Entertainment
Adapting 'Lady in the Lake' for TV meant centering the women at the core of the story
The seeds of “Lady in the Lake” were planted in 1969 with the disappearances and deaths of an 11-year-old Jewish girl and a 33-year-old Black woman in Baltimore. These crimes inspired Laura Lippman to write her 2019 novel, in which multiple narrators tell the stories of aspiring newspaper reporter Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish woman trying to establish herself as a journalist as she breaks away from her traditionalist family; and Cleo Sherwood, a Black waitress who gets on the wrong side of her criminal employers.
Now “Lady in the Lake” has been adapted into a seven-episode limited series, created by Alma Har’el and premiering Friday on Apple TV+. The story, about women pushing against hard glass ceilings, a city on the brink, and the different ways that different people look for freedom, has undergone significant changes on the path from the streets of Baltimore to the pages of a bestseller and now to the screen. In separate interviews, Lippman, Har’el and members of the cast, including stars Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram, shared their thoughts about bringing “Lady” to life.
The novelist
Lippman is a Baltimore native and former reporter at the Baltimore Sun. As a child, she read about Esther Lebowitz, an 11-year-old girl who in 1969 went missing and was later found dead. But it wasn’t until Lippman went to work at the Sun that she learned of Shirley Parker, the Black woman who received almost no coverage in the city’s white, mainstream press when her decomposed body was found in a lake fountain soon thereafter.
“I grew up reading the newspaper, but I had to go work at the newspaper and take the rewrite guys’ tour of Baltimore to find out about the Lady in the Lake,” she said in an interview from her Baltimore home. “I was very much interested in the idea that a little girl died and everybody knew, and a Black woman died, and we’ve never even had an official cause of death. They’ve never even been able to rule it a homicide, and at this point, there’s not going to be any determination made in that death.”
This discrepancy fascinated Lippman. But she didn’t want to just write a novel about these two deaths. When she writes fiction, she doesn’t do deep research into specific cases.
“I don’t reach out to the real-life families who might have connections to these cases because I don’t want to inflict pain,” Lippman said. “I’m thinking about this all the time. There have been some crime podcasts that do this that I have really had trouble with.”
Instead, she set out to write a novel with a very specific theme: “I decided to go really meta and write a story about a white woman who exploits Black pain for her own gain.”
Moses Ingram, left, stars as Cleo Johnson and Byron Bowers as her husband, Slappy Johnson, in “Lady in the Lake.”
(Apple)
Enter Maddie, played in the series by Portman — in her first recurring TV role — and Cleo, played by Ingram (“The Queen’s Gambit”), whose surname is Johnson in the adaptation. The disappearance of the little girl sends Maddie into an existential tailspin. She leaves her husband, moves into a predominantly Black neighborhood and rekindles an old passion for journalism. She grows increasingly obsessed with the missing girl, and then with Cleo, who chides Maddie, perhaps from the grave, for missing the big picture.
“Lady in the Lake” plays differently on the screen than on the page — Maddie is a little more redeemable in the series than in the novel — and the myriad narrative voices in the book have given way to a dialogue of sorts between Maddie and Cleo.
Lippman, who calls the series “terrific,” has no problem with such changes. The author, who was married to David Simon, creator of the quintessential Baltimore series “The Wire,” said she knows a lot about how TV is made but that she doesn’t write for the screen.
“I don’t think of it as my story anymore,” Lippman said. “I didn’t from the moment I sold it. I come to adaptation as a novelist.”
The creator
Har’el, who was born and raised in Israel but is now a longtime Los Angeles resident, was struck by how the story handled Maddie’s Jewish identity when the project was first brought to her by producers Nathan Ross and the late Jean-Marc Vallée.
“The idea of Jewishness creates an opportunity to explore persecution, racism, and both oppression and being an oppressor,” she said in a video interview from her Los Angeles home. “It also lets you look at assimilation, or having the possibility to even assimilate.”
Alma Har’el, creator, writer and director of Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake.”
(Rob Berry)
These ideas swirl around Maddie, whose family eats kosher and observes the high holidays, and who rebels against her culture’s expectations of her as a wife and mother.
But the Black characters in “Lady in the Lake” intrigued her as well, particularly the different ways they represent the idea of freedom. Har’el’s romantic partner, comedian Byron Bowers, inspired her to create a husband for Cleo, Slappy “Dark” Johnson, whom he plays in the series. Slappy is a Richard Pryor-like comic testing creative boundaries in the mid-‘60s (both novel and series take place in 1966) and exploring topics that resonate within the Black community. Bowers was also a consulting producer on the series, and several of the series’ writers are Black.
“Everybody in the series is fighting their own war inside, and finding freedom outside of what society says, which is something I try to do in real life,” Bowers said in a separate interview. “This is a world of Black people I didn’t even know. I came up in the crack epidemic. But this is when families still were families and Black people had hope before heroin and the Vietnam War.”
Tyrik Johnson, left, and Byron Bowers in “Lady in the Lake.”
