Rachel Mason’s My Brother’s Killer – Los Angeles premiere at AFI FEST on October 24
“I am in it because the person who killed Billy London also tried to kill me.”
Tickets: fest.afi.com/2026/documentary-2026/my-brothers-killer
By Phil Tarley
For an AFI Fellow, coming home to AFI FEST with this film means a great deal.
On Saturday, October 24, at 7 p.m., I will sit in the dark at the TCL Chinese 6 and watch myself describe the afternoon a stranger cut my throat.
The film is Rachel Mason’s My Brother’s Killer, an official selection of AFI FEST 2026. It runs 87 minutes. I saw it once already, at its South by Southwest premiere in March, and I walked out shaken.
In October 1990, the head of William Arnold Newton, 25, was found in a dumpster near Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea Avenue. He worked in gay adult film under the name Billy London. This was deep in the AIDS years. Gay men were dying faster than anyone could count, and the murder of a porn actor did not rate much attention. The Advocate covered it. Almost no one else did. The case sat cold for more than thirty years.
Mason grew up next to this world. Her parents owned Circus of Books, the West Hollywood porn shop that served as a living room for a generation of gay men, and in 2019 she made a documentary about the store. She came across Billy London’s murder in an old magazine while making that film and could not put it down. What followed was years of work with cold case detectives, amateur sleuths, and boxes of old adult video, some of which turned out to be evidence.
The film names the killer. She is DarraLynn Madden, a trans woman now in an Oklahoma prison for the murder of another gay man. Madden confessed to Mason on camera.
When I met Madden in 1990, he was a good-looking guy with dirty blond hair and light-colored eyes, standing outside a 7-Eleven on Santa Monica Boulevard. He said he had just come in from Wisconsin. I took him home.
Back at my place he pulled a knife and slit my throat; there was blood everywhere. I got to the window of my third-floor apartment and screamed down to the street. He told me to jump. People below shouted that the police were on the way. I grabbed a frying pan from the kitchen, and we circled my couch, his blade against my skillet, until I ran him out the door and locked it.
The surgeon told me the cut came close to the jugular. It took twenty-two stitches to close. Two days after I left the hospital, I was on a soundstage in the Valley directing a picture, as Phil St. John, with the stitches still in my neck. I had cheated death, and shooting a movie made me feel alive.
It was decades later, in conversations with Mason, that the two of us figured out the man who tried to kill me was Madden.
In February, Mason came to my home in West Hollywood, and I interviewed her for The Gay & Lesbian Review. https://glreview.org/article/
What keeps My Brother’s Killer from being one more true crime entertainment is that Mason puts the murder squarely back inside its time. She uses footage I shot in the early 1990s of Queer Nation in the streets, from my short documentary The Year of the Queer. The Queer Nation motto was, “An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.” It is also the principle the NATO alliance is built on. Mason took that line as her subtitle. She wanted to show that a community being buried and beaten fought back against homophobia.
Telling the story on camera cost me something. I had worked through the trauma years ago with a therapist, and I thought it was finished. It came back during the shoot. Then, at the SXSW screening in Austin, Madden’s face came up on the screen, larger than life, and I shook and broke into a sweat in my seat.
I have spent my life behind a camera. I was a cinematography fellow at the American Film Institute, class of 1980. Now AFI’s own festival is showing a film in which the camera is pointed at me.
I will be there on the 24th, watching Rachel’s movie, because the best revenge against someone who tried to kill you is to live fully and fabulously and to make great art.
Video: Phil Tarley’s teaser for the Los Angeles premiere of My Brother’s Killer.
My Brother’s Killer screens Saturday, October 24, at 7 p.m. at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. Tickets: fest.afi.com/2026/documentary-2026/my-brothers-killer
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Phil Tarley is a freelance writer and the only fellow of the American Film Institute to be inducted into the Gay Porn Hall of Fame for producing and directing as Phil St. John. Instagram: @philtarleywrites.
