This was a necessary improvisation that is testament to how endangered such buildings are in San Francisco, but also a testament to the sui generis nature of the home itself. The film’s most prominent building-the stately, Queen Anne-style Victorian built in 1889, with a phone book’s worth of period details that was Fails’s family home in the Fillmore District-is, in fact, in the heart of the Mission. Here, then, is Talbot guiding Curbed SF on a tour through some of the film’s locations.ĩ59 South Van Ness in the Mission District. “For me and Jimmie, they were as important as any other element of the movie.” “Locations are a really important part of it,” he added. “It felt like we were trying to preserve the old San Francisco, at least on film.” The constant struggle to find emblematic San Francisco locations and then finish filming before they went away forever made the job “feel like it was bigger than the movie,” Talbot said. “We had to beg the people building next door” to hold off for just a few hours so the crew could get the shot and finish the film, he said. “We got there, and there was construction beginning. “It was the last day we shot,” Talbot recalled. Toward the end of the film, actor Jonathan Majors, playing Monty Allen, Fails’s best friend, is seen in a long shot staring out the window of his home, which in real life is a 19th-century farmhouse on Innes Avenue in Hunters Point. If geography can be said to be a character in the plot-and in this case, the city certainly is, often serving as antagonist as well as constantly changing setting-what does a director do with an indispensable character declining to cooperate?Īs it happened, the San Francisco real-estate market nearly scuttled one of the film’s more poignant shots.
Changes to approved and permitted filming locations happened so quickly-sometimes from one day to the next-that they created continuity challenges and compromised the film’s cinematography. Life outpacing art, art not moving quickly enough to imitate life. Then we’d come back, and they’d be bulldozing it,” Talbot told Curbed SF in a telephone interview in late June.
“Even before we shot anything, we’d be scouting locations and find a place we’d love. Shot entirely in the city-the rapidly changing city, the transient city, the city beset on all sides by forces rendering it a strange and alien place to both natives and longtime transplants-by the time the film won critics’ laurels, including best director, at the Sundance Film Festival in February and wider acclaim upon its June release, several of the locations selected by writer-actor Jimmie Fails and co-writer/director Joe Talbot to tell this story of belonging, longing, displacement, and gentrification were already gone-casualties to the very phenomenon the film critiques. The Last Black Man in San Francisco was already a historic document well before the film’s first screening.