THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO (Joe Talbot 2019)

[Chris Knipp]

More about the movie and its makers.

The story of this movie and its making, the friendship of two men and the sense of displacement and lingering love of the City (traditionally referred to that way) may be more exciting and more moving than the movie itself. And lots of articles have been and will be published about that. In fact the movie may be as much about its own creation as Jimmy's Quixotic effort to regain a house than wasn't ever really his. It's notable that the white director Joe Talbot is a friend from late childhood of Jimmy Fails, whose story the movie is drawn from and who plays something like himself. And articles tell us that Fails in real life lost their home and he and his father (played briefly but intensely by Rob Morgan the film) had to sleep for a while in their car.

The makers turn this into poetry and fantasy, and Jimmy's friend Mont (the intense, mournful Johathan Majors) is an artist and writer. So that's where the image of making-of on screen comes from. The two friends (lie Talbot and Fails) are conjuring up the story of Jimmy's struggle and dream. (His character works as a caretaker in an elderly home and barely has enough to live on.)

Personally, I lived in San Francisco for many years, though only a couple in the Hayes Valley, close to the Fillmore and houses like the one in the movie. But I went back and forth to that place for years before living there. The dream always felt inaccessible, the glittering city seen from the bridge coming over from Berkeley lost its magic - and yet, not quite. And those Victorian houses, which abound in the Hayes Valley and Fillmore and Japan Town where Jimmy's house on Golden Gate resides, so photogenic, so exploited for adverts, are so homely and grand, magical and commercial, once occupied by Sixties hippies, then by yuppies, now by Silicon Valley millionaires, if they deign to. The City's rapid transformation actually has taken place over many decades, really all time. After all the city was destroyed and rebuilt in 1906 after the earthquake and fire of that year. But many of the Victorians must have survived, since they predate that year. The history says they were build between 1849 and 1915.

I actually worked as a house painter briefly and got to paint what are somewhat crudely referred to for tourists now as "painted ladies." My supervisor loved the opportunity to do what he called "four-color cut-ins." That means a paint job that, with the main walls and all the different trip, involved a combination of four different colors or shades. And truly nothing could be more satisfying to a painter in the Bay Area - all out in the bright, cool light of San Francisco (don't ever call it "'Frisco" - that's not done!) in the spicy air laced with the local weatherman's perennial "patchy fog nights and mornings."

There must be something in this film. Though it seemed minor and marginal like its chracters and easy to dismiss, since coming back to it I've felt waves of memory sweeping back over me from those days long agao when I lived in the Hayes Valley, near Oak and Fell Streets, near Golden Gate, a few blocks from the Freeway entrance that has never been replaced since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, not far from the Julian Morgan building designed as a residence for young single Jewish women, and then taken over as the San Francisco Zen Center where the brilliant and later controversial Baker Roshi dwelled, notable for its gourmet vegetarian cooking and for occasional surprise visits for dinner by Jerry Brown - in the first, more fantastical, of his two times as governor of the state separated by 28 years, the second just recently ended,the first begun in 1975.