News

Tony Ganios, best known for playing Anthony ‘Meat’ Tuperello in Porky’s, is dead at the age of 64. According to the actor’s fiancée Amanda, Tony was admitted to a hospital in New York on Saturday with a severe spinal cord infection but passed away of heart failure following surgery on Sunday.

“The last words we said to each other were, ‘I love you,’” Amanda wrote on X. “Love is an understatement. You are everything to me. My heart, my soul and my best friend.“

He made his feature-film debut in Philip Kaufman’s coming-of-age comedy-drama The Wanderers, which followed a group of Italian-American teenagers and their power struggles against rival gangs in the Bronx in 1963. The film was a success upon release, but its popularity grew over the decades as it developed a passionate following, even leading Warner Bros. to re-release the movie in 1996.

Ganios made a name for himself with Porky’s,...

There are roughly 900,000 tribute pieces online this week about the 1985 John Hughes film "The Breakfast Club," and I understand the motivation. If you were the right age when the film was released (I was 15 at the time), that movie felt like a lightning bolt right to the face. Hughes treated teenagers like they were actual people with complex emotional lives worthy of respect, and while that would seem to be a logical approach to writing about any character, it certainly didn't feel average when he did it. He wrote about that secret world of teenagers with what felt like laser accuracy, and he basically created an entire industry of movies that tried to tap into that same audience. So certainly, there is much to celebrate when looking back at that particular film, but when I went to look at a list of the films that came out in 1985, a year...

When AfterElton asked me if I'd be interested in doing a story on full-frontal male nudity in the movies, I said, “Interested? I've been researching it since I was 12!” What prompted the idea is of course the film Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender as a man addicted to sex. When the film debuted at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year it set off a shockwave because of its sexual explicitness, including a much-discussed full-frontal reveal by Fassbender. Add to that the recent flurry of attention that stills of Jonathan Groff's nude scene in Twelve Thirty hitting the Internet generated, and it seems like these days cinema penises are a trending topic.

Everyone from film critics to Freudian analysts to gender theorists has written about male nudity in film. And sorting through the pronouncements on the male gaze and Lacanian mirrors and power inequities between the sexes in Hollywood...

Wyatt Knight, best remembered for the Porky's movies, was found dead in Maui on Oct. 26. Knight, who had received a bone marrow transplant for stage 4 non-hodgkins lymphoma in 2003, apparently committed suicide. He was 56. Knight's wife released a statement explaining her husband's decision: "He was tired of the pain, and after much contemplation, chose to end his life in a beautiful and a serene place. His family and friends are devastated. He was deeply loved by all who knew him and will be missed every day." In Bob Clark's Porky's, perhaps the sleeper hit of 1982, Knight played handsome bad boy Tommy Turner, the type of man that today would be labeled either a sex addict or a sex offender (if caught). Back then, Tommy was just a regular guy, either thinking of sex or dreaming about it. Knight's Tommy is particularly memorable because while showing his dick through a hole in the girl's bathroom wall,...

Craig Moss and Steve Schoenberg have been hired to write the remake of 1982's Porky's, which Howard Stern is executive producing along with Larry Levinson. Dan Gross and Steve Squillante are producing. Porky's, released in 1982, starred Dan Monahan, Mark Herrier, Wyatt Knight, Roger Wilson and then-newcomer Kim Cattrall. The film, which followed a group of high school boys on their mostly sexual misadventures, was a risque release for its time and a big hit at the boxoffice. Porky's cost $4 million to make but brought in more than $105 million and spawned two sequels, Porky's II: The Next Day and Porky's Revenge.