contact Anderson were unsuccessful. Siegel acknowledged that James was in some ways a counterintuitive choice for the role, but he had wanted to subvert expectations.“A lot of people assumed we would cast whoever the biggest bombshell is,” he said. “But one of the takeaways of the show is that Pam is not who you think she is, and we’ve all underestimated her. You’re misjudging Lily maybe the way you’re misjudging Pam.”Stan and James tried to contact their respective subjects, but only Stan succeeded. It made James “even more committed to giving my absolute all to play her authentically and do her justice,” she said. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesJames and Stan, 39, had to disappear into their characters. Both talked about having to lose weight and exercise steadily for their role. Stan acknowledged being somewhat intimidated by the drumming scenes, especially since Lee operated at a gonzo level of intensity. (Lee was not asked to participate in the series, but Stan talked with Lee, who Stan said seemed “very touched” that they had connected; Lee declined to comment for this article.)“You’ve got to remember he was a guy who would be playing upside down on a roller coaster,” he said, referring to something that routinely happened in concert. “You’ve got to have a lot of energy to handle that.”And then there were the lengthy makeup sessions: James required four hours daily; for his various adornments, Stan needed three, many of them dedicated to the painstaking application of Lee’s tattoos.“It’s pretty wild because Lily and I didn’t really see each other outside of those costumes until the end,” he said. “Even now, we see each other for press, and we’re like, ‘This is your hair?’”Both actors put those hours to use by watching countless YouTube videos and practicing their elocution. James’s task was further complicated by having to put on a different accent (Anderson was born in Canada) while wearing prosthetic choppers.In the end, getting the appearances right didn’t matter as much as getting the characters right. But if James couldn’t meet with Anderson in person, it only motivated her further.“I just was even more committed to my own research — even more committed to giving my absolute all to play her authentically and do her justice,” she said. More

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    Erika Lust's Alternative Porn Vision

    The Swedish moviemaker thinks pornography can create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters.BARCELONA, Spain — When Billie Eilish called pornography “a disgrace” in a recent radio interview, the quote made headlines. The Grammy-winning musician said she had started watching at around age 11, to learn how to have sex, and that she was now angry about the way she felt porn misrepresented women.When people talk about pornography, they’re often referring, like Eilish, to its commercial, heterosexual variety, which is what most of the free porn online tends to be. On those sites, you’d be forgiven for thinking it all looks the same. But depending on the sexual politics and vision of its creator, porn can look wildly different.Take, for example, the work of the Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust. She has built her production company, Erika Lust Films, into an art-house pornography behemoth by offering something outside the porn mainstream. Most viewers watch Lust’s stylish, highly produced films by subscribing to her websites, where she also distributes videos by other like-minded directors. But her own films have also been screened in regular movie theaters in Berlin, London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York.“There’s not just one type of porn,” Lust said in an interview at her office in Barcelona, where she has lived since 2000. “People see it as one monolithic entity, but it’s not.”In the films Lust makes, she said her goal was for the female performers to have real orgasms. “When women watch porn, they need to see that women are being stimulated,” she said. “If there is a scene with penetrative sex, viewers need to see a woman using her hand or a vibrator at the same time — because that’s what works for most women.”Lust, 44, added that she had spoken with many young women who told her, “‘Something’s wrong with my body, I can’t reach an orgasm with a man,’ because they’re reproducing what they learn from online porn.”In Eilish’s radio interview, she said that the damage inflicted on her by online pornography went deeper still: In her view, it had “destroyed” her brain. