Entertainment

Adapting 'Lady in the Lake' for TV meant centering the women at the core of the story

Published

2 years ago

July 18, 2024

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.”

A woman with curly red hair in a yellow jacket.

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.”

A boy and his father sitting on a couch.

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.”

A woman in a yellow dress look at woman in a green shirt holding a camera.

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.”

A woman in a yellow dress looks away from a window with a woman modeling a white dress.

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

‘Supergirl’ review: DC Studios serves up a second less-than-super movie

Published

25 minutes ago

June 24, 2026

Press Room

‘Supergirl’ review: DC Studios serves up a second less-than-super movie

James Gunn isn’t exactly crushing it.

Named co-chairman and chief executive officer of the newly formed DC Studios in 2022, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker wrote and directed the division of Warner Bros. Discovery’s largely disappointing “Superman,” released last year.

This week, DC Studios’ second big-screen affair, “Supergirl,” lands in theaters with similarly underwhelming results.

‘Superman’ review: James Gunn gets DCU off to rocky, overstuffed start

Starring Milly Alcock as the movie’s namesake Kryptonian heroine — who also goes by Kara Zor-El and is the cousin of David Corenswet’s Superman/Clark Kent/Kal-El — “Supergirl” isn’t distractingly zany the way its 2025 sister film was. Instead, it’s tonally boring, a chore of a movie chock full of thinly drawn characters and increasingly bombastic and violent.

To be clear, Gunn isn’t at the helm for “Supergirl.” Instead, it’s the typically dependable Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya,” “Cruella”), working from a script by Ana Nogueira, making her less-than-impressive feature-writing debut.

This planet-hopping adventure in the new DC Universe isn’t a complete space wreck, however, thanks largely to the spunky performance by Aussie Alcock, best known for portraying the younger Rhaenyra Targaryen in the early episodes of HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”

When we catch up with Kara, she’s basically as we left her late in “Superman”: a super-sized mess. She’s out with her beloved, rambunctious dog, Krypto — the peppy and powerful pup having already been a major player in “Superman” — and enjoying a 23rd-birthday pub crawl among planets under a red sun. (Quick reminder: Supergirl, like Superman, draws her incredible powers from a yellow sun, like Earth’s, so she’s at least vaguely normal under a red sun and, importantly, can become intoxicated. The color of suns is a major factor throughout “Supergirl,” and it’s the movie’s most inventive narrative element.)

It is on such a world where a drunken Kara encounters 13-year-old Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan (Eve Ridley), whose family has just been brutally slain by the ruthless Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). Understandably, Ruthye wants revenge against Krem — leader of the Brigants, a band of male pirates and traffickers — and can think of little else.

She’s offering anyone who will help a sword made by her family of skilled weapons makers. The beyond-buzzed Kara isn’t interested, but she gets involved when a scumbag type tries to take the sword. She continues to do her best to fend off Ruthye’s subsequent pleas for assistance in her quest to kill Krem, but when the baddie — in the process of stealing her floating RV of a spaceship — shoots a charging Krypto with a poison dart, Kara has designs on punishing him, too. In fact, she needs to retrieve the specific antidote Krem carries with him to save her four-legged bud.

Milly Alcock, left, as Kara Zor-El, and Eve Ridley, as Ruthye Marye Knoll of the Danastia Clan, appear in a scene from “Supergirl.” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

And so the gals are off to other worlds, initially traveling via the space equivalent of a beat-up Greyhound bus, on which they run into a trio of pillaging Sklarian Raiders. The sequence in which Kara retrieves stolen possessions and extracts information from them is as zany as “Supergirl” gets.

As their trek through the stars warps on, Kara and Ruthye encounter Lobo (Jason Momoa, seemingly leaving his Aquaman character back in the defunct DC Extended Universe), a rough-and-tumble, motorcycle-riding bounty hunter. They team up — sort of, eventually — but their alliance of convenience is one of the flick’s myriad plot threads that fail to tie into a sturdy knot.

