Joe D'Amato

Early life and work (1936–1969)

Joe D'Amato was born on 15 December 1936 in Rome, Italy. His father was Renato Massaccesi, who after an incident on a ship had been declared a war invalid and had started to work at the Istituto Luce in Rome first as electrician, fixing power generators left by the United States army at Cinecittà, and then as chief photographic technician. In 1950, at the age of 14, D'Amato joined his father at work together with his brothers Carlo and Fernando (called Nando). Being the most enterprising of the three sons, D'Amato took on the task of delivering the movie cameras his father sold. D'Amato also assisted in the dubbing of Italian film productions and designed title and end credits with Eugenio Bava, cutting the letters out by hand. In 1952, D'Amato worked as a still photographer on the set of The Golden Coach, later as electric. In the 1960s, D'Amato eventually moved on to work as a camera operator on numerous films including Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World.

First work as cinematographer and director (1969–1975)

In 1969, Piero Livi's Pelle di bandito and Silvio Amadio's No Man's Island (Italian: L'Isola delle Svedesi) were D'Amato's first films as cinematographer. In the next few years, D'Amato continued to work as cinematographer on Italian productions such as Umberto Lenzi's A Quiet Place to Kill, Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange? and some of Demofilo Fidani's low-budget Spaghetti Westerns.

D'Amato took on the role of director for the first time in 1972. He started out with a number of small western films (Go Away! Trinity Has Arrived in Eldorado and A Bounty Killer in Trinity) and decamerotici (More Sexy Canterbury Tales and Novelle licenziose di vergini vogliose) which he partly directed, partly co-directed before going on to direct the gothic horror film Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973) and the war film Heroes in Hell (1974), both starring Klaus Kinski. D'Amato briefly relinquished directing and reverted to cinematography in films such as Luigi Batzella's The Devil's Wedding Night, Steve Carver's The Arena and five films directed by Alberto De Martino: Crime Boss, The Killer Is on the Phone, Counselor at Crime, The Antichrist, and – two years later – Strange Shadows in an Empty Room. When D'Amato was in Canada shooting a sleigh ride sequence for Lucio Fulci's Challenge to White Fang, the film's producer Ermanno Donati asked him to stay and direct the adventure film Red Coats for him, in which D'Amato used the pseudonym "Joe D'Amato" for the first time. It turned a good profit, and D'Amato later considered it his best film in this period.

First work as producer (1979–1982)

The voodoo-themed Sesso nero, written by George Eastman, was the last film D'Amato shot in the Caribbean, at the end of 1979, and the first film D'Amato produced on his own, through his newly founded company, P.C.M. (Produzioni Cinematografiche Massaccesi). Of the Caribbean group of films it received the earliest theatrical release – the films only being released gradually throughout 1980 and 1981.

After his return from the Caribbean, D'Amato also co-founded Filmirage and used the companies to produce and direct the gore film Antropophagus (1980, produced through P.C.M. and Filmirage) and its follow-up, the slasher film Absurd (1981, co-produced by Filmirage and Metaxa), both of which starred George Eastman and later became cult films for fans of extreme cinema.

D'Amato also founded and co-founded two further production companies, "Cinema 80" and "M.A.D." (an acronym for [Aristide] Massaccesi, Alessandroni, and [Donatella] Donati) on 15 January 1980 and 9 January 1981, respectively. For M.A.D., Alessandroni, an engineer, provided the funding, while his son acted as producer on set. Donatella Donati, the daughter of Ermanno Donati, became D'Amato's assistant and constant collaborator, usually acting as production secretary and assistant director.

The two companies were the main vehicles for D'Amato's film production of this period. From 1980 until 1982, D'Amato produced 14 hardcore pornographic films through both companies (Cinema 80: 9 films, M.A.D.: 5), 10 of which he directed and lensed himself, while 3 of the films (Blue erotic climax, Labbra vogliose and Le porno investigatrici) were directed by Claudio Bernabei. Officially, Bernabei was both executive manager and director, his pseudonym Alexander (or Alexandre) Borsky being used for almost all directorial credits although the films were for the most part directed by D'Amato personally, who was only given credit in the non-committal phrase "a Joe D'Amato film" (Italian: un film di Joe D'Amato) used for marketing purposes. The reason for this lay in avoiding one of two criminal charges per film since the state only charged the executive manager of the company and the director; them being the same person, only one charge was brought forth. One notable exception was Porno video (1981; sometimes: Pornovideo), which was directed entirely by Giuliana Gamba (under the pseudonym Therese Dunn); it was the first film D'Amato produced for another director – a practice he would start expanding six years later in his Filmirage period. Il succo del sesso (1982; a punning title which can mean both "The Essence of Sex" and "The Juice of Sex") was the only film of this period that was directed but not produced by D'Amato, being a "Promo Film" production of Giovanni Perrucci's.

The average Cinema 80 or M.A.D. film cost 55 million lire, was shot in 10 days, edited over a period of two months, and had a generic title such as Super climax, Super hard love or Voglia di sesso (literally: Lust for Sex). A group of three films produced through Cinema 80 stands out. In 1981, building on Tinto Brass's Caligula (1979), D'Amato produced, shot and directed Caligula... The Untold Story in both a hardcore and a softcore version, starring David Brandon, Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti. It recounted the final days of the Roman Emperor Caligula and was followed by two purely hardcore pornographic films – Una vergine per l'impero romano and Messalina orgasmo imperiale – in which D'Amato reused sets and costumes from the first film, albeit on a significantly lower budget. The three films were signed by D'Amato as director under different pseudonyms and released separately in December 1982, May 1983 and July 1983. They have been called his "porno-peplum trilogy".

Messalina orgasmo imperiale (shot in 1982) also happened to be the last film of this period. Another hardcore film that D'Amato originally intended to shoot himself for producer Riccardo Billy in co-production with a Chinese company, Love in Hong Kong (1983, starring Mark Shannon and Marianne Aubert), ended up being entirely delegated to his assistant Bernabei for lack of time, who directed the film on location in Hong Kong. It survives only in a truncated softcore version.