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has also recently considered porn’s effect on the mind, reviving feminist debates from the 1970s and ’80s.In “The Right to Sex,” Srinivasan’s 2021 best-selling essay collection, she argues that, “While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty.” (Srinivasan declined to be interviewed for this article.)Although in her book she argues against censoring explicit material — a move that often unfairly targets women and sexual minorities, she writes — the Oxford University academic advises young people to lay off porn if they want their sex lives to be “more joyful, more equal, freer.”“Perhaps then the sexual imagination could be coaxed, even briefly, to recall its lost power,” Srinivasan writes.“Sex is such a huge part of who we are,” Lust said, “and there are so many more stories to tell.”Monica FiguerasYet Lust said it was film’s capacity to excite the erotic imagination that first drew her to pornography. While studying political science at Lund University in Sweden, she said she read “Hard Core,” a book by Linda Williams that is regarded as a classic of feminist film criticism, and that argues that pornography is a way of communicating ideas about gender and sex.Feminist thinking led Lust to realize that porn, like many other cultural products, was mostly made by men, for men and from a narrow perspective: that of “middle-aged, heterosexual, white men,” she said. This male view of sexuality was “often misogynistic, in which women were reduced to tools for men’s orgasm,” she added. A lot of commercial porn is shot from a disembodied male perspective, and often the only part of a male performer that’s visible onscreen is his penis, Lust said.The films she directs and produces, on the other hand, show women with sexual agency, who stimulate their own clitorises and whose facial expressions communicate their emotional and psychological states. Lust’s performers have a natural, everyday look and include people of “different sexualities, skin colors and body shapes,” she said.Her films are also heavy on plot lines. Lust’s best-known series, “XConfessions,” are filmed depictions of her viewers’ real fantasies. Anyone can “confess” their imagined or real-life sex stories through the XConfessions website. If she likes the idea, she turns it into a film. The stories include classic and kinky fantasies and are sometimes made by guest directors, such as the Canadian cult queer filmmaker Bruce LaBruce. One of his “XConfessions” movies, “Valentin, Pierre and Catalina,” is a remake of François Truffaut’s classic movie “Jules and Jim,” a three-way polyamorous love story between a woman and two men.LaBruce, who just wrapped up a feature-length parody porn movie for Lust set in the fashion industry, said in a phone interview that he was not surprised by the recent resurgence of negative attitudes toward porn. “The idea that porn is a male way of controlling women — that used to be the provenance of the Christian right,” he said. “Now, the left and the right have kind of flipped.”The anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who was on the “pro-sex” feminist side of the 1970s and ’80s “sex wars,” opposing calls for censorship, said by phone that pornography was “easy to pick on” because, historically, it had been marginalized socially and legally.“You know in movies when you think the monster is dead, but it just keeps coming back?” she said. “These assumptions about porn just keep resurfacing, going back more than four decades.“Many people just don’t think as rigorously about porn as they do other topics. Porn is a special case in how it’s treated intellectually, which is badly — even among philosophers and others who should know better,” Rubin said.While the porn industry is not known for critical reflection, there are, however, events like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, an annual gathering that seeks to provide new perspectives on the genre — artistic, social and even philosophical. Paulita Pappel, a porn performer and director who is one of the event’s curators, said that porn was often “a mirror of wider problems in society.” She added that, “The more we scapegoat and stigmatize it, the less space there will be for porn to be diverse, and the less chance we have to change the bigger issues.”When Lust screened her first feature-length movie, “The Intern,” to a sold-out audience at the festival in October, many in the audience — men, women and gender nonconforming people, mostly in their 20 and 30s — said that they came to see the film in search of an alternative to traditional porn.“I’m here because my friend recommended Erika Lust, because she doesn’t make heteronormative porn,” said Levent Ekemen, 28, a graduate student. “Her films show sensuality, and they’re extremely erotic.”Lust, center, on the set of “The Intern,” her first feature-length movie, which had its premiere at the Berlin Porn Film Festival in 2021.Adriana EskenaziLust said she hoped that the movies on her websites can have an “expansive” effect on people’s sense of the erotic. “With some of LaBruce’s films with male interaction,” she said, “men tell me, ‘Erika, I’ve never watched this before, but it was on your site, and it was hot!’ People are opening up their sexual visions outside of what they might be used to seeing.”She added that she wanted to help create a society that sees sexuality as myriad and joyful, and where women’s pleasure matters. “The value filmmaking has when it comes to empathizing with other people is incredible,” she said. “Sex is such a huge part of who we are, and there are so many more stories to tell.”“I have a right to tell them,” she added. “And no one can stop me.” More

