5/28/2023 0 Comments Last man standing documentaryKnight, who came up behind the seated Broomfield, told him he’d be waiting for him in the lobby. The film concluded at Mule Creek State Prison, with Broomfield sensationally scoring an interview with Knight, when he was serving nine years for violating probation – a situation so scary the cameraman gets the shakes.īroomfield doesn’t know whether Knight saw his film, but encountered him several years later, at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Broomfield was dining with writer Gore Vidal. The New York Times accused Broomfield’s film of peddling “circumstantial evidence and speculation”. The evidence around Shakur’s murder – the prime suspect was gang member Orlando Anderson, who later died in 1998 in an unrelated shooting – appears shaky at best.īroomfield’s movie took the stance that Knight was behind both killings that after the murder of Shakur, who was reputedly set to sue Death Row for owed royalties, Wallace was gunned down as a smokescreen, to make the Shakur killing look like a feud between rap outfits. No one was charged with Wallace’s killing. “Not only had I believed in Russell Poole, I’d also introduced Russell to Voletta Wallace.”Īfter they met, Wallace filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles – eventually dismissed in 2010. “I felt very heavily invested in the story,” he says. It has clearly gnawed away at the 73-year-old Broomfield. While he drifted toward heavy drinking, Poole never gave up: he died of an aneurysm in 2015 at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, literally still pleading his case. “ discredited by the LAPD and made to look like an idiot and conspiracy theorist – but he was proved to be completely right.” Broomfield returned to Compton to make Last Man Standing (Photo: Press) Knight is now in prison, sentenced to 28 years for voluntary manslaughter after he crashed his car into two men in 2015, killing one – Terry Carter, his friend and co-founder of Heavyweight Records.īroomfield was encouraged to revisit the story after considering the fate of Russell Poole. “Enough time has elapsed people are talking in a much more open way,” he explains over Zoom, from his home near Santa Barbara. A long-term survivor of HIV/AIDS (diagnosed in 1989), he is a thirty-eight-year resident of San Francisco, where he lives with his fiancé Rick.Almost two decades on, Broomfield has returned to Compton in LA to make a follow-up, Last Man Standing, another compelling look at celebrity, corruption, greed and gang warfare. Hank Trout, Editor at Large, edited Drummer, Malebox, and Folsom magazines in the early 1980s. We hope it sparks a conversation and brings some measure of healing to the community.” We want them to know that they are not alone. “We hope this film can reach especially those survivors living in isolation who don’t yet know about this loving community. To that end, the Chronicle has made the film available online, free, for personal viewing. “We want the film to be experienced all over the country,” Erin Brethauer has said. Even after she narrowed her focus to just eight men, the story grew into a twenty-page supplement to the Sunday, Maedition of the paper. No one ever imagined the difficulties and issues of aging with HIV, because no one imagined “aging with HIV.” Constant neurological pain, substance abuse, economic hardship, housing instability, costly bogus medical treatments, stigma, toxic side effects of medicines, and the never-ending grief and PTSD over the loss of friends and lovers during the height of the epidemic have all taken their toll.Ĭhronicle reporter Erin Allday, who wrote the original article on which the documentary is based, interviewed more than fifty men who have lived with HIV/AIDS for half of their lives, as well as doctors, activists, San Francisco city officials, and LGBTQ allies. All eight of these men are part of the AIDS Generation, diagnosed in the pre-cocktail days when a positive HIV test was tantamount to be a death sentence. Last Men Standing explores the everyday difficulties faced by eight long-term HIV/AIDS survivors in San Francisco. After making the rounds of the film festival circuit, the film is now available, and free, online for personal viewing. Last Men Standing the heart-wrenching documentary film by Erin Brethauer and Tim Hussin at the San Francisco Chronicle, premiered on April 8, 2016, to a sold-out crowd at the legendary Castro Theatre in San Francisco.
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