Directed by: Wakefield Poole
Stars: Jeff Addison, Philip Borden, Tony Franco, Sal Guange
Language: English
Country: Usa | Imdb Info
Description: In late-70s San Francisco, filmmaker Wakefield Poole sits down with a group of gay men and asks a deceptively simple question: what fantasy have you always wanted to explore?
Their answers become the foundation of Take One, an unusual hybrid of documentary, underground cinema, and adult-era experimentation. Rather than building a conventional storyline, Poole structures the film as a series of intimate portraits, allowing each participant to describe a private desire before stepping in front of the camera to bring some version of it to life.
The result is less a polished fantasy anthology than an open-ended study of self-expression. Poole’s camera moves between interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, stylized lighting, personal spaces, and staged scenarios, creating a film that constantly blurs the line between performance and confession. Some passages are playful, some deliberately provocative, and others surprisingly reflective, revealing how fantasy can become a language for identity, vulnerability, and trust.
As the participants gradually come together, the movie expands beyond individual stories into a broader snapshot of a specific place and moment: San Francisco during an era of extraordinary openness, when queer communities were creating their own spaces, their own imagery, and their own cinematic language outside the mainstream.
Legacy Note:
Take One was one of the final film-lensed productions directed by Wakefield Poole, the filmmaker behind the landmark underground title Boys in the Sand. What gives it lasting value is not simply its anthology structure, but its vérité-style curiosity and unmistakable sense of time and place. Alongside its more stylized passages, the film captures glimpses of pre-AIDS-era San Francisco queer culture with a degree of openness that would soon carry a much heavier historical weight. Uneven by design but culturally revealing, it survives as both an adult-cinema artifact and a candid document of a community exploring freedom on its own terms.
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