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EAST LIVERPOOL - Peter Wooley graduated from East Liverpool high school "when the world was in black and white." After graduating, Wooley joined the Navy and after that he attended Kent State University in East Liverpool to study architecture.

Somewhere along the line Wooley was exposed to the exciting (and sometimes wacky, but almost always enjoyable) world of showbusiness. Wooley took his architectural expertise and decided to become a production designer for movie sets,"which is kind of the same thing, only it is much more fun," he said.

In his autobiography "What! And Give Up Showbusiness?" Wooley recounts his Hollywood experiences, like working with actor/director Mel Brooks on popular films "Blazing Saddles" and "High Anxiety," and making a unique truck for Katharine Hepburn for the film "Olly Olly Oxen Free."

Wooley said he loves the whole process of production design, which is essentially creating a piece of art. "(The film) goes through the hands of 250 people and we all come out with this piece of art, and the fun is in the trying," he said.

To be completely honest, Wooley said, he doesn't always know exactly what he is doing. "I have walked through life just following my bliss. My wife said that is one of the reasons that she loves me." But, he warns, "You gotta have some conviction or you ain't gonna follow it well."

But while Wooley has been around the world and introduced to people some would call "Legends" in showbusiness, he hasn't forgotten his East Liverpool roots. "I remember everything about East Liverpool. I dream about that town," he said.

In fact, Wooley is still friends with his childhood pal, Spider Allison. "There's an apple tree up there in the woods. I'm not going to tell you where. Only me 'n' Spider Allison know where it is, and we're just not saying...Me 'n' Spider sat up in that tree and solved the problems of the 1943 world," Wooley said in his book. Allison and Wooley attended grade school through high school together in East Liverpool.

After joining the Army and going to Vietnam, Allison was exposed to Agent Orange and is now blind, Wooley said. But Allison hasn't lost his sense of humor. "He still plays golf and his wife says he does his best work in the dark," Wooley said.

Wooley remembers a time when he and Allison and both of their wives were at the last East Liverpool All Class Reunion and Wooley purposefully walked Allison into a post. "I love him too much to feel sorry for him," he said.

While Wooley no longer lives in East Liverpool, he does come back to visit from time to time. In fact, he and his wife Linda have plans to attend the All Class Reunion in July. Allison, who now lives in Florida, will be there too, and Wooley plans on taking Allison up to their old tree. (He promises he won't run him into any trees.)

Wooley has been involved with showbusiness for nearly 40 years and continues to work on films. His latest project, "Barbarossa and the Towers of Italy" is somewhat different compared to his past projects.

Looking over Wooley's filmography reveals he has spent a majority of his time in comedy (his autobiography is laugh-out-loud funny), but this latest project is a serious documentary about the Barbarossa pirates who raided Italian villages along the southern coast of Italy during the 1400s.

Wooley said he got the idea for the documentary when he and his wife Linda were visiting Italy for their 50th wedding anniversary. "My friend Tony Schweikle (who is also a Director-Cinematographer) picked us up and and drove us down the coast and I kept looking at these ruins on the land and I asked him what they were, and he said he didn't know."

After some research, Wooley and Schweikle discovered the ruins were formerly watchtowers built to protect the villages from the Barbarossa pirates. "Barbarossa" is Italian for red-beard. The original four Barbarossa pirates were brothers and one of them had a red-beard, which distinguished them from other pirates. Since then many other pirates have been known as "Barbarossa."

Originally Schweikle thought the story of the "torries" (Italian for towers) would make a good coffee table book, but Wooley thought it would make a better documentary, he said. "We scraped the money together from a family corporation in Florida and went and made the darn thing."

So far this year "Barbarossa and the Towers of Italy" has screened at the Ispani Festival di Cinema in Italy and the Black Swamp International Film Festival in Toledo, Ohio. On Friday, Nov. 13 the film will be screening at the Levante International Film Festival in Bari, Italy.

With a background in comedy, working on a documentary such as this one was quite different for Wooley, he admits. "When I am doing a film-like a regular movie-there is a script and the script is pretty much cut and dried, and you dig in and do it. You have a script for a documentary of course, but it is a loosely woven script and if you are smart you let it talk to you and learn as you go. It is like writing-what I envision when I start a book or documentary is not necessarily what comes out at the end," he said.