LAST MAN STANDING DOCUMENTARY SERIAL

And then, actually, when I was doing Tales of the Grim Sleeper, one of the police officers who was in charge of that case, a guy called Daryn Dupree, contacted me and said, ‘My dear friend Greg Kading has done a book on the Tupac killing and he’s come up with a new theory. He was really into it for belief and honor. He was, I thought, one of the few people who wasn’t into it at all to make money. I was upset by the demise of Russell Poole. Nick Broomfield: It was a combination of factors.

The police… I don’t think their way of doing business has changed very much.įilmmaker: What prompted you to revisit this story, nearly two decades on?

Some things have changed, but an awful lot really is exactly the same as it was. Nick Broomfield: The world has certainly changed enormously in that time, although maybe the principal elements haven’t changed very much. The footage feels very different compared with watching it in 2002… The key question is: who has the right to tell certain stories? Such conversations reverberate as we see Broomfield parachuting into Compton to once again examine the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.įilmmaker: It’s quite a trip, diving back into the Tupac-Biggie story after quite so much time. Having been the preserve of mostly white, mostly male filmmakers from the 1960s onwards, gatekeepers at all levels are now being forced to engage in difficult discussions around access, inclusion, representation and opportunity, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last Man Standing also arrives at a tumultuous time for the documentary industry, which is undergoing a dramatic shake-up.

LAST MAN STANDING DOCUMENTARY SERIAL

The doc marks the third time Broomfield has revisited an earlier film, following 1990’s police force examination Juvenile Liaison ’s Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, which revisited the late Aileen Wuornos prior to her execution. (Perhaps because, some 20 years on, so little has changed for African American men on the streets of America.) There is still plenty of speculation to go around, but we see a weariness exhibited by the talking heads interviewed on camera. Reuniting with Compton-based, African American producer Pam Brooks, with whom he worked on his truly remarkable 2014 film Tales of the Grim Sleeper, the now septuagenarian Broomfield spends less time on screen in Last Man Standing than he did in Biggie & Tupac, ceding his trademark boom mic to a cast of peripheral players now hardened and wizened by the passing of time. Rather than relying on a single smoking gun to propel the story forward, the documentary instead offers a panoramic view of the factors and the environment that led to the mid-90s Californian tragedy. Knight’s incarceration allows for never-heard-before testimonies.Nearly two decades on from the release of his controversial 2002 opus Biggie & Tupac, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield is revisiting the story of the iconic, titular American rappers. In the BBC- and Abacus Media Rights-backed Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac, currently available through Gravitas Ventures on digital platforms, Broomfield delves into fresh testimony about the potential involvement of the LAPD and Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight in the murders of Smalls and Shakur. In 2018, Suge Knight, the former CEO of legendary music label Death Row Records – a figure who cast a long and suspicious shadow across Broomfield’s earlier film – was sentenced to 28 years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. Broomfield hopes this new feature will vindicate Poole, who devoted his later years to gathering evidence that LAPD officers were involved in the hit on Biggie Smalls. He was reporting new evidence in the Tupac and Biggie cases at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department when he died from an aneurysm. Russell Poole, the LAPD whistleblower who featured prominently in Broomfield’s earlier film (and whose archival interviews prove hugely important throughout Last Man Standing), died in 2015, his career and reputation in tatters. Tupac Shakur should have celebrated his 50th birthday this month. Arriving as part of a remarkable career hot streak that has yielded Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, Whitney: Can I Be Me, and My Father and Me, Nick Broomfield returns to the subject matter of his acclaimed 2002 investigation Biggie & Tupac.

Last man standing documentary