Joe D'Amato - The Aliases of Aristide Massaccesi

The Aliases of Aristide Massaccesi

D'Amato always took credit for his camerawork with his birth name Aristide Massaccesi until his late hardcore phase, when he started to use the pseudonym Frederiko Slonisko.

When first starting to work as a director, he chose to credit the producer or co-director instead because he wanted to avoid interference between his directorial work, of which he did not think much due to budget constraints, and his professional reputation as cinematographer. Around 1973, he started using directorial pseudonyms, the first being Michael Wotruba. The only movie which D'Amato as a director ever took credit for with his birth name was to be Death Smiles at a Murderer (1973); in an interview, D'Amato said he had felt comfortable with the reasonably high budget and the actors he had at his disposal.

In 1974, he first used the name Joe D'Amato as director on the Canadian spaghetti western Cormack of the Mounties, a name proposed by producer Ermanno Donati to resemble Italian American the Italian names of directors such as Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma and which became his better-known pseudonym.

During his lifetime, D'Amato worked under innumerable aliases. Because of this, it is on the one hand possible that there are still Joe D'Amato films which are in circulation, which he wrote or directed, but for which he used an as yet unattributed pseudonym. This seems especially likely for the years devoted to the production of hardcore pornography in the early 1980s and the second half of the 1990s. On the other hand, titles are easily wrongly attributed to D'Amato as long as they are directed by a lesser known director with only one or a few titles in his oeuvre who happened to work in the same genre as D'Amato and whose name is then misinterpreted as a pseudonym of Joe D'Amato. This is largely due to the lack of easily accessible documentation on most of these movies.

The following is a list of pseudonyms D'Amato is known to have used. The names which recur on a regular basis are highlighted in bold.

Anna Bergman, Raf Donato, Gerry Lively, and Romano Gastaldi are sometimes listed under pseudonyms as well. However, these were not mere names, but actual people involved in the production of the respective movies who for various reasons took the credit in D'Amato's stead, and thus should not be listed as pseudonyms, but allonyms. The same goes for D'Amato's use of the fictitious character-name Sarah Asproon.