Jimmie Fails

Jimmie Fails is an American actor from San Francisco who came to filmmaking through a friendship formed in childhood. He met Joe Talbot at a park between their neighborhoods, and the two began making short movies together while in high school; their short American Paradise premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, and an earlier one, Last Stop Livermore, was a finalist for the Golden Gate Awards. Fails and Talbot conceived The Last Black Man in San Francisco when they were teenagers and raised money for it with a Kickstarter campaign in 2015. The film, released in 2019, was his first professional acting job, casting him as a fictionalized version of himself who tries to reclaim a Victorian house in a gentrified part of the city, and it drew positive reviews. In 2019 the pair also set up a production company, Longshot Features.