Biography
Son of David William Wolstencroft he grew up in Lower Templestowe, a middle-class suburb of Melbourne, attending Templestowe Heights Primary School and later Ivanhoe Grammar School.
Wolstencroft began making short films at age 11 in 1980 starting with clay and action figure animation. He got a home video camera around 1982 and started shooting many lo fi shorts. Many of his early works are collaborations with childhood friends Mark Horponitch and Jamie White and are either horror spoofs and/or imitations or outright offensive comedies. He met mentor Mark Savage at a Super 8 film group around 1984 and together they made the low budget zombie short "Undead" with Savage directing and Wolstencroft starring. He then co-produced and acted in Savage's Marauders in 1986, one of the first video features ever made in Australia.
He co-directed his first feature Bloodlust with collaborator Jon Hewitt in 1990 which went onto to become a cult hit and has recently been featured in Michael Adams book "Showgirls, Teen Wolves and Astro Zombies". Adams points out that Bloodlust had many of the same obsessions as the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino and he notes it was released 2 years before Reservoir Dogs. Adams acted in the film as "Stoned Hippie."
In 1992 Wolstencroft founded the Hellfire Club, a BDSM-themed nightclub which operated in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and other states for many years. In 1996 he began work on his second feature film Pearls Before Swine, a project which would take him three years to complete starring Boyd Rice. In 2000, the film was submitted to the Melbourne International Film Festival, but was not selected. In response, Wolstencroft founded the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, which, as of 2013, has remained an annual event.
Wolstencroft has acted in several films. He was credited as both actor and producer in Mark Savage's Marauders, and acted in Savage's Defenceless and many of his early shorts. He also appears in Andrew Leavold's Lesbo A Go Go, Nicolas Debot's Extremism Breaks my Balls and Stuart Simpson's El Monstro Del Mar.
Wolstencroft's writings have appeared in a variety of publications, including Fatal Visions'Filmnet and Fangoria Magazine (issue 162).
He is written about in Linda Jaivin's book "Confessions of an S&M virgin" and Jeff Sparrow's censorship investigation "Money Shot".
His fourth feature was The Beautiful and Damned based on the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The film is a modern adaptation, the first ever attempted of any of Fitzgerald's work and stars Ross Ditcham, Kristen Condon, Norman Yemm, John Brumpton, Paul Moder, Peter Christopherson and Frank Howson amongst others. The film was sneak previewed at the 10th Melbourne Underground Film Festival and played at The Australian Film Festival in 2010.
The Beautiful and Damned had its US Premiere at the 10th F. Scott Fitzgerald Festival in Baltimore in October 2009.
He also keeps a blog Idea Fix running since early 2008.
He shot a war documentary in Uganda in July 2009 called "Heart of Lightness" with Ebony Butler.
Wolstencroft founded a new film festival, Bloodfest Fantastique, dedicated to Horror and Science fiction cinema. The festival opened at a venue in St Kilda on the 10 June 2011 and was a one off event.
Between 2009 and July 2012 shot his latest feature, a documentary, on Michael Tierney and the contemporary LA adult film scene called "The Last Days of Joe Blow". It will play festivals in 2013.
His latest narrative feature project is an adaptation of the famous William Butler Yeats poem "The Second Coming". The film is a portmanteau film made up of seven stories. Shooting began in Thailand in October 2010 with Michael Tierney, continued in to 2012 featuring many underground 'superstars' in roles. It is scheduled to be completed in two parts in 2013.
Read more about this topic: Richard Wolstencroft
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