(Apple)
Where Lippman’s novel incorporates multiple narrators, some more reliable than others, Har’el immediately zoomed in on the voices of Cleo and Maddie, two women desperately trying to break free of the strictures created by a very patriarchal society. Maddie can’t even sell her own car without her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s signature; Cleo lives largely under the thumb of her gangster/club owner boss, played by Wood Harris, who combines Black Power rhetoric with a ruthless command of the city’s numbers racket.
Har’el, who was the lead writer and also directed all seven episodes of the series, sees the characters as part of the same push-pull duality that fuels the entire story.
“There’s a Jungian underbelly going on in the show that is trying to seduce you to maybe see beyond the politics of it all and into human experience,” she said. “It turns that experience into something that, hopefully, the characters get to touch.”
But without her stars, she says, the ideas mean little.
“The credit goes to the actors,” she says. “They come to that emotional place with authenticity, and it’s pretty magical to see them do that.”
Natalie Portman, left, on set with Alma Har’el.
(Apple)
The stars
Portman was attached to the project from the beginning, as a star and executive producer. At one point Lupita N’yongo was slated to play Cleo, but the character ultimately wasn’t cast until shooting had commenced; “Nobody could agree,” Har’el says. “But when Moses came in, it was so clear. Everybody saw it right away.”
Ingram and Portman rarely appear on screen together, but they’re linked from the moment they see each other in the first episode. In the opening scenes, blood from the lamb that Maddie has purchased for her family’s dinner has spilled onto her dress, and she eyes the outfit that Cleo is modeling in the window of a department store. For Portman, this moment speaks volumes.
“In that initial scene of them together, where she’s looking at Cleo in the dress, she’s really just looking at the dress,” Portman said in a video interview alongside Ingram. “It’s kind of symbolic of how she treats Cleo. She’s using her as a vehicle for her own needs and to further her own ambition.”
The moment Maddie (Natalie Portman) and Cleo (Moses Ingram) first meet in “Lady in the Lake.”
(Apple TV+)
And yet, the series takes pains to connect them, thematically and visually, in the editing process, through crosscutting that links them throughout different periods of their lives.
“I think they’re living in a very similar world that’s affecting them both in similar ways,” Ingram said. “Being women, being mothers, taking care of the husband and the children and also trying to figure out what they might want for themselves, let alone how to get it — those are all things they share.”
In the series, Maddie is a bit softer than she is in the novel, a little less single-minded in the way she uses Cleo’s story to establish a journalism career. But she’s still deeply flawed and somewhat blind to the lives she writes about. (Lippman: “I joke that if you want to be a human-interest writer, it helps to have some interest in humans”).
For Portman, the fact that Maddie is no angel made the role more interesting, and more human.
“It speaks to the tragedy of the fact that, even if you’re oppressed, you can still be an oppressor,” she says. “That’s something that we have to be very conscious of, because I think the opposite story is usually told: ‘Oh, if someone did something to you, you don’t do it to someone else.’ And that’s just unfortunately not very true.”
For Lippman, a somewhat kinder, gentler Maddie speaks to the different roads taken in a different medium. And she’s quite happy with the results.
“Natalie Portman’s Maddie is much bigger, much more layered and complicated than my Maddie,” she said. “How can I not love that? There’s a big difference between asking readers to come along with a not particularly likable character and asking people to watch that character in a limited series, especially if it’s a female. I really respect the choices made in this adaptation, because they’re thoughtful.”
Movie Reviews
‘Greenland 2: Migration’ Review: Gerard Butler in a Post-Apocalyptic Sequel That’s Exactly What You Expect
Desperate migrants are forced to leave Greenland after a malevolent force makes their island uninhabitable. No, it’s not tomorrow’s headline about Donald Trump, but rather the sequel to Ric Roman Waugh’s 2020 post-apocalyptic survival thriller. That film starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin had the misfortune of opening during the pandemic and going straight to VOD. Greenland 2: Migration (now there’s a catchy title) has the benefit of opening in theaters, but it truly feels like an unnecessary follow-up. After all, how many travails can one poor family take?
That family consists of John Garrity (Butler), whose structural engineering skills designated him a governmental candidate for survival in the wake of an interstellar comet dubbed “Clarke” wreaking worldwide destruction; his wife Allison (Baccarin); and their son Nathan (now played by Roman Griffin Davis). At the end of the first film, the clan had endured numerous life-threatening crises as they made their way to the underground bunker in Greenland where survivors will attempt to make a new life.
Greenland 2: Migration
The Bottom Line It’s the end of the world as we know it…again.
Release date: Friday, January 9
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roman Griffin Davis, Amber Rose Revah, Sophie Thompson, Trond Fausa Aurvag, William Abadie
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Screenwriters: Mitchell LaFortune, Chris Sparling
Rated PG-13,
1 hour 38 minutes
Five years later, things aren’t going so well. Fragments of the comet continue to rain down on the planet, causing catastrophic destruction. The contaminated air prevents people from going outside, and resources are becoming increasingly scarce. But there are some plus sides, such as the bunker’s inhabitants still being able to dance to yacht rock.
