About the Greasy Pole Doc
America’s oldest fishing port, Gloucester, MA, is a community steeped in tradition with a culture and character unlike any other. The St Peter’s Fiesta is the epitome of Gloucester’s storied heritage, and the crowning point of the festival is a sporting event unlike any other: the Greasy Pole.
As Gloucester natives, we have grown up with the Greasy Pole all our lives and heard stories of the years of bumps, bruises, laughs, and tears from some of the most fascinating and endearing residents of Gloucester: the Greasy Pole walkers. In March of 2009 we competed in the International Documentary Challenge, a timed filmmaking competition where filmmakers have 5-days to make a 7-minute film. Our film, The Greasy Pole, beat out over 130 other teams from around the world to win the Documentary Educational Resources (DER) Award.
Through the encouragement of DER (an organization that helps independent filmmakers secure funding for their films), and many friends, family, and residents of Gloucester, we have decided to create a feature-length version of the film, with an end goal of having the film aired on broadcast television.
The process of acquiring funding will happen over the next year, and we hope to meet our budget goal by Fiesta 2010. We encourage anyone interested in contributing to the documentary (whether it’s financial contributions, photo/video from past Greasy Pole competitions, or to share one of the countless stories that have built up over the last century) to please email:
We would like to generate an e-mail list to provide people with updates on the project over the next year. If you’re interesting on keeping up with the film’s progress, let us know.
This is a project that will need the support of the whole community for it to be a success. It’s a chance for the people of Gloucester to tell their story to the world, and as Gloucester filmmakers, we would like nothing more than to see the community at large make this their film as much as it is ours. Above all, “The Greasy Pole” will be a film about a unique cultural tradition that has managed to endure in a world undergoing profound changes.
- Many thanks,
Emile Doucette, Thomas Papows, Michael Pallazola
CoffeeBlack Productions
