‘Last Black Man’ star has first brush with fame
Jimmie Fails, the 20-something character at the center of the low-budget, indie film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” feels he is slowly being disappeared from the city, that his entire presence is being erased like yesterday’s chalkboard lesson.
Jimmie Fails, the 24-year-old Bay
Area actor/writer whose life provided the blueprint for his on-screen persona, is having a slightly different problem these days. Ever since “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” which opened Friday in Houston, won two awards at Sundance in February — first-time feature filmmaker Joe Talbot went home with directing honors and a special-jury award for creative collaboration — and then got picked up by hot distributor A24 (“Lady Bird,” “Moonlight”), it has been generating ecstatic word-of-mouth as one of the year’s must-see movies.
That means Fails, who had never acted in a feature-length film before, now finds himself squarely in the spotlight.
“I’m definitely a little more recognizable in my city now. So I’ve got to move a little incognito a little bit more and not get noticed so I can just be regular,” he said by phone from a press-tour stop in Atlanta. “I just got back there to do
Q&A’s for opening weekend, and I was doing a walk-and-talk interview and I got noticed like four times, and I tried to go in a coffee shop to get away from it. And then the people in the coffee shop noticed me. I got free coffee.”
But the film’s subject matter — Fails’ refusal to drown under the tidal wave of tech-industry gentrification that has overwhelmed San Francisco’s black neighborhoods — is also gaining more attention, too. After all, it’s a city where the median rent for a one-bedroom is $3,700 a month, forcing artists, the working class and low-income earners of all colors far outside its city limits. But it’s a burden that has fallen especially hard on black San Franciscans who, on average, earn far less than their white counterparts.
The issue was addressed last year in “Blindspotting,” Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal’s powerful tale about the changing face of Oakland across the bay, but in “Last Black Man,” it feels even more personal and poignantly poetic.
Victorian home to group home
In the film, Jimmie, living in cramped quarters with his best friend, Montgomery (played by Jonathan Majors), and Montgomery’s grandfather (Danny Glover), keeps returning to what was once his childhood home — a sprawling Victorian in the Fillmore district that many years ago belonged to his family — to watch over it and maintain it as it lives in his memory. Unsurprisingly, the current owners are less than enamored with his constant attention.
In real life, Jimmie and his family were evicted from their Victorian after his grandfather died and the survivors couldn’t afford it. “It was an old Victorian, but it didn’t have as many intricate details as that house (in the movie),” he said, noting he never tried to surreptitiously repair it like his fictional counterpart. “I would go back all the time, but I wouldn’t fix it up. But I would just sit out there, you know?”
Both Jimmies ended up in a variety of living situations, including group homes. It was while the real teenage Fails was living in such an environment that he started hanging out in creative circles and met someone who seemed his total opposite: Talbot, a white kid who lived with his parents in the Mission District.
But the two had more in common than first thought. Both were born and raised in San Francisco, loved the city and had shared interests in art, music and film.
They became best friends, telling each other about their lives. Fails’ story of how his family was displaced after his grandfather’s death and how he ended up in a group home fascinated budding filmmaker Talbot.
“It’s really our friendship that kind of made this movie happen,” Talbot told Deadline.com. “The movie came out of us just walking around the city as friends. It’s such a great walking city, so that became sort of a ritual for us. We’d talk about life, music, girls, whatever. And we talked about Jimmie’s life, obviously, so informally those conversations — which, at the time, I don’t think we were thinking much about — became a movie.”
Five years ago, Talbot made a concept trailer to raise money on Kickstarter for a feature. Fails cowrote the script with Talbot and Rob Richert and always imagined that he would be its star.
“I didn’t see anyone else (playing me),” Fails said. “Especially in a movie about (this) city, it had to be San Franciscans, and I’m the central person for it.”
The fact that Talbot is white telling a black story never was an issue for Fails.
“We’re just best friends,” Fails said. “I don’t want to be like, ‘We don’t see color,’ but we’re both telling my story and we’re best friends, so he was telling his friend’s story, and I just happened to be black.”
What’s next?
Fails is not sure what he’s going to be doing next now that “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is out and has been met with critical hosannas — his hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, called it “poetic and authentic” — though he’s working on some writing and considering acting roles.
He suspects he’ll be in whatever Talbot comes up with. “Even if we’re not working on the same project, we will always be in touch about whatever it is we’re working on,” he said. “I’ll probably have a cameo in all of his movies.”
He still lives in San Francisco but, if this movie hadn’t come along, he realizes he might have been one of those who would have to say goodbye.
“I probably would have been priced out eventually,” he said, “and just living in poverty for a very long time.”
He’s not sure what San Francisco will be like in a decade. “You hope this movie is like a rallying cry, to bring the art back and to bring help to people who want to fight to do whatever they have to do so they can come back.
“I know I’m going to be out of the mix and be down in L.A., which is closer to my management team and agency; that’s where more things are happening in terms of what I want to do,” he continued. “But I do want to be able to raise my family in San Francisco.”