Within the first few moments of HBO’s four-part docuseries “The Lady and the Dale,” you get the big picture of the story. The titular lady is Elizabeth Carmichael, an extraordinarily confident automotive executive who gained international fame in the 1970s as she tried to compete against the ‘Big Three’ of the American auto industry – General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and the Ford Motor Company – by marketing the Dale, a weird three-wheeled (but supposedly economical) car.
For a brief moment, The Dale was everywhere, from the cover of Japanese newspapers to the price floor of “ The Price is Right, ” and Carmichael was there, posing for press photos depicting her in a miniskirt, astride the Los freeway. Angeles in a “Wonder Woman” -like pose. “I don’t want to sound like an egomaniac, but I’m a genius,” she told an interviewer in a matter-of-fact manner.
It was a claim that journalists, investors, and competitors wanted to control, and soon Carmichael’s stories – about the valley and herself – began to unravel. Promises about the car were too good to be true, and Carmichael’s fingerprints, obtained by a disgruntled employee, matched those of a con man who had been on the run from the FBI and the Mafia for years.
It’s always risky to show so many of your cards up front in a documentary introduction. It’s kind of a feeling when watching a particularly slogging movie trailer and you think to yourself, “Well, I’ve kind of seen the movie now.” But if you sit down and watch the Duplass Bros. produced “Lady and the Dale” it is almost like starting a road trip; you have an idea of your destination, but it’s really the stops and detours along the way that make it memorable, and those times when things get a bit stuck are easy to forgive.
“The Lady and the Dale” quickly establishes Carmichael as a small-town Indiana fab who shunned everyday lifestyles and responsibilities in favor of “get rich quick” plans. Despite a series of divorces, she eventually married Vivian and had five children. She hopped from place to place while still trapping others in risky, unconventional and often criminal ventures. When she finally comes out as transgender, she reinvents herself in a new city as the CEO of the 20th Century Motor Company, ready to produce the Dale.
All of this is reflected in the hour-long first episode, which sets the tone for a series rich in both source interviews and surprisingly vibrant and charming visual appeal. While Carmichael passed away in 2004, directors Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker (who was a consultant and cast member on “Transparent”) spoke to people who knew Carmichael in all walks of her life; they interview two of her children, her brother-in-law, her childhood friends, her employees and any opponents.
This helps to compose a complex portrait of Carmichael. It would have been easy to portray her as a pioneer or a con man, when the truth is, she was both. She made tremendous strides both as a woman in the auto industry and as a transgender figure in the 1970s, who had very few peers who shared her lived experience, but her plans also brought her family into a itinerant, mysterious life that her children gave the feeling. much of their lives fearful and unaffected. Carmichael was a doting mother to the five children she had with Vivian, but she has abandoned or never met several others from her previous marriages.
To flatten Carmichael’s features or try to put her in a single box for the sake of storytelling would have been a disservice to the real life she led. As such, it’s understandable why the docuseries writers seem to linger a little too long in certain places – the explanation of the design plans for the Dale, for example, gets a little repetitive. But there is so much to see.
It helps that “The Lady and the Dale” is so visually different from other contemporary documentary projects that rely on clumsy re-enactments or dramatic interviews with talking heads supplemented with archive footage. This series is an explosion of vivid stop animation (performed by animation director Sean Donnelly) that almost resembles paper dolls, with the faces of various characters brought to life. This technique elevates the source interviews, which are full of detail, to something transcendent.
On the second episode, however, it is clear that Carmichael has only a sudden grip on her new life; she gets late on Dale employee paychecks, makes unverified claims to investors and lies to the media about the status of the vehicle. She has also begun depositing deposits for a car that had not yet reached the floor-standing prototype stage at the time.
A former colleague tells the day that he knew things were starting to crack. Carmichael had bragged to reporters about how the Dale was bulletproof because of a special plastic used to encase the vehicle’s interior. She had said it so many times, the colleague said, that she had come to believe it, even though she never checked to see if it was true.
But one day Carmichael came to work with a gun and used it to shoot a Dale door about 20 yards away. The bullet didn’t bounce off the plastic; instead, it made it break up into thousands of little pieces.
There is actually no better metaphor for the course of Carmichael’s life at the time – the public discovers her past and the R&D money for the Dale is running out. That’s when viewers really want to get involved. The rest of the documentary is a wild ride.
The first two episodes of “The Lady and the Dale” will premiere consecutively on Sunday, January 31 at 9:00 pm on HBO. The next two episodes are released weekly.