“Last Call” wasn’t interested in telling just a story of anti-queer violence and trauma — which is a tricky needle to thread when you’re telling a true crime story of a serial killer targeting LGBTQ men in the greater New York area.
Centered on serial killer Richard Rogers, HBO’s “Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York” is based on Elon Green’s 2021 nonfiction account “Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York” and unflinchingly documents the crimes and circumstances surrounding the murders of four queer men in the 1990s. But it was the hope of executive producer Howard Gertler (Oscar nominee for “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” and “How to Survive a Plague”) and director Anthony Caronna (“Susanne Bartsch: On Top”) to counterbalance that flashpoint of violence and fear with a tribute to the community’s joy and beauty.
In addition to tributing the lives of the men lost and largely leading by way of their friends and families’ voices, “Last Call” also celebrates the places and the people who made queer New York such a haven at a time when outcasts found family in shared spaces, nightlife and political activism, even as the larger powers that be — and in the case of “Last Call,” a stalking serial killer — did all they could to dampen the light.
“We had to show the beauty of these safe spaces, and the beauty of these places and this community that anti-queer violence was destroying,” Caronna told TheWrap. “So yeah, right from the start, we wanted to show all of the joy, all of the moments that make being part of this community and make being queer so joyful.”
After all, Gertler said, “Anti-queer violence, it’s a response to queer expression, queer visibility, queer joy. So we had to start with that. It was important just from a storytelling point of view.”
It was “as important,” Caronna added, “as it was to tell the darker side of the story.”
It helped, too, that “Last Call,” which by its nature is quite dark, was gifted a balm of sorts even while mining such horrific stories of murder, homophobia and institutional negligence.
“It was dark material,” Gertler said, “and so spending time throughout the editing process on the stuff that brought our subjects joy and brought us joy was really great.”
“Last Call” aired its third episode Sunday — the first hour that identified Rogers by name. The limited docuseries’ fourth and final episode, which brings the story through to today and launches a “Last Call” impact campaign post-airing, debuts Aug. 30 on HBO and streams on Max the same day.
Read TheWrap’s interview with EP Gertler and director Caronna in full below.
The best place to start, I think, is hearing about your relationship to Elon Green’s “Last Call” book and what brought you to this project adapting it?
Howard Gertler: Yeah, I mean, I first heard about the story, when Liz and Dan and at Story Syndicate sent me the book pre-publication, and said, “Hey, we think there might be something here. What do you think?” And so I took a read and felt like, yeah, there’s an opportunity here, not only to tell this story, but to tell a deeper, fascinating, unique, queer history story.
Anthony Caronna: Yeah, and I also got it. It’s funny, Howard asked me to go to dinner, like at one point two years ago, and he mentioned that he was possibly working on something called “Last Call,” based on this book, and it kind of blew my mind because I had also received it pre-publication, but like, a year earlier, from a different company, and I read it, and I loved the book, but I passed on it because I wasn’t really interested in doing true crime. I was mostly just afraid of re-victimizing the community and having this be something that was potentially really problematic for the queer community. So I passed on it. And then serendipitously, Howard asked me to go to dinner, and he said that in reading, he felt like there was a possibility for it to be an activist story and a larger social justice conversation. So when I read it through that lens, and I knew Howard would be an amazing partner on this, it was clear that this had major potential to be exactly that.
That’s interesting that your initial impulse was thinking that there was room for it to be problematic. What about adapting this story was a concern of yours?
AC: I think there’s major potential of re-victimizing not only the friends and family of these men, but also the queer community at large by diving into anti-gay violence – or in the potential of not diving into it, and just doing this really shallow exploration of the anti-queer violence movement. And I didn’t want to do any of that. I also was fearful because I didn’t at the time watch tons of true crime. I think the few things I had seen, I wasn’t, like, eager to throw my hat into that arena. It wasn’t anything that I was like, this genre speaks to me. And then I actually, after finding out that Story Syndicate was interested in doing this, I watched “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,”, and I saw the potential for there to be a larger story. It was clear that there is a possibility of making true crime, something that is meaningful and deep. And it is such a powerful genre, and a lot of people love it. So the audience you have is so wide. So the opportunity to sort of use true crime as this Trojan horse of sorts and have it go out to like the masses, but wrap this deeper, queer narrative inside of it was extremely appealing to me.
So how did the two of you work together to maybe avoid more of the pulpiness of true crime?
