In the first moments of the four-part HBO documentations “The Lady and the Dale”, you get the general outline of the story. The titular lady is Elizabeth Carmichael, a singularly self-confident automotive executive who achieved international fame in the 1970s while trying to face the “Big Three” of the American auto industry – General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Ford Motor Company – by marketing the Dale, a car strange three-wheeler (but supposedly fuel efficient).
For a brief moment, Vale was everywhere, from the cover of Japanese newspapers to the “The Right Price” award, and Carmichael was there with him, posing for press photos that portray her wearing a miniskirt, mounted on a Los Angeles highway in a “Wonder Woman” pose. “I don’t want to sound like an egomaniac, but I’m a genius,” she says naturally to an interviewer.
It was a statement that journalists, investors and competitors wanted to verify, and soon Carmichael’s stories – about Vale and her – started to break up. The promises about the car were too good to be true, and Carmichael’s fingerprints, which were obtained by a disgruntled employee, matched those of a swindler who had fled the FBI and the mafia for years.
It is always risky to show so many of your cards right away in a documentary introduction. It’s like that feeling of watching a particularly heavy movie trailer and you think to yourself, “Well, I kind of saw the movie now.” But sit back and watch “Lady and the Dale” produced by Duplass Bros. it is almost like embarking on a journey; you have an idea of your destination, but it’s really the stops and detours along the way that make it memorable, and that make periods when things kind of stop easily forgivable.
“The Lady and the Dale” quickly establishes Carmichael as a fabulist in a small Indiana town who has avoided a monotonous lifestyle and responsibilities in favor of “getting rich” schemes. Despite a series of divorces, she ended up marrying Vivian and had five children, jumping from place to place while still dragging others into risky, unconventional and often criminal ventures. When she finally becomes a transgender, she reinvents herself again in a new city as CEO of the 20th Century Motor Company, ready to manufacture Dale.
All of this comes through in the first hour-long episode, which sets the tone for a series that is rich in original interviews and surprisingly vivid and charming visual appeal. While Carmichael passed away in 2004, directors Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker (who was a consultant and cast member for “Transparent”) summoned people who knew Carmichael in all aspects of his life; they interview two of their children, their brother-in-law, their childhood friends, their employees and their possible detractors.
This helps to put together a complex portrait of Carmichael. It would have been easy to portray her as a pioneer or a crook, when in fact she was both. She made tremendous advances as a woman in the automotive industry and as a transgender figure in the 1970s, who had very few colleagues who shared her life experience, but her plot also pushed her family into an inerrant and secretive life that left her children feeling scared and untied for most of his life. Carmichael was a loving mother to the five children she had with Vivian, but she abandoned or never met several others from her previous marriages.
Flattening Carmichael’s features or trying to put it in a single box because of the narrative would have been a disservice to the real life she lived. As such, it is understandable why the docuseries writers seem to take a little too long in certain places – the explanations of the design plans for Vale become a little repetitive, for example. But there is a lot to learn.
It helps that “The Lady and the Dale” is so visually distinct from other contemporary documentary projects that rely on both clumsy staging and dramatic interviews with talking heads augmented with archival footage. This series is an explosion of animated stop animation (made by animation director Sean Donnelly) that looks almost like paper dolls, featuring the faces of various characters, brought to life. This technique elevates the original interviews, which are dense in detail, to something transcendent.
In the second episode, however, it is clear that Carmichael has only hasty control in his new life; she is delaying the paychecks of Dale employees, making unrestricted statements to investors and lying to the media about the vehicle’s condition. It also started to pocket the payment for a car that, at that time, had not passed the prototype stage model.
A former co-worker details the day he learned that things were starting to break. Carmichael had been bragging to reporters about how bulletproof the Valley was due to a special plastic used to wrap the vehicle’s interior. She said so much, said the co-worker, who started to believe it, although she never verified that it was true.
But then, one day, Carmichael showed up to work with a gun and used it to shoot at a Dale door about 20 meters away. The bullet did not bounce off the plastic; instead, it broke into thousands of tiny pieces.
There is no better metaphor, really, for Carmichael’s life course at that point – the public discovers his past and the R&D money for Vale is running out. That’s when viewers really want to tighten their belts. The rest of the documentary is a wild ride.
The first two episodes of “The Lady and the Dale” open consecutively on Sunday, January 31 at 9 pm on HBO. The subsequent two episodes will be released weekly.