The screenplay by Nogueira — an actor who’s penned a pair of plays — attempts to explore why Kara is so jaded by taking us back to her childhood in the Kryptonian city Argo, protected by her father’s tech after the planet’s demise. Of course, that protection proved to be temporary, or she wouldn’t have eventually been sent to Earth like her cousin before her. It’s lukewarm fare, with Kara eventually learning the familiar Spider-Man lesson — with great power comes great responsibility.

Gillespie adds a few nice touches from the director’s chair throughout the movie, but they’re too little to elevate the proceedings.

Again, Alcock — whose credits also include the recent Netflix limited series “Sirens” — does what she can with the material. It’s a demanding role, as she is on screen for most of the movie, and is spirited in it.

Unfortunately, the lesser-known Ridley — making her feature debut following a few television appearances — is given even less to work with. We never learn much about the one-note Ruthye beyond that her family was killed in her presence and that she is really upset about it.

If you’re expecting the always-lively Momoa to save the day, he brings his larger-than-life presence to Lobo, but the demon-like figure isn’t very interesting. A mix between Aquaman and his Khal Drogo from “Game of Thrones,” the longtime DC Comics character isn’t anything you wouldn’t expect here.

Lobo (Jason Momoa) rides into action in a scene from “Supergirl.” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

If there’s another bright spot in the cast, it’s Schoenaerts (“Rust and Bone,” “The Old Guard”), who brings a touch of nuance to the villainous Krem. You may have expected a bigger name to play the big bad in this second DC Universe big-screen effort, but some of the acting choices the Belgian makes keep things vaguely engaging when he’s within the frame.

Matthias Schoenaerts portrays the vicious Krem of the Yellow Hills in “Supergirl.” (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Sadly, vaguely engaging is the best “Supergirl” can manage.

We’ll see if Gunn can turn things around, starting with the HBO series “Lanterns” in August and the horror-tinged film “Clayface” in October, before he returns to direct Corenswet, Alcock and the rest of the “Superman” gang in “Man of Tomorrow,” arriving a little more than a year from now.

We’re hoping for super results, but, at this point, it’s tough to say we’re expecting them.

‘Supergirl’

Where: Theaters.

When: June 26.

Rated: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking.

Runtime: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.

Entertainment

Culture Clash knows the end is near. It wants to go out with a bang

Published

2 hours ago

June 24, 2026

Press Room

Culture Clash knows the end is near. It wants to go out with a bang

Richard Montoya of Culture Clash doesn’t mince words when it comes to politics, current events or the state of mainstream Hollywood. But he does sugarcoat his technological limitations as a 67-year-old comic in the dreaded age of video calls with a punchy Chicano twist.

“I’m a low-tech Aztec,” he writes via email when requesting a Zoom link to our Monday interview.

Culture Clash — which includes members Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Sigüenza — arrived on the scene as a guerrilla sketch theater group from the San Francisco Mission District in 1984. By that time, the Chicano movement had reached its peak, thanks to the United Farm Workers labor movement, as well as student activist organizations like Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), which advocated for Chicano unity, political empowerment and educational access.

Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino — who began putting on social justice-oriented plays for the striking Delano farmworkers in 1965 — backed the slapstick satire troupe, considering the trio “the cutting edge of fresh, new Latino comic genius.”

Culture Clash stood out in a time when Chicanos became more vocal and visible — and its members challenged an entertainment industry that has historically lacked Latino representation. Between 1993 and 1996, Culture Clash hosted its own self-titled TV show on the syndicated Fox network. The show, which was filmed at the Mayan Theater in downtown Los Angeles, is widely considered the first Latino sketch comedy to air on American television.

Throughout the last four decades, Culture Clash has parodied nearly every prominent Latino figure in history, including Che Guevara, Frida Kahlo, Ritchie Valens, Rita Moreno, Edward James Olmos and others. Its members have mocked hard-shell cholos and gangsters, often by placing them in funny scenarios. For instance, take this clip, in which the trio take on cholo characters and reimagine what it would be like to surf on the Southern California shore.

