The Search for Truth in True-Crime Documentary Night in West Texas

The story of the unjust imprisonment of James Harry Reyos goes back to 1983, when he was convicted of the 1981 murder Father Patrick Ryan, a gay priest who had sexually assaulted Reyos.

It’s a story laid out in Night in West Texas, the new documentary from Austin filmmaker Deborah S. Esquenazi which screens at AFS Cinema this weekend. As a young, queer Apache from New Mexico, charged in West Texas with no support structure and having given a false confession, Reyos was easy meat for the Texas justice system, and spent the next 20 years in jail until he was finally released to a halfway house in Austin.

Night in West Texas focuses on the most recent phase of his life and legal struggles, of the efforts by the Innocence Project of Texas (and especially its deputy director, attorney Allison Clayton) to get him exonerated. The flimsiness of the case against Reyos was a longstanding part of the record, even covered within the pages of the Chronicle by staff writer Jordan Smith back in 2005 when he was first paroled. “She was the first person I contacted,” Esquenazi explained, and the original plan was for Smith to be interviewed for the film. “But life gets in the way,” Esquenazi said, “and so in honor of her I made sure that we saw the article.”

Austin Chronicle: Making a documentary means making a choice about committing your life to a story for potentially years. What was it about this that made you go, ‘This is the story I’m adhering to’?

Deborah S. Esquenazi: There’s two parts of me. There’s the part that’s committed to activism, and there’s the part that is a filmmaker and wants to tell a great story.

Director Deborah S. Esquenazi Credit: Harry James Reyos Documentary LLC

I will speak for the activist part first. The activist is like, ‘Whatever it takes, I will do this. Even if it takes years, I will at least do my part.’ James, when he first met me, asked me to help. He asked me because, years ago, I made a film called Southwest of Salem that helped exonerate these four Latina lesbians, and he had heard it, and he thought, ‘You know, I’ve been facing this shit for 40 years.’ And in his vulnerable place that he was in, I agreed, so I was going to be committed, regardless.

Then there’s the film part, and if you weigh the pros and cons of the conclusions of this, the story is painful in whatever resolution there is. Either you win the exoneration, which is amazing but James has lost 40 years of his life and that will make your head spin; or he doesn’t win and your heart feels the tragedy of that and hopefully it awakens something within individuals to go out and help. So the difference was a film that was complete or a film that would take a more activist side, and I didn’t know the ending.

This will be the last exoneration film I will make.

Austin Chronicle: I can only imagine how these are personally hard to make. When you’re a documentarian and you’re in the middle of this and you’re watching people whose lives have been destroyed on a lie, I don’t think people take into account how wearing that is on the filmmaker – and they don’t want to talk about it.

Deborah S. Esquenazi: Because it’s embarrassing, and it’s a little bit highfalutin to go, ‘Oh, this is so hard for me.’ Well, what about James?

I won’t hide the fact that there is a feeling of deep loneliness when making it, especially because I shoot my own stuff. This is because I believe in the intimacy, and I don’t believe in a giant crew. I’ve done that and I don’t like it, so I go alone and I shoot my own stuff. I make my footprint as small as possible. But the hours spent commuting from Lubbock or Denver City or Odessa, it’s a lot of ‘What am I doing? How is this going to help?’

There’s also the artist in me that’s fallen in love with the mythical West. I’m a big fan of the Western, the revisionist Western, and I felt like, just from a storytelling point of view, there’s an opportunity to tell a very intimate story about a character, about a man, facing insurmountable odds and in a sense that kept me fueled because that’s not about me. It’s about James, and about Allison, who’s carrying the weight.

James Reyos with attorney Allison Clayton
Credit: Harry James Reyos Documentary LLC

We had this amazing screening in Los Angeles, and this screenwriter stood up at the Q&A and said, ‘I’m a big fan of Westerns, and to me Allison is like the new John Wayne, and I was like, ‘Yes! I totally get it.’ The lipstick and the heels, that is her version of the gunslinger and we did that on purpose because I wanted when you see the hero and he puts his gun away and goes off to the horizon on his horse, and here it’s the lipstick and the heels and she’s armed for the next [case].

There’s a beautiful story here. It’s not flashy. It’s not trying to be anything other than it is – about the internal world of a man. That’s the biggest risk. You have a very quiet protagonist, and in fiction movies about quiet people can be very beautiful, but in documentaries that’s a big risk. So thankfully Allison became the foil. She’s the loud, the brash, the high drama, and that was a really lucky juxtaposition that we could play with.

Austin Chronicle: An issue that every documentarian doing true crime has to deal with is how much of the crime scene to show. But here the brutality of the murder is so much of the story, so what was your internal back-and-forth and with your editor on what to show?

Deborah S. Esquenazi: It was huge. Asking people I know, calling producers, calling journalists, asking how much to show, how much not to show. Allison was on the side of ‘show everything’ because people need to feel it. Myself and my editor, we’re both queer, and we’re kind of sick of it because it’s so much. And then contacting the queer criminologist who we show on screen who said, ‘Show it. Overkill is real.’ So we came down on the side of showing it just enough with the hope it doesn’t overdo it. … There’s no right answer, frankly.

Austin Chronicle: And even when you have new suspects in the crime, you don’t go down that rabbit hole. You stay focused on James, so what was the conversation of saying, ‘That’s someone else’s story to tell.’

Deborah S. Esquenazi: We did talk a lot about that as well, and I just came down to something that, early on, I really believed in, which is that true crime as a genre is extremely problematic. That’s the genre I work in, I can’t escape that, but I can do my part to try to humanize it. So, again, the question is, ‘How far do we go before it’s the story of the killers?’ Which is the story we hear, and is sensationally delicious – I do not deny that – but again you ask yourself, ‘What am I trying to do?’ I needed to reclaim for James, wherever I could, the story about him.

Night in West Texas screens Sunday, January 11 at AFS Cinema and will be followed by a conversation with director Deborah S. Esquenazi, Innocence Project of Texas Deputy Director Allison Clayton, and Executive Producer Megan Creydt, moderated by Maurice Chammah of the Marshall Project.

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