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    Wakefield Poole, Pioneer in Gay Pornography, Dies at 85

    He gave up a dance career to create a crossover, and now classic, hit film in 1971 that had both gay and straight audiences, and celebrities, lining up to see it.One New York night in the early 1970s, a dancer and budding filmmaker named Wakefield Poole went to see a gay porn flick called “Highway Hustler” at a run-down theater in Times Square with his friends. As he settled into a tattered seat, he prepared to spend the next 45 minutes or so enjoyably aroused.But as the film rolled, he experienced nothing of the kind. He thought that the movie was sleazy, that its sex scenes were unnecessarily degrading. He started laughing out loud, and one of his companions fell asleep.“I said to my friend, ‘This is the worst, ugliest movie I’ve ever seen!’” Mr. Poole, who died on Oct. 27 at 85, recalled in 2002. “Somebody ought to be able to do something better.”The Stonewall uprising in Greenwich Village had occurred two years earlier, and Mr. Poole, like countless gay men of his generation, was empowered in its aftermath. What he had witnessed onscreen that night didn’t resemble the sexual liberation he was experiencing as a proud gay man in New York.Thus, armed with a 16-millimeter Bolex camera, Mr. Poole decided to do something about it. He headed to Fire Island Pines, the secluded summer Eden for gay men just off Long Island, and there began filming experimental movies with his friends, capturing them making love on beaches and in shady groves.And he did so with an auteur’s touch, as if he were some horny version of D.A. Pennebaker, striving to portray artful realism in the male intimacy he was documenting.The adult film star Casey Donovan in a scene from “Boys in the Sand,” which was shot in the beach community of Fire Island Pines, off Long Island.Wakefield PooleMr. Poole soon made a feature-length, surrealistic movie called “Boys in the Sand” (the title a spoof on “The Boys in the Band,” the groundbreaking 1968 play and 1970 film adaptation about gay men in New York), and its release in 1971 proved revelatory. He was hailed as a pioneer of gay porn, and the film became a crossover hit that changed attitudes about pornography among both the gay and straight audiences that lined up to see it.The movie, with the adult film star Casey Donovan, was composed of three steamy vignettes: First, Mr. Donovan materializes from the ocean Venus-like to ravage a young man lying on the sand; then, at a beach house, he tosses a dissolving magic pill into a swimming pool, causing a hunk to emerge from the water; lastly, he pleasures himself while admiring a telephone line repairman working outside his window.When “Boys in the Sand” opened at the now gone 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan, it became the talk of the town. The sex it portrayed between Adonic men frolicking in the Pines came across to viewers as blissful and guilt-free. Soon, celebrities like Liza Minnelli, Rudolf Nureyev and Halston were also lining up to see it.“I wanted a film,” Mr. Poole said at the time, “that gay people could look at and say, ‘I don’t mind being gay — it’s beautiful to see those people do what they’re doing.’”In a memoir, “Dirty Poole,” published in 2000, he related how, during the film’s release, its producer sneakily bought an ad for the film in The New York Times, leading Mr. Poole to speculate that the paper’s advertising department may not have looked at it too closely. Variety reviewed the movie, a rare instance of critical coverage of hard-core gay pornography by a mainstream publication (though it took a dim view of the movie). Even the film’s marquee billing challenged precedent: It displayed Mr. Poole’s real name.Mr. Poole in the early 1970s. He said of “Boys in the Sand,” “I wanted a film that gay people could look at and say, ‘I don’t mind being gay — it’s beautiful to see those people do what they’re doing.’”via Jim TushiskiWhile “Boys in the Sand” marked Mr. Poole’s official debut as a filmmaker (he had made some experimental short films earlier), his first passion was dance: He had led an impressive career performing in the New York-based company Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo and helping with the choreography of Broadway shows involving the likes of Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim and Noël Coward.