"The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel"
Just off the main drag of West Hollywood sits a two-story, barn-red motel nestled against the A-frame of a dejected IHOP. Although not a cathedral amidst Los Angeles’ gay mecca, the shuttering Holloway Motel is home to one of its most impossibly enigmatic characters. Tony Powell, the building’s lone resident, is a man whose tangled lives could cast a shadow long enough to stretch from Los Angeles to his hometown of Bristol, England.
For decades, Tony's story has escaped revelation. In 1970s England, he became a star defender and player of the year for Norwich City Football Club—and then he promptly vanished into thin air. When filmmakers and Tisch alumni Rameil Petros ‘19 (BFA, Film & TV) and Nick Freeman ‘19 (BFA, Film & TV) happen upon Tony off Santa Monica Boulevard, he shares with them the news of his pending eviction as the motel’s final guest. Their initial inquiry into the housing and homeless crises that imperil Los Angeles transforms into a character study of a man whose hidden life echoes across generations.
The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel is an aching portrait of sexual secrecy that reverberates as a cautionary tale of what’s lost when we are forced to hide ourselves. Petros and Freeman have eschewed exposé for something more tender and eternal that lays bare the deep-seated fears that historically—and often still today—burden the LGBTQ+ community. Below, we catch up with the filmmakers to discuss their documentary project that premiered over the weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival and will screen once more Friday, June 13.
Editor’s Note: "The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel" is a film collaboration that includes five NYU Tisch alumni: directors Ramiel Petros and Nicholas Freeman; Producer Andrew Corkin; Composer Kat Vokes; and Director of Photography Gabriel Connelly.
Stories as enigmatic as this one are often stumbled upon as opposed to sought out. What provided your entry into Tony’s life and story?
Ramiel Petros: It’s kind of one of those serendipitous things, you know? Right place, right time. I had just moved to West Hollywood from New York. I lived two blocks from the Holloway Motel, which is kind of this striking building in the middle of Santa Monica Boulevard. It’s next to a CVS and an IHOP, so it really stands out on the street. A few months after I moved there it was a building I kept noticing, completely abandoned except for this old man, who was sitting on the balcony day and night, probably 18 hours a day.
Nick, whom I met at NYU, had come out for a couple of months to sublet a room that we had available. [I said] there's this mysterious old man down the street that seems to be running this abandoned motel—let's go see what's going on there. And we literally just walked over and shouted up from the street. We were like, what's going on, why are you closed? And he told us the city had purchased the motel—that it's becoming a homeless shelter. And he was saying, “I was a professional soccer player once.” We were like, “Okay, you crazy old man.”
Nicholas Freeman: You know, hearing you recount it makes me remember how insane it was that we decided to do that. We wrote him a letter asking if he wanted to do a short documentary about the motel closing, and he didn't respond. And then we were just walking around kind of assuming he would never get back to us and we just found him on the street having a margarita outside of some cantina. I didn't recognize him and Ramiel was like, “That's Tony. That's him with his Chihuahua.”
What is the process of disarming yourself as filmmakers to effectively build trust with a subject like Tony Powell, who is seemingly quite protective of his past?
Ramiel: It first started as a short and so there wasn't an expectation that we would be going so deep into his life. I don't think on day one he would have agreed to do a feature. He retired 10 or 15 years before the Internet came out, so there isn't that much that was available easily [online] to find. I think that there were things that he was very comfortable talking about; he was very proud of his career as a soccer player. That was really easy for him. And anything that was observable in the present day he was pretty comfortable with. Early on he opened up about being gay, and West Hollywood is a famous gay cultural hub so it's not that much of a leap to say, well, you've lived here for 40 years, why do you love this place? And that was something that I think was strange for him to talk about on camera, because he had never acknowledged being a closeted soccer player before. He considered himself a gay man who was a motel manager with a soccer career past that he was really comfortable with. I think the film ends up becoming something much bigger when you kind of go into the part about his life that he ran away from and ignored. It took months and months of us getting to know Tony before he was comfortable even diving into that.
