Who was Dennis Duggan? He was certainly one of the most eclectic personalities of American contemporary cinema. He was an actor in genre films. He exceptionally played the porno character actor ?who does not take off his clothes? in some hard-care films of the 1980s. He was a documentary filmmaker, a lighting director, and teacher at the Film School in San Francisco. Above all, he was the very esteemed director of short and feature films in Super8. Dennis Duggan died of cancer in December, 1995, right after he made a feature film entitled Dark Street. This documentary tells the story of his life and works.

?I ran into Dennis Duggan in 1989, when I first appreciated his talent as an actor in Bud Lee?s film, The Ribald Tales of Canterbury, where he played the role of the drunken miller who was tricked by the two Oxford students in a way that was sublime. I was struck very much by the fact that there was an actor of his level in a blue movie, an actor with a Falstaff-type physique, and ? what?s more ? who did not play a role in the hard-cord scenes. From that time on, I began a research project that lasted ten years, over the course of which I gradually discovered ? like in a game of Chinese boxes ? the many-faceted nature of this ?little big Orson Welles of San Francisco? who had never directed his Citizen Kane, but who had loved, known, taught, and experienced cinema in all its forms. Unfortunately, just when I had obtained a way of meeting him personally, I found out that he had died two months before. When I was able to see all of his works, I wanted to pay him a small homage with the testimony of the people who had admired him and been his companions. My desire to do this was almost transformed into a clear and unavoidable necessity.? (Marcello Garofalo)

Marcello Garofalo

Marcello Garofalo (Naples, 1958) is a film critic and essayist. He is on the editorial board of the journal, Segnocinema. He has written books dedicated to the cinema of Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Walt Disney. In 1996 he entred his middle-length film, Westmoreland Naples, in the Italian Space section of the fourteenth Torino Film Festival. In addition, he is the author of the film novel for the episode, Maruzzella, of the colective film, I Vesuviani.