But they’ve also taken on more serious topics in their classic “Chavez Ravine” play, which looks into one of the darkest chapters in L.A. history: the forceful removal and displacement of families, mostly Mexican, in the 1950s under eminent domain. Recently Montoya attended a live reading adapted by Somos El Teatro, led by Xolo Maridueña, Mariana da Silva and Angel Villalobos at Elysian Park.

“It gives us so much life that people are finding the issues of swindlers, whether it’s gentrification, the taking over of settlements,” says Montoya. “The generational trauma of losing your home in L.A. has never gone away.”

But not every Culture Clash joke or skit has been safe from criticism. Montoya still remembers how a conservative pundit chastised the group for using light humor to discuss the 1992 riots, when LAPD officers were acquitted for using excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King.

“By looking at it and treating it as dynamite, exploding it and then by bringing some levity and a whole lot of seriousness to the Rodney King matter allows us a moment, a fraction of time to look at the issues a little bit differently,” says Montoya. “That laugh allows us a moment to examine it differently.”

On June 27, Culture Clash will return to Grand Performances, a free summer concert series at California Plaza in downtown L.A., with comedic sketches colored by political and social satire. The show, titled “American Payasos! Culture Clash’s End Times Cabaret” will be co-presented with De Los.

While their 40-year-plus legacy might merit a show reminiscent of old goofball skits — like their early 1989 show “The Mission” that poked fun at the problematic Spanish Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra — this will not be an “oldies but goodies show,” as Montoya put it. “We are highly pissed off about a lot of stuff right now.”

“ We’re thinking a lot about the Mexican American patriarchy, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and it’s time to address some of these things,” says Montoya. “ We want to look at the service workers of Los Angeles, the people that sell cotton candy in MacArthur Park, the people that sell ice cream in Echo Park and the people working the World Cup.”

For the veteran comic, son of the late Chicano poet Jose Montoya, it is also impossible to ignore the immigration enforcement raids that have rattled Los Angeles communities in recent years.

“This is a very strange moment for satirists,” says Montoya. “We have a responsibility to use those tools to say what’s going on in our city and country and provide these moments where we can do a little bit closer examination because the people in power aren’t telling us what’s going on.”

In the last five years, Montoya has fiddled around with digital media, creating sporadic videos featuring old clips of the troupe, as well as videos of Latino media, to connect with technologically diverse audiences of all ages. (One example is a video calling on people to get out the vote, that features clips of Speedy Gonzales and honors political figures like Huerta.)

Although Montoya believes Culture Clash is nearing the end of its career, there’s a question lingering inside his mind: What does a graceful exit look like for a group like Culture Clash, which has never been fully integrated into mainstream Hollywood and still left such a profound legacy in the world of Latino entertainment?

The answer to that might still be unknown, but like any Culture Clash project, it will likely be wickedly satirical and punchy. Says Montoya: “We’re ready to go out with a huge, loud bang that can say something against the power structure.”

Culture Clash will take center stage on June 27 at Grand Performances, in partnership with De Los. Also performing is the retro cumbia-quebradita musician É Arenas (bassist of Chicano Batman), the cumbia-fusion, luchador-masked cumbia group La Nueva Ola de Cumbia, as well as DJ Dali.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review – In the Hand of Dante (2025)

Published

11 hours ago

June 24, 2026

Press Room

In the Hand of Dante, 2025.

Directed by Julian Schnabel.
Starring Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Louis Cancelmi, Sabrina Impacciatore, Benjamin Clementine, Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino, Franco Nero, Jason Momoa.

SYNOPSIS:

A handwritten manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s poem “The Divine Comedy” makes its way from a priest to a mob boss in New York City, where it is taken by Nick Tosches after he’s asked to verify its authenticity.

