Zackary Drucker Reveals What She Would Ask Liz Carmichael After Working on HBO’s ‘The Lady and the Dale’

The story of Liz Carmichael and The Dale will blow your mind. I went into Zackary Drucker and Nick Cammilleri’s four-part HBO documentary series, The Lady and the Dale, completely blind, and I could not believe my eyes and ears. Liz Carmichael was a woman of many talents but her most impressive trait was how she could hold your attention and sell you anything. Using only archival footage and incredible animation, Zackary Drucker worked with her co-director, Nick Cammillieri, to paint a portrait of a transgender woman who is as complex and nuanced as any lead character on a prestige drama.

Drucker first heard about Liz Carmichael in 2019 from Jay Duplass and she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It was a story that she couldn’t get out of her head, but when she teamed up with Cammillieri they hit the ground running with interviewing people who came in contact with Carmichael.

“There were so many unexpected twists and turns that I ended the conversation completely discombobulated. There was nothing internet archive or trace of Elizabeth Carmichael. Nick Cammillieri, my co-director, has been working on this since 2011. If it wasn’t for his archive and building this network of people who knew Liz through the business or law enforcement, we wouldn’t have this story at our fingertips. We were interviewing people two months later in Texas and it was a very quick learning curve. Being a trans person in the volatile time in American history in a state where there are no protections for trans people was a trip.”

Drucker clarified that her co-director was the one who conducted the interview with Dick Carlson. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for a trans person to be around a man who was seemingly obsessed with Liz Carmichael and how she lived her life. Drucker did, however, detail some experiences where she felt Carlson’s footage and stories on Liz were meant to be included in The Lady and the Dale.

“Nick’s interview with Dick was kind of a bit of serendipity and Liz helping him out from the other side. I feel like there was a lot of that. There were so many moments in the process that were presented to us or where we stumbled upon things that felt too good to be true. The footage of this trans woman addressing a town hall meeting in San Francisco and it was in the cut and I started poking around on the archival database and I was looking at clips from the other side and it was Dick Carlson’s footage. It was this strange, unexplained instance that affirms that Carlson’s reporting must have identified Liz as a trans person and he had to have interacted with other trans people.”

Even though the doc series chronicles Liz’s struggles to be taken seriously as a trans individual, The Lady and the Dale doesn’t sugarcoat anything. They present Liz in her entirety and show how she both swindled people but was also a caring mother who took people in when they had nowhere else to go. Too many people demonized her for The Dale, but Drucker and Cammilleri’s series reclaims as much of Liz’s history as it possibly can.

“Her presence was so palpable–even the people who were trying to apprehend her were charmed with her. She could connect people quickly and helped them feel safe and seen. A friend of a friend’s father told us a story about how he lost money in stock and he was so happy that Liz took his money.”

The Lady and the Dale uses archival footage, but animation is used to fill in the blanks to make Liz come alive on screen. It helps build a history of Liz’s earlier life, and it adds so playful texture. It becomes more sophisticated as the series goes along. Every frame feels like a work of art.

“One of our lead producers, Alana Carithers, and the editor, Chris Donlon, and I became the creative nucleus in post. We wanted to tell the story how Liz would tell it. It wouldn’t be a drawing on paper but on tracing paper. She would cut things out and have jagged edges, and we partnered with an animation team from Awesome and Modest. It was a group of artists and they worked with a small army of experimental animators. It was a tremendous challenge. That first episode is a prologue to the story and we very little source material–nothing from Liz. How do we turn hundreds of FBI files into a compelling story? We wrote it out and as we presented it to the animation team. You get so familiar with the material that we could add a joke here and there.”

Since Drucker has made such a individual path for herself in the entertainment industry, I kept wondering what it felt like to watch such a polarizing trans figure like Liz Carmichael on screen. I wish that Drucker would’ve had the opportunity to interview Liz (she passed in 2004), because Drucker has some lingering questions she would like answers to.

“Liz is so present for me. In touching the people that she knew and meeting her grandkids, I think you can feel very close to a person. There was a time working on this where I was dreaming in Liz’s story every night for months. You get so intimate with a person and there were so many moments when I was frustrated with her like if we don’t have a president who doesn’t believe in capitalism, the United States would cease to exist. And I am working on a film after the most corrupt president in American history was voted out of office. Liz’s story is a microcosm and it’s humble in its origin but it’s become a global conversation about trans people in public life. Trans people existing with equal rights.  I wonder if she knew then what we know now would she have pursued a life as a petty criminal in her younger years? I thought that the richest material stage in my mind. Just thinking about how if she always felt like an outsider? Was it this unnamable, slippery thing of feeling that dysphoria? That relationship of Liz’s trans identity to her criminality. Is there something with feeling out of synch with the world around you and out of sync with your body that makes you resent the world you live in?”

The Lady and the Dale is streaming now on HBO Max.