The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel ★★★★

Availability: Very limited showings still occurring; see the film website for time and place. Available for rent and purchase on Amazon Prime Video and AppleTV (timed to issue shortly before the World Cup). See JustWatch here for current availability.

Social Suicide

In the first 30 minutes of co-directors Nicholas Freeman and Ramiel Petros’s powerful documentary, its subject, an English-born (1947) former soccer player—an idolized golden boy—loses in short succession his job, his chihuahua who’s been his companion for 17 years (“Sammie’s my daughter”), his much-loved home (an apartment in a Los Angeles motel), and is hospitalized with a heart condition.

And then his luck runs out.

Tony Powell, at his window on the world, his balcony at the Holloway Motel. The "Notice of Public Hearing" is a sign that the balcony will soon be one of Tony's mounting losses.

It’s an old joke, but in this case it captures the Job-like succession of events that threaten to overwhelm Tony Powell, once an all-star for Norwich City Football Club. In the early 1980s, Powell disappeared from the UK and from everyone who knew him, eventually settling in the gay mecca of West Hollywood, where for 21 years he would manage the Holloway Motel, a modest, 2-story structure sandwiched between Holloway Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard.

---

The interviews are extraordinary, but not because Tony is naturally open about his past.

---

There’s more to come, and it’s all on film, Tony, still handsome in his 70s, having agreed to be filmed and interviewed—"another final chapter,” as he puts it. The interviews are extraordinary (reminding us of Richard Gere, the fictional Leonard Fife, in Paul Schrader’s 2024 “Oh, Canada”), but not because Tony is naturally open about his past, or eager to experience whatever the future holds, or comfortable with the filmmakers’ agenda.

The 2 faces of Tony Powell,

blonde "golden boy" British soccer star

and aging Los Angeles motel manager.

The “final chapter” Tony envisions will be firmly lodged in the present he inhabits, a place walled off from the past he willfully “forgets” and from a future so potentially painful he would rather not think about it. There’s an innocence and naiveté about Tony, but also a steely resolve to keep his guard up, to hold himself together, even as the camera moves, time and again, to the thick metal ring on his left hand, tapping apprehensively on the wooden arm of the chair. “We’re Powells,” says his younger sister Denise, whose efforts to locate her brother over the decades have been fruitless. “We don’t reveal.”

---

The climate for gay men in England, even popular gay athletes, was unimaginably hostile into the early years of this century.

---

Yet much will be revealed, the last revelation coming in a photo in the credits. We’ll learn that Tony was widely respected for his soccer skills and his tough but fair approach to the game, and known, by the few in West Hollywood who were able to get close to him, as a helpful, reliable man who enjoyed his Southern Comfort (“I’ll drink anything”). We’ll learn, from Tony’s experience and that of Justin Fashanu, Powell’s Black Norwich City teammate, who came out as gay in 1990, that the climate for gay men in England, even popular gay athletes, was unimaginably hostile into the early years of this century—the tail end of a history of repression that enveloped Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing, among others.

One of the last views of the Holloway Motel before it was closed for rehabbing into government-subsidized housing. Computer in front of him, Tony is on the balcony, with a view of Santa Monica Boulevard—Route 66—from his outdoor office.

Though Tony could hardly be described as promiscuous in the more accepting West Hollywood environment, he had at least one significant relationship, with David Castro, who years earlier died in his arms of AIDS. David’s sister, one of many interviewees, calls Tony and David’s “a great love.” Unfortunately, a manufactured scene, of older Tony in a locker room with muscular young athletes and frontal nudity, needlessly eroticizes his experience as a soccer player and likely presents a false impression of his sexuality. In other scenes, his desires are presented more subtly.

Through historical sources (including predictably outrageous British tabloid coverage) and with Tony’s cooperation, the film centers on his gayness as a cause for his flight to America and his disappearance, attributing it in part to a father he loved dearly and could not bear hurting. That’s a riveting, stand-alone story. (The first American professional athlete to come out as gay while playing was former soccer player Robbie Rogers, a producer on this documentary.)

But there’s another story, just as powerful and certainly less common, of which the filmmakers may initially have been unaware. Like the gay story, it involves family and Tony’s enigmatic, even inexplicable relationship to it, implied in the interviewer’s question, “Did you ever think about having children?” and Tony’s response: “No.” Which was false.

It’s difficult to know all that Freeman and Petros, 2019 NYU Tisch graduates, had in mind when they decided to center their first full-length film around the life of Tony Powell, but it’s likely they imagined the “final chapter” as grounded in profound loneliness, with hermit-like Tony having lost all he valued most, including the Holloway Motel balcony that served as his window on the limited yet rich world he inhabited. Curiously, place was important to him. But the last third of the film isn’t about what Tony doesn’t have; rather, it’s about possibilities he has been too fearful, or too guilty, to consider.

---

Uncomfortable to watch, the film raises questions about whether Tony’s “turn” was entirely voluntary.

---

Engaging those possibilities won’t be easy for Tony, who will pace, hold his head in agony and doubt, sob, and click that ring. Uncomfortable to watch, the film raises questions about whether Tony’s “turn” was entirely voluntary—something he had known he had to do, something he needed—or whether it emerged from the filming experience, with the filmmakers pushing ethical boundaries to get the most from a vulnerable human subject, an issue perhaps raised most directly in the films of Ross McElwee and in documentaries such as “Three Identical Strangers” (2018).

Either way (as cold as that may sound), “The Last Guest” is a stunning portrait of a decent, troubled man who made more than one bizarre, or at least regrettable, life decision.

---

He says: A fascinating, intricate film that deserves wider distribution.

She says: We recently visited the site of the motel, now in the final stage of repurposing. One of the large signs is still extant on Santa Monica Boulevard; the other was on Holloway Drive. The city of WEHO received special funding to preserve the mid-century and “iconic Route 66” look; an historic preservation designation application is pending. A young woman walking near us stopped us to say she knew Tony and how kind he was to invite her and her friends up on his balcony (still there) for Pride events that unfolded before their eyes on the Boulevard. Touching.

A recent view of what was the Holloway Motel, the sign on Santa Monica Boulevard still extant, with the "NO" in "No Vacancy" lit. A preservation effort kept the exterior (including "Tony's balcony") in the mid-century modern, "iconic Route 66" style, while the interior was remodeled to create government-subsidized apartments.

---

Date: 2025

Directors: Nicholas Freeman, Ramiel Petros

Starring: Tony Powell, as himself

Country: United States

Language: English

Runtime: 94 minutes

Other Awards: Special Jury Prize, Antenna Documentary Film Festival, 2026. Played to a sold-out crowd at its US premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival; featured in several major film festivals.