Outrageously ambitious with an absurd narrative that veers between slick scuzzy fun and philosophically snoozy, the key issue with co-writer/director Julian Schnabel’s excessively long In the Hand of Dante is that it’s more engaging as a dopey early 2000s crime thriller about mobsters employing the services of novelist Nick Tosches (also the writer of the novel the film is based on, inserting himself into it as a fictional character, here played by Oscar Isaac in the adaptation by Schnabel and Louise Kugelberg) and Dante Alighieri specialist to steal the recently unearthed original manuscript of his 14th-century masterwork The Divine Comedy from Italian priests than it does as its other side to that coin, a flashback story about the creation of that story complete with actors portraying secondary characters to eventually get at some points about reincarnation.

This means that the film mostly begins with Oscar Isaac entangled in a web of crime alongside slur-slinging, trigger-finger-happy Louie (in what might be the best performance of Gerard Butler’s career, despite the steep drop in quality in the second half), John Malkovich as a mob boss seeing nothing but dollar signs if they can get a hold of the original manuscript, authenticate it, and sell it on the black market, and even Al Pacino popping up for a scene and stealing it set during Nick’s childhood following a violent incident that is so bonkers readers might not believe it even if I typed it out here, to something close enough to a mess culminating in a confrontation between the excellent Oscar Isaac and the shudderingly bad Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa in important roles, the former a lover placed in danger to the mob by her proximity to Nick, and the latter a greedy killer in a relationship with literary historian Dr. Susanna Pulice (Sabrina Impacciatore).

Martin Scorsese also appears in the 14th-century section (for someone who loves to assert what real cinema is vs cinematic theme park rides, he has now appeared in 3 mediocre-to-terrible movies this year), offering sage-like advice to Dante (also Oscar Isaac) in a hilariously over-the-top beard piece. Much of this is a mental journey, but also has something to do with Pope Boniface VIII (also Gerard Butler) placing the Mark of Cain on Dante following a falling out, the writer’s inability to find inspiration in his current lover Gemma Donati (also Gal Gadot) compared to his first love Beatrice, executed in stark contrast from the much more accessible and palatable modern day crime story. A blunter way to put it is that any time the film shifts to these flashbacks, it’s quite boring and never finds a sense of rhythm, drive, or purpose.

Unquestionably, some of this is by design and baked into other elements of the presentation, which includes flashbacks only receiving color as a means of implying that they were more enriching days for artistic freedom and integrity, compared to the black-and-white 2000s material that further homes in on greed and only financial gain for a manuscript no one even knows how to price if it turns out to be authenticated. Expanding on that thought, there are certainly no qualms to be had with the striking cinematography from Roman Vasyanov.

The other encroaching thought here is that, for as carefully considered as the film looks and as captivating as about half the performances are (we truly do not need to talk anymore about Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa, neither of whom can deliver convincing accents without eliciting laughs), it’s not going anywhere interesting, especially once the mobsters exit the narrative. Technically, they are replaced by a hitman, although a lengthy amount of time is spent watching Nick fly around the world for different aspects of the identification process, sometimes involving technology that even he doesn’t understand and tunes out of. In the novel, there appears to be a greater emphasis on Nick’s inner thoughts about the current state of the art world and on finding flaws in classic works or restrictive prose, which is alluded to here but not interrogated enough to emerge as a compelling element. It’s enough to make one wonder what else was lost in translation from the book.

The filmmakers seem to think the romantic subplot will sustain intrigue for the second half, but it’s devoid of emotion and comes across as aimless in the 14th-century portion. At a certain point, one simply longs for a more focused movie about mobsters stealing recently discovered historic manuscripts for profit; it’s far more fun and amusing than the rest of the sluggish, artfully tedious In the Hand of Dante. No one here seems to realize that this should be a comedic crime caper, and it works that way until it takes itself far too seriously, with flashbacks that bore rather than provide insight or meaningful context.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist