Anthony Caronna: Last News

EXCLUSIVE: In a competitive situation, Anonymous Content has signed Anthony Caronna, the filmmaker behind HBO’s acclaimed docuseries Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, for representation. The company will look to support Caronna as they transition into narrative filmmaking.

Addie Morfoot Contributor While corporate consolidation has led to smaller documentary production budgets and fewer indie doc sales, the demand for true-crime docus has skyrocketed over the last few years. That’s good news for documentary production companies like Dan Cogan and Liz Garbus’ Story Syndicate.

Sophia Scorziello editor When director Anthony Caronna was pitched with making a series out of Elon Green’s 2021 book “Last Call,” about a string of queer-targeted murders in 1990’s Manhattan, he had some reservations. “I loved the book,” said Caronna. “But I passed on the project because I wasn’t interested at that time in doing true crime. My biggest concern was re-victimizing the community and possibly working against the community in a way.” True crime media is a true mixed bag. Each documentary, docuseries or podcast sits somewhere on a spectrum of educational and entertaining; while the latter might sound like a jarring way to describe the storytelling of real-life criminals and real-life victims, it’s not incorrect to say that some audiences find sensationalized crime stories enticing.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The current backlash against queer and trans people, led by a vivified cultural right, may have come as a surprise to younger people who assumed their rights and protections wouldn’t backslide. For this potential audience most of all, “Last Call,” a rigorous yet emotionally vivid documentary series on HBO, will come as a startling depiction of all-too-recent history, and a call to stand united in the face of a world’s worth of threats. Produced by, among others, recent Oscar nominee Howard Gertler (“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”) and directed by Anthony Caronna, “Last Call” tells a set of stories that tend to begin at a piano bar. In the early 1990s, a cohort of gay men, often in culturally forced heterosexual marriages and living their true lives only after dark, frequented various drinking establishments in New York City; time and again, one of this set would turn up not merely dead but dismembered, in a sort of brutal testament to antigay feeling.