Web Master: The 'Real' Spider-Man Speaks

It's late-afternoon in Baltimore, on opening day of the new movie Spider-Man, and Dan Poole's cell phone won't stop ringing.

Across the country, armies of thrill-seeking matinee-goers have already spent millions to catch the long-anticipated movie version of the classic Marvel comic book. Right now, thousands of Internet junkies are hotly debating the movie's controversial organic web-shooters (in the original comic book, Spider-Man shot webs from the mechanical gizmos he invented himself) while some folks are actually lining-up to see the film again.

Poole himself caught the first Baltimore screening of the day, at 11:30am, and now, not long after, his friends and fans are calling up to get Poole's reaction to the movie. But they'll have to wait, because Dan Poole -- the underground guerrilla-filmmaker and comic book fan commonly known as the "real Spider Man" -- is tied up, energetically describing that response to me. And here it is:

Spider-Man, the movie -- directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe and Kirsten Dunst -- very nearly drove Poole up a wall. Literally. And Dan Poole is a guy who's actually climbed walls.

"It was very hard to sit still through this thing," he admits with a laugh. "It did make me want to climb something, or swing from something. But I just sat there, wanting so badly to have been in it!"

That desire, to be in a Spider-Man movie, is what inspired Poole, 10 years ago, to shoot his own breathtaking Spidey adventure, "The Green Goblin's Last Stand," in hopes that his stunt-filled, crudely shot video would somehow capture the attention of Hollywood.

While Hollywood has yet to respond, Poole's movie -- in which he dons a Spider-Man suit to scale real buildings and dangle from incredibly high bridges -- has made him a legend among independent filmmakers. It's also made people question his sanity. Now a self-made documentary about Poole's exploits, titled "The REAL Spider-Man: The Making of the Green Goblin's Last Stand," has become a certified film-festival phenomenon, snagging two awards: the Audience Award for Best Documentary and Best Guerrilla Marketing during January's edgy No-Dance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

The majority of Poole's fans have discovered him on the web (www.alphadogproductions.net), where the quirky doc can be purchased and GGLS -- Poole's original 50-minute movie -- can be downloaded for free.

"So," I ask, "what's it like to be Spider-Man?"

"Well, climbing walls is a lot of fun," he says. "I gotta tell you, though, that climbing in that costume is not easy. The mask is a bit suffocating and your eyes tend to get fogged up. But swinging -- swinging from bridges, swinging from building to building -- that's when I really feel like Spider-Man. In this new movie, whenever Tobey Maguire is swinging, climbing or jumping, it just made me feel so . . . envious. I could identify with those moments. As some one who's done it, I can tell you that when you're flying through the air, that's when you feel like you're really Spider-Man."

"Let me ask you straight," I say. "Did you like Spider-Man?"

"Damn! I loved it!" he confesses at considerable volume. "Ain't nobody going to be saying too much bad shit about this one. It's good. I give it an A-minus."

"Not an A?"

"Well, obviously I have some reservations," Poole replies. "I hated the Green Goblin's mask. Willem Dafoe's face is scary enough without a mask. He could have been the scariest thing on the screen since Alien. But instead it was laughable. And of course there's never going to be any excuse for the organic web-shooters. No excuse."

"Um, I thought they were kind of cool," I reply.

"You're kidding me," he says.

"Hey, if I were bitten by a genetically engineered spider and mutated into a half-spider/half-man hybrid, I'd want organic web-shooters."