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THE LADY AND THE DALE is a fascinating, stylish look at a scandal

Directed by Nick Cammilleri and Zackary Drucker
Runtime: 4-part minieries
Episode 1 available on HBO starting Jan 31

by Emily Maesar, Staff Writer

In the early 1970s, America was in the middle of a gas crisis. It was then, like a gift from above, that Twentieth Century Motor Company unveiled their Dale automobile. It was a prototype, but it was going to save the world. 

The Dale was a three-wheeled, two-seater car that allegedly got 70 mpg. It was unbelievable. And it never existed. Not really. Elizabeth Carmichael was the head of the company, named after an automotive company is Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and by most accounts she had every intention of making the Dale a reality. She truly believed in the car, but time after time the company was mismanaged and the car never quite came together as everyone involved had hoped. 

Produced by the Duplass Brothers, The Lady and the Dale is the story of Liz Carmichael and the car that never was. It’s a four-part HBO docu-series about her life, what led to the creation of Twentieth Century Motor Company, and how it all fell apart. It’s a story of ego, fraud, and the lengths people are willing to go to make their dreams come true. It’s also the story of a trans woman trying to make it in a business, and a society, that continues to want nothing from women, especially trans women. 

And here’s where it needs to be said that there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of deadnaming and misgendering of Liz Carmichael in these four hours. Some of it is by the people who loved her, people who have a clear distinction between when Liz lived her life as a man, and when she was finally able to be herself. And the rest of it is by reporters, attorneys, and various other people who believed that Liz’s identity as a woman (one that was officially put in the court record during her trial) is invalid.

That Dick Carlson’s 40+ reports on KABC-TV in Los Angeles, reporting which won him and his team a Peabody Award in 1975, only happened because he thought something “seemed off” about Liz, feels like a verbally violent beginning to his utter harassment of her. Yes, she was the head of a company deeply involved in fraud and illegal activities, and that story should have come out, but none of those things had anything to do with her womanhood. In the final episode, the show reveals the repercussions of Dick Carlson’s single-minded transphobic reporting with a modern-day bombshell that left me absolutely seething. Truly, I needed to pause the episode in order to process, and I still don’t think I have yet. The montage and editing on that sequence is masterful and utterly enraging. 

I do think the series does a good job of bringing in trans women to talk about both different aspects of Liz’s life, but what was happening in the US for trans women at the time. As imperfect as Liz Carmichael was, she was a titan of her industry, she was truly loved by her family and not almost no person who worked for her ever said an unkind thing about her. She remains a deeply interesting figure, and the Dale is an undeniably important piece of automotive history. 

I think this docu-series is extremely well-made, and has a keen eye for sympathy that it very easily could have thrown out for shock value. It allows the viewer to see a full picture of Liz Carmichael and all that she dreamed of accomplishing, big or small. There are shocking things in there, certainly. Every episode leaves you with a cliffhanger that makes you want to know what else could possibly happen in this story that’s been sold as “Elizabeth Holmes, but she made cars instead of a blood testing machine”. The information is expertly doled out and the way they do reenactments–since it was the 70s and they don’t have a lot of footage–is divine. It works perfectly for the ascetics and style of Carmichael’s story. 

Maybe that’s what is so great about this series. It has substance and style. Liz Carmichael was many things, but boring was certainly not one of them, and I’m excited to talk about her story with all the people who get to discover it through this series.