Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor

Here is the fascinating career of Joe Dallesandro, a tough kid from the streets of New York who became a counterculture emblem of male beauty and ambiguous sexuality through the films of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. Author Michael Ferguson examines in detail the six features Dallesandro made for the Factory, as well as the X-rated Frankenstein and Dracula, the score of offbeat, arty, and low-budget movies that followed in Europe, and his return to America as character actor. Ambivalent about his fame as a Warhol Superstar, Dallesandro is nevertheless irrevocably drawn back to the images of his younger self and a persona that captured the gaze of both women and men during the Sexual Revolution. As the first openly eroticized male sex symbol of the movies to appear casually naked on screen, he spoke to our fantasies and liberated the male nude as an object of beauty in the cinema. Including new interviews with Joe, an extensive biographical section, and photographs from the actor’s personal collection, Ferguson has revised, expanded, and updated his long out-of-print Little Joe, Superstar with Joe Dallesandro: Warhol Superstar, Underground Film Icon, Actor.