When their safe haven in Greenland is destroyed, the Garritys, along with a few other survivors, are forced to flee. Their destination is France, where there are rumors of an oasis at the comet’s original crash site. And at the very least, the food is bound to be better.
It’s a perilous journey, but anyone who saw the first film knows what to expect. The Garritys, along with the bunker’s Dr. Casey (Amber Rose Revah), run into some very bad people, undergoing a series of life-threatening trials and tribulations.
Unfortunately, while the thriller mechanics are reasonably well orchestrated by director Waugh (Angel Has Fallen, Kandahar) in his fourth collaboration with Butler, Greenland 2: Migration feels as redundant as its title. While the first film featured a relatively original premise and some genuine emotional dynamics in its suspenseful situations, this one just feels rote. And while it’s made clear that the crisis has resulted in people resorting to cutthroat, deadly means to ensure their survival, the Garritys have it relatively easy. All John has to do is adopt a puppy-dog look, put a pleading tone in his voice, beg for his family’s help, and people inevitably comply.
To be fair, the film contains some genuinely arresting scenes, including one set in a practically submerged Liverpool and another in a dried-up English Channel. The latter provides the opportunity for a harrowing sequence in which the family is forced to cross a giant ravine on a treacherously fragile rope ladder.
Butler remains a sturdy screen presence, his Everyman quality lending gravitas to his character. Baccarin, whose character serves as the story’s moral conscience (early in the proceedings she spearheads a fight to open the shelter to more refugees despite the lack of resources, delivering a not-so-subtle message), more than matches his impact. William Abadie (of Emily in Paris) also makes a strong impression as a Frenchman who briefly takes the family in and begs them to take his daughter Camille (Nelia Valery de Costa) along with them.
Resembling the sort of B-movie fantasy adventure, with serviceable but unremarkable special effects, that used to populate multiplexes in the early ‘70s, Greenland 2: Migration is adequate January filler programming. The only thing it’s missing is dinosaurs.
Paramount is staying the course on its $30-a-share bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, again appealing directly to shareholders.
The move comes after Warner Bros. Discovery’s board voted unanimously this week to reject Paramount’s revised bid, in which billionaire Larry Ellison agreed to personally guarantee the equity portion of his son’s firm’s financing package.
Paramount Skydance, in a Thursday statement, sidestepped Warner’s latest complaints about the enormous debt load that Paramount would need to pull off a takeover. Paramount instead said the appeal of its bid should be obvious: $30 a share in cash for all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including its large portfolio of cable channels, including CNN, HGTV, TBS and Animal Planet.
Warner board members have countered that Netflix’s $27.75 cash and stock bid for much of the company is superior because Netflix is a stronger company. Warner also has complained that it would have to incur billions in costs, including a $2.8-billion break-up fee, if it were to abandon the deal it signed with Netflix on Dec. 4.
The streaming giant has agreed to buy HBO, HBO Max and the Warner Bros. film and television studios, leaving Warner to spin off its basic cable channels into a separate company later this year.
The murky value of Warner’s cable channel portfolio has become a bone of contention in the company’s sale.
“Our offer clearly provides WBD investors greater value and a more certain, expedited path to completion,” Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison said in Thursday’s statement. Paramount said it had resolved all the concerns that Warner had raised last month, “most notably by providing an irrevocable personal guarantee by Larry Ellison for the equity portion of the financing.”
Paramount is gambling that Warner investors will evaluate the two offers and sell their shares to Paramount. Stockholders have until Jan. 21 to tender their Warner shares, although Paramount could extend that deadline.
The Netflix transaction offers Warner shareholders $23.25 in cash, $4.50 in Netflix stock and shares in the new cable channel company, Discovery Global, which Warner hopes to create this summer.
Comcast spun off most of its NBCUniversal cable channels this month, including CNBC and MS NOW, creating a new company called Versant. The result hasn’t been pretty. Versant shares have plunged about 25% from Monday’s $45.17 opening price. On Thursday, Versant shares were selling for about $32.50. (Versant has said it expected volatility earlyon as large index funds sold shares to rebalance their portfolios).
Paramount has argued that fluctuations in Netflix’s stock also reduces the value of the Netflix offer.
“Throughout this process, we have worked hard for WBD shareholders and remain committed to engaging with them on the merits of our superior bid and advancing our ongoing regulatory review process,” Ellison said.
Paramount is relying on equity backing from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia. It turned to Apollo Global for much of its debt financing. Warner said this week that Paramount’s proposed $94 billion debt and equity financing package would make its proposed takeover of Warner the largest leveraged buyout ever.
Amid the stalemate, Paramount and Warner stock held steady. Paramount was trading around $12.36, while Warner shares are hovering around $28.50 on Thursday.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: A real-life ’70s hostage drama crackles in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.
The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.
But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.
Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.
That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”
Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”
There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.
It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.
But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.
“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.
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