'The Lady and the Dale' director unravels Liz Carmichael's complicated legacy: 'She kept me on my toes' (original) (raw)
Two years ago, filmmaker Zackary Drucker (Transparent, This Is Me) had no idea who Elizabeth Carmichael was when she received a call from collaborator Jay Duplass. Who was Carmichael and why should Drucker and her producing partners tell her story?
"As a trans person and an enthusiast of trans history, I was surprised to have never heard of Liz Carmichael until Jay Duplass called me," Drucker told EW in a recent interview.
As she learned, Carmichael was a fascinatingly complicated subject who appealed to her artistic sensibilities. The result of two years of passionate research is HBO's documentary The Lady and the Dale, which is set to conclude on Sunday night.
Across four episodes, viewers learn about Carmichael, a convicted fraudster whose biggest scheme saw her peddle a three-wheel, fuel-efficient vehicle known as the Dale in the 1970s. Consumers threw money at Carmichael as a deposit for a vehicle that was never produced. While fleeing justice, she and her family (including her five kids and their mother) moved all over the country.
She was found living in Florida under an alias and was arrested and extradited to Los Angeles, where she was convicted on 31 counts of grand theft, fraud, and corporate security violations. It was through her arrest and incarceration that the world discovered Carmichael's dead name and her long-running criminal history. She died in 2004 from various health issues, mainly cancer.
Drucker spoke to EW about the rollercoaster ride she experienced while unraveling the story behind Carmichael's life that was almost lost to history.
"At first, I wondered, why this story? There are so many heroic trans and gender-variant people with great stories, but Liz was a different kind of protagonist," Drucker explained. "She's complicated. She's made a lot of questionable decisions, like her identity as a criminal, which, at the time really conflated with her gender expression. I knew immediately that there would be a lot to unpack and a lot of feelings on behalf of trans folks who have been so maligned in representation. I think as Susan Stryker says, there's this hunger for informational stories of trans role models to be out there."
As an artist, Drucker was compelled to tell Carmichael's story. Though oftentimes, Drucker admitted, she felt conflicted about cheering for this innovative and captivating person who was also a criminal.
"It's all baked into her story! There was no avoiding her complicated legacy, but there are so many things about Liz that are so inspiring," Drucker shared. "At the same time, there are so many moments where you see that she was her own worst enemy. She made decisions that had consequences and it caught up to her. Everybody she touched was so magnetized to her, she had that kind of cult of personality and she developed at a time in American history, in the 1970s, that produced cult-like figures. Liz was definitely part of that cultural environment. She kept me on my toes! I was always weaving in and out of loving her and questioning. It was like being on a roller coaster ride with Liz."
While The Lady and the Dale provides definitive answers to many questions, one major one remains: Did Carmichael plan for the Dale to be a money-grabbing scheme all along, or did she seriously want to challenge the automotive industry?
"What I can tell you is, we crafted this series to provoke questions and to provoke critical thought," she explained. "We want people to have that question. Was the Dale Liz's shot at redemption? Was this her trying to be legit and to have a legitimate enterprise? We, as the creative team, debate this internally all the time. As recently as a few days ago because of the way it had been covered in an article. We ended up having a full debate and it's the same conversation we were having two years ago when the project started. I think Liz bit off more than she could chew and that was her shot to be a successful entrepreneur. She had been aiming for that for so long but her past as a criminal was always going to catch up to her."
She added, "I think she was being genuine about the Dale, and there's no telling how much unconscious behavior was happening."
HBO
Surprisingly, even with all the scams Carmichael pulled, her family never lived privileged lives, Drucker learned.
"Her daughter and her children told us they were never rich, they were never high on the hog. My take on it is that Liz mostly spent the money on developing the Dale," Drucker said. "Her employees said she paid them twice as much as they would've been paid elsewhere. I think she was just mismanaging money and was in over her head."
She added, "Liz's family were amazing. My co-director Nick Cammilleri had pursued this story since 2011 and he was persistent even though they declined. He became close to some of Liz's grandchildren who are now in their 30s. I think they're a little more in the world and realized this is a fantastic story and they loved their grandmother so much. Those of us who saw how Liz was portrayed in the media ... it was an injustice and it needed to be rectified. It was the younger family members who helped convince their family members to participate, we couldn't have done it without them."
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