Alex Honnold Surpasses Potter as HBO Revisits May 2015
alex honnold sits behind the latest HBO look at Dean Potter, but the documentary’s hardest fact is the one that still defines the story: Potter died after a wingsuit jump from Taft Point in Yosemite in May 2015. The four-part film follows a life built on risk and ends with the accident that took Potter and Graham Hunt.
Taft Point in May 2015
Potter and his girlfriend, Jennifer Rapp, were at their house in Yosemite the morning before he died. He had just returned from a trip to Germany, while she had flown in from Vancouver, where she was head of communications at Arc’teryx. The pair were scheduled to fly to New York the next morning for a gala where Potter was set to receive an Action Maverick Award.
Rapp remembered trying on dresses for him in their living room and saying, “Help me pick one.” She also said, “That changed the course of our day” about Hunt’s arrival, and later, “We wouldn’t have hung out with Graham, and Dean wouldn’t have died.”
HBO’s Four-Part Film
“The Dark Wizard” is a four-part HBO documentary about Potter and his demons, directed by Nick Rosen and Peter Mortimer and co-created by Josh Lowell. Rosen, Mortimer, and Lowell also made “The Alpinist” in 2021, and this project returns to the same terrain of obsession, control, and consequence without softening what happened at Taft Point.
Potter had spent years trying to convince the world and himself that his feats were an expression of harmony with nature. The film lands on a more awkward reality: he had also been surpassed as an athlete by Alex Honnold, the new free soloist in Yosemite Valley, which gives the documentary a built-in rivalry that is less about style than about who gets remembered as the standard-bearer.
Rapp, Hunt, and the Notch
Potter, Rapp, and Graham Hunt hiked out to Taft Point that afternoon. Hunt and Potter jumped off a promontory in flying-squirrel suits and swooped toward a ridge with a slot called the Notch, but they did not make it there. Rapp heard two thuds from Taft Point, and a recovery team found the bodies in the Notch the next day.
Elizabeth Streb, the woman behind the Maverick Awards, first met Potter and Rapp at the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival while promoting Catherine Gund’s film “Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity.” Streb said, “He, like me, believed he could fly, and dedicated his life to that proposition.” That line fits the film’s subject, but it also leaves the harsher fact untouched: the last act in Potter’s story is not the leap, but the failure to survive it.
