Amos Poe

Amos Poe (born Amos Porges; September 30, 1949 – December 25, 2025) was an American New York City-based No Wave director and screenwriter, described by The New York Times as a "pioneering indie filmmaker".

Early years Poe was born Amos Porges on September 30, 1949, in Tel Aviv, where his parents had immigrated from Europe. His family moved to East Meadow, New York, when he was eight years old. He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, but dropped out in 1972, the year he married Barbara Brooks. By that time he had changed his surname to Poe.

Career Amos Poe was one of the first punk filmmakers and his film The Blank Generation (1976)—co-directed with Ivan Král— is one of the earliest punk films. The film features performances by Richard Hell, Talking Heads, Television, Patti Smith, and Wayne County. Rolling Stone named it number 6 on its list of 25 Greatest Punk Rock Movies of All Time.

He was also associated with the birth of No Wave Cinema due to films such as Unmade Beds (1976), featuring Duncan Hannah and Debbie Harry; The Foreigner (1978), featuring Harry, Eric Mitchell, and Anya Phillips; and Subway Riders (1981), starring Susan Tyrrell, Robbie Coltrane, and Cookie Mueller. During this time he was also the director of the public-access television cable TV show TV Party hosted by Glenn O'Brien and Chris Stein.

Poe was part of the Remodernist film movement, which he described as the next development of Postmodernism and the transformation of existing cultural features, but "using the technology and the sensibility of contemporary rather than nostalgia". "My idea of my work's importance is to see how it moves the culture to where I'd like to see it", Poe said in a 1981 interview.

In 2008, he wrote the screenplay for the 2008 Amy Redford film The Guitar.

Poe taught filmmaking at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and at Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.

Partial filmography Night Lunch (1975) The Blank Generation (1976) Unmade Beds (1976) The Foreigner (1978) TV Party (1978) Subway Riders (1981) Alphabet City (1985) Rocket Gibraltar (1988, screenplay) Triple Bogey on a Par Five Hole (1991) Joey Breaker (1992) (producer) Dead Weekend (1995) Frogs for Snakes (1998) 29 Palms (2001, murchian engineering) Steve Earle: Just an American Boy (2003) When You Find Me (2004) John the Cop (2004) Her Illness (2004) The Guitar (2007, screenplay, producer) Empire II (2007) La Commedia di Amos Poe (2010) Ladies & Gentlemen (2012) A Walk in the Park (2012) Happiness Is a Warm Gun (2015)