Nicholas: Trust is the biggest thing when it comes to his ability to start talking about things that he has buried for, you know, 30 or 40 years. Right when we figured out this was going to be a feature, it coincided with the time that he was getting evicted from the motel, so we were just thrust into that with him. We were capturing it, but we were trying to help him figure it out a bit. And it was quite a stressful situation that happened over the course of like two months. A lot of that's not even really in the film, but that was a crucial period of building trust. At a certain point we just kind of became pals with him. He turned from this intimidating motel manager who had a baseball bat to chase out vagrants and became a bit of a softy.
Tony Powell in "The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel"
The film seems to underscore the contrasts in Tony’s life and personality. How did you strike a tonal balance to capture both the drama and the whimsy of this story?
Nicholas: Ramiel and I never wanted to make something that was a depressing sob story that only focused on tragedy. Early in the production we wanted to capture Tony in all his whimsy and his insane, funny personality. So we were trying to be guided by Tony's tone, and that was something difficult to land on. Tony's facing all these very difficult things, and recounting things that he's sort of buried, but at the same time he is just the funniest, weirdest kind of guy.
Ramiel: There's so much there that was heavy that we were dealing with in the film. There was a lot of unfinished business when he left England that the film kind of helped him go back and tie up a little bit. Through all that Tony is always humorous and joyful, even in the hardest moments. So it kind of starts off as like, let's articulate the heavy moments… And he's [also] being humorous and making jokes and things like that. There are times where you're belly laughing, and there are times where you're like, oh, there's a gut punch.
You’re working around multiple layers of sensitivity concerning Tony’s former life, his current one, and the separation between the two. What kind of reaction did you get from subjects on either side of Tony’s life?
Ramiel: It was so unexpected that people would agree to be a part of the documentary and let us capture the stuff that we did. The people that we found who knew Tony—his teammates, his family, or people he became estranged from—hadn't seen him in 45 years. Some of them were easier [to find than others]. For example, we could go through Norwich City Football Club, and they really did help us on this film and they were excited to participate in a documentary about one of their players. They had tried to find him for their 100 year reunion, so they were really helpful in helping us track down the teammates.
But in terms of his family, a lot of them had changed their names because they had been married. Nick and I were pursuing every avenue. I was on ancestry.com looking up stuff; we did a 23andMe DNA test hoping there'd be family pop-ups. I was joining Facebook groups in Bristol and posting looking for these people. And I think eventually, Nick, you found it on a British background website…
Nicholas: We truly were sleuths. I think we maybe thought it'd be easier. We are, you know, digital natives, and can kind of figure out our way around, but still it took months and was challenging. And so Tony rightfully was like, “Good luck. I don't know if you'll be able to find anyone. They might be dead. I have no idea.”
Ramiel: At his age range he thought his older brother was dead at this point. Nick finally got a list together of every Roy Powell in England. His brother never moved from their hometown, so that was the first one we tried. We said, “Hi, is this Roy Powell?” And he goes, “Yes, who's this?” And we said, “We're a couple of guys in America. We are friends of Tony Powell, the former soccer player. We're looking for his brother.” And his brother just immediately started sobbing on the phone. And yeah… the rest is in the movie.
In thinking about the celebratory mood of Pride Month, it’s hard to ignore the counterpoint that LGBTQ+ lives are often still under attack—that many folks are forced to live in secrecy. How do you hope the film fits into these larger conversations around LGBTQ+ issues?
Ramiel: As a gay person who grew up in the early aughts, and now getting to help Tony tell his story… you can see the change. When he was growing up it was almost impossible to come out. It would have affected every aspect of his life. He couldn't have had the career he wanted; it would have destroyed his life immediately. Obviously, I grew up in a place where that's not true for me, but the thing that is universal is the shame and the secrecy. That’s still part of us. I think for me this film is an example of the consequences of not being able to be who you are. Because it didn't just affect Tony. It affected every single person in his life who knew him and who he connected with. Because of this looming secret he had, that he never felt like he could come out, he just ran away and started over a new life.
Keeping his identity a secret, hiding his true self until he was alone, didn't give the people who loved him the opportunity to get to know him as he was. The lesson Tony learns at 75 is to give the people who love you the opportunity to love you as you are.