“She was probably one of the best antiheroes I think I’d ever seen,” proclaims Nick Cammilleri about Elizabeth Carmichael, the subject of his docuseries “The Lady and the Dale.” The HBO project, co-directed by Zackary Drucker, documents the rise and fall of Carmichael, a transgender woman who created an entire automobile company around the release of “The Dale,” a three-wheeled car designed to help consumers during the fuel crisis of the 1970s. The show also chronicles Carmichael’s arrest and imprisonment for fraud, as well as the media’s treatment of her gender identity. Check out our exclusive video interview above.
Drucker admits that she had never heard of Carmichael before working on this project, but she was struck by the media’s treatment of Carmichael during her arrest and subsequent trial. “If you didn’t know anything about her and were just going off of the media coverage of her from the time, you wouldn’t have even known that she was trans,” she explains. “She was flat out characterized as a man masquerading as a woman to commit a crime.”
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The media’s demonization and near-constant misgendering of Carmichael was one of the reasons that Carmichael’s family was initially incredibly resistant to talking to the filmmakers. Cammilleri talks about the difficulty in getting Carmichael’s children– particularly her daughter Candi– to talk about their mother. “Everything had been turned on them every time they talked to the media,” he says. “[The media] would just screw them again and again and again. I had to keep saying to them ‘I’m not a journalist– I don’t come from the news world.'”
Cammilleri acknowledges Carmichaels complex nature as equal parts villain and hero, but also says that those qualities are what make her such an intriguing character. “A lot of things that I’m attracted to are there, trying to balance good and evil, finding the way between those two sides and trying to reconcile them,” he argues. For Drucker, Carmichael’s story has a resonance that reaches beyond the trans community. “There’s something for everybody in Liz’s story,” she argues. “I’m thrilled that people in the LGBTQ community have embraced the show, and I’m equally thrilled that the the world at large has.”
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