“There weren’t a lot of people who were out,” Mr. Poole told South Florida Gay News in 2014. “Just seeing my name above the title on a theater made its impact. Hundreds of people saw ‘Boys in the Sand’ and came out after seeing the film.”The year after “Boys” appeared, the landmark film “Deep Throat” was released, commencing a golden age of American pornography. “Wakefield was determined to elevate the gay porn genre,” Michael Musto, the longtime Village Voice writer, said in a phone interview. “This was a time when you had to leave your home to see pornography. It was a communal experience by necessity, and you had to be seen in your seat. He removed the shame of it.”Mr. Poole’s next hit, “Bijou,” followed a construction worker who stumbles on an invitation to a private club, where he joins a psychedelic bathhouse-style orgy. Then came “Wakefield Poole’s Bible!,” a creatively ambitious soft-porn movie that reimagined tales from the Old Testament, but it flopped.Frustrated with its failure, Mr. Poole started afresh in San Francisco, which had become an epicenter of the gay rights movement, although his troubles only worsened there: He broke up with his longtime partner, and he became addicted to freebasing cocaine.He soon directed a documentary-like film, “Take One,” in which he interviewed men about their carnal fantasies and had them act them out on camera, in one notorious moment engaging two brothers.Mr. Poole eventually moved back to New York, holing himself up in a cold-water flat in Chelsea to break his cocaine addiction. Trying for a comeback, he released “Boys in the Sand II” in 1984, but it didn’t make a splash.The AIDS crisis had begun, and the carefree gay paradise depicted in his original movie suddenly felt a world away.“The reason I stopped making films was the AIDS situation,” Mr. Poole told an interviewer. “I lost my fan base to AIDS. I saw them all die. It’s a miracle I’m not dead. Cocaine saved my life. I did so much coke, I couldn’t have sex.”Mr. Poole in an undated photo. “The reason I stopped making films was the AIDS situation,” he said. “I lost my fan base to AIDS. I saw them all die.”via Jim TushinskiWalter Wakefield Poole III was born on Feb. 24, 1936, in Salisbury, N.C. His father was a police officer and later a car salesman. His mother, Hazel (Melton) Poole, was a homemaker.Growing up, Walter fell in love with a boyhood friend, and they would crawl through each other’s window to be together. But their romance ended when Walter’s family moved to Florida, settling in Jacksonville. Years later, he said, after his friend had married a woman and started a family, they rekindled their passion one night.Walter caught the dance bug in Jacksonville and started studying ballet seriously. When he was 18, he headed to New York to pursue dance further and joined the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo when he was 21.He turned to moviemaking in the 1960s, captivated by the experimental films of Andy Warhol.As he pulled away from pornography in the mid-1980s, Mr. Poole needed to find a new way to make a paycheck in New York, so he studied at the French Culinary Institute and later landed a job in food services for Calvin Klein.He retired in his 60s and moved back to Jacksonville, where he died in a nursing home, a niece, Terry Waters, said. He left no immediate survivors.As Mr. Poole grew older, enthusiasts of gay history and vintage pornography collectors began revisiting his work. A documentary, “I Always Said Yes: The Many Lives of Wakefield Poole,” directed by Jim Tushinski, came out in 2016. New York art house theaters like Metrograph and Quad Cinema screened “Boys in the Sand.”In 2010, Mr. Poole, then 74, was invited to the Pines for a screening of his classic, although some gay residents there weren’t thrilled about it.A local film festival, responding to their complaints about the X-rated content, had declined to show the movie, so an opposing faction of residents organized their own event. Their group included a man who lived in a summer house that had been used in the film.That night, Mr. Poole was introduced to a packed auditorium as an unsung hero who had helped transform the Pines into an international destination. (“Boys in the Sand” was seen widely overseas.) He took the stage to applause.“What has happened here with the controversy is why I made this film,” he told the crowd. “It’s the ultimate of what I wanted this film to do, and that’s to not only make controversy, but to overcome controversy.”He added: “When I first came to Fire Island, I felt free for the first time in my life. I didn’t feel like a minority and I wanted everybody to suddenly feel that. So I said, ‘I can make a movie that no one will be ashamed to watch.’” More