HG: That was actually part of our initial conversations. Story Syndicate had done it really well with “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” so we knew we were in good hands with crafting it with them from there. And then, when we were having conversations with HBO about how we wanted to make the show and stepping out these parameters that Anthony just described, they’re like, “Sounds perfect to us, we love it.” And so, in terms of being very specific about how we did that, in the show, by way of example, we used a lot of restraint when talking about the nature of the killings, and using any imagery from the crime scenes. The book did go into much more detail than we went into. We didn’t feel like it was necessary for the audience to understand that it was brutal and terrible. And so we also thought as we were editing the episode, what would it be like for a family member of one of the victims to watch that particular episode, and would we feel like they could actually watch it themselves? That was another sort of guiding principle that helped us. We were constantly figuring out as you’re cutting, “Hey, where’s the line? Are we going over? Do we need to pull back? Where do we pull back?”
AC: We we also, like, you know, in so much true crime, oftentimes, either the perpetrator or the investigators are really walking you through the narrative, and they’re driving the story – or both sometimes. And I think coming out this, we were very, very clear that we wanted the queer community to really tell this story, and the friends and family. So we really wanted to put it in their hands and let them drive all four episodes.
The involvement of the friends and family members, even 30 some odd years later, is so significant. Was that a difficult process to get them on board?
HG: We were very clear with our intent with all of our subjects with why we were making the show, the subjects and themes we were going to explore, the kinds of questions we’d be asking them. And there are certain parameters, again, with Story Syndicate giving us guidance, when interviewing people who’ve been victims of trauma, or their family members who have been victims. They can pass on any question they don’t want to answer. They really do lead the conversation. We want to hear from them, and these interviews are really set up on a day around like, it’s not about what we need as filmmakers, but what is this person we’re interviewing need from this process? And that was kind of what our approach is like,
AC: I think as much as the interview is so important, not making people feel pressure to sit down and talk to us and allowing them space to sometimes back out and then come back or have multiple Zoom meetings and multiple phone calls and make them feel and understand that we aren’t doing something that they’re not going to feel proud of or that we’re trying to take advantage of what oftentimes is the most horrible moment in a lot of these people’s lives.
I like this idea, too, of “Last Call” being a Trojan horse. Obviously, your audience is people who are interested in true crime, but you’re also giving a history lesson on not just the crimes, but really the queer community in New York. So what role does considering the audience play when you’re telling the story? Are you thinking about the queer audience or the true crime audience or is it a bit a both?
AC: All of them, everyone alll the time.
HG: Yeah, we’re figuring out how do we satisfy someone who might be coming for the true crime but also expand their horizons? To bring people in who are not necessarily true crime fans, but want to give them a really compelling story as well. You know, there are audiences who are coming in who may have no understanding of queer history, and you have to make it welcoming to that audience as well as people who know the story backwards and forwards. And so we were definitely threading the needle in that in that editing room, up to the very end.
AC: It’s just such deeply complicated storytelling. Like, I don’t know. I mean, I imagine at some point, I will have a similarly complicated story to tell, but this was just so, so complicated. It was so, so hard – because of all of those things that Howard just said.
And while telling this story of trauma within the queer community, you’re also so reverent of queer joy and the beauty that this community built for itself at the time in New York. Was that tone intended to counterbalance the darkness of the true crime?
AC: We had to show the beauty of these safe spaces, and the beauty of these places and this community that anti-queer violence was destroying. And I think both Howard and I, in past work, have been good at showing the beauty of the queer experience. And so yeah, right from the start, we wanted to show all of the joy, all of the moments that make being part of this community and make being queer so joyful. So yeah, it was it was as important to us that we show the joy and the beauty of the queer community as it was to tell the darker side of the story.
HG: I mean, anti-queer violence, it’s a response to queer expression, clear visibility, queer-joy. So we had to start with that. It was important just from a storytelling point of view. And of course, like, those are some of our favorite parts to work on, because it was dark material and so spending time throughout the editing process on the stuff that brought our subjects joy and brought us joy was really great.
And obviously, this is a period piece and a point in history that does have reverberations through to today. So what do you think the significance of “Last Call” is in terms of some of the anti-queer experiences that we’re seeing in today’s world?
AC: I mean, I hope that people, you know, “Last Call” is one of many, many, many examples of anti-queer violence throughout history and especially today. We have an amazing impact campaign that’s going to come out after Episode 4 that I really hope people will look at and think about. And I also really hope that people do see how political rhetoric leads to extreme anti-queer violence. That for me would be a huge takeaway.
HG: You’ll see [in Episode 4] we cut right from Anita Bryant to Ron DeSantis. It’s like, the same thing.
AC: The same playbook, yeah.
HG: Institutions don’t always get it right, and communities need to hold them accountable loudly and strongly, just as they did in this case. It’s a strategy that we need to sort of remind ourselves of today. Given how precarious this moment feels, that spirit of resistance and those strategies for resistance are things that we can actually, hopefully, drawn from.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
