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 From the time he was a kid gleefully dragging mannequins to the attic, tossing them out the window, and Super 8 filming the drop, pratfalls were par for the course in a Michael Gentile film. After hormone-rocked suburban teenage years shifted his interest to the rocky ground between the subtle and obvious, he gravitated towards the avant-garde with a self-confessed appreciation for Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and John Waters. The darkly comic, occasionally crass, vision of this exile from Main Street was impossible to find on screen until a multimedia retrospective at the Creative Alliance titled “Baltimore Anti-Art Scene, 2005.”  At the end of the “punk” explosion Gentile produced and directed, with partner Brian Donegan, a notorious project, "Dead Strippers,” 1979, shot in 16mm with a Bolex. John Ellsberry worked as one of the production’s cameramen, pre Dork Brothers. The made-for-pocket-change Ed Wood-like “psychotronic featurette” remains an artifact of its own time. John Waters cited “Dead Strippers” as one of five local examples of “good bad taste” in Baltimore Magazine, 1980. “This bloody project laid the groundwork for a sprawling anti-empire unleashed under the banner of The Dork Brothers with John Ellsberry. The body of work includes animated films [The Dork Brothers ”lost” film “Funktown,” and a rare live-action featurette, 1984’s “Prisoners on Beaverkill Run,” about two escaped convicts and a distressed couple], comic strips, books, fliers, photos, and at least one public performance.” — Eric Allen Hatch Baltimore City Paper
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