THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 AR 7Television
Hollywood may love neat, cathartic resolu-
tions, but the filmmaker Liz Garbus has al-
ways been drawn to open-ended stories.
“You have to deal a little bit with the discom-
fort of the gray areas in the world,” she said
in a recent phone conversation.
Don’t look to Garbus’s 22-year career for
easy answers. Ambiguity is woven into the
fabric of such films as “Who Killed Garrett
Phillips?” (don’t ask the police) and
“There’s Something Wrong With Aunt Di-
ane” (nobody knows exactly what). Gar-
bus’s Academy Award-nominated docu-
mentary about Nina Simone — tellingly ti-
tled “What Happened, Miss Simone?” — is
energized by the often contradictory com-
plexity of its prodigiously talented but mer-
curial subject.
Even Garbus’s recent scripted debut,
Netflix’s “Lost Girls,” was marked by a dis-
quieting restlessness — the movie was
based on Robert Kolker’s nonfiction book
about the unsolved killings of Long Island
sex workers. Now she is turning Michelle
McNamara’s true-crime best seller about
the Golden State Killer, “I’ll Be Gone in the
Dark,” into a six-episode documentary se-
ries for HBO that will debut on Sunday.
The complex story of how the series came
into being — full of twists and tragedies allits own — is less about yet another de-
ranged male killer than about another sub-
ject of deep importance to Garbus: who gets
to tell women’s stories and how.
“What intrigued me was Michelle’s voice
as a writer,” said Garbus, who oversaw “I’ll
Be Gone” and directed multiple episodes. “I
didn’t want to make a series about the Gold-
en State Killer. I wanted to make a series
about Michelle’s journey, her observations
and articulations, the plight of the victims
and the kind of 1970s-through-1980s atti-
tudes toward rape.”
“I’ll Be Gone” is very much of a piece for
Garbus, 50, with its troubling sense of unfin-
ished business. McNamara, who died in
2016, had spent a half-decade trying to un-
cover the identity of the killer, a serial rapist
and murderer who terrorized multiple Cali-
fornia communities in the 1970s and ’80s,
pouring her painstaking but fruitless efforts
into a book published almost two years after
her death. As HBO bought the rights and
approached Garbus for the project, the elu-
sive criminal appeared safely tucked away
on the cold-case shelf.
Then came a plot twist in April 2018, just
two months after McNamara’s book was
published. “After that first day of filming,
unexpected by any of us, they actually ar-
rested somebody,” said Nancy Abraham,
the co-head of HBO’s documentary and
family programming with Lisa Heller.
That somebody was a former cop named
Joseph James DeAngelo (as of mid-June he
was expected to plead guilty soon), but Gar-
bus did not let him hijack her series: She
knew that her take on “I’ll Be Gone in the
Dark” was, and had to remain, about wom-en. Garbus devotes time to survivors of
DeAngelo’s assaults, but it’s McNamara,
her presence both spectral and earthy,
whom we really get to know — the book, af-
ter all, is subtitled “One Woman’s Obsessive
Search for the Golden State Killer.”
(HBO approached Garbus because “she
has had such experience making multiple
kinds of documentaries, and she would be a
person with the dexterity to deal with the
intertwining story lines,” Abraham said.
“Lisa and I also thought she would probably
relate to and have an affinity with Michelle
McNamara.”)
McNamara’s voice is heard often in the
series, pulled from various archives. But
her words are also articulated by the ac-
tress Amy Ryan, who played a mother
searching for her missing daughter in “Lost
Girls.”
“Mostly Liz and I talked about Michelle’s
caffeinated energy,” Ryan said in a recent
phone interview. “She’s really on the cusp of
figuring this out, and this driving force is
keeping her up late at night, going down
these rabbit holes of investigation.
“I listened to a lot of existing recordings,
her podcast. When you layer in the emo-
tional side of it, I think the audience will for-
give that it’s not exactly a dead-on imper-
sonation.”
McNamara wrote about pursuing leads
and digging into reams of police reports, but
she also revealed quite a bit about herself.
She did hold back, however, on the extent of
her prescription-drugs use: Suddenly, thebook abandons the first-person to inform
readers that she died in her sleep, discov-
ered in her bedroom by her husband, the co-
median Patton Oswalt. She had an undiag-
nosed heart condition, and Adderall, Fen-
tanyl and Xanax were found in her blood-
stream.
The documentary fills in some of those
blanks as it reveals more of the toll McNa-
mara’s quest took on her mind and body.
“It was very, very hard to watch these
episodes,” Oswalt said on the phone. “I told
Liz: ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to watch
Episode 5. I just can’t deal with that level of
grief again.’
“Michelle was amazing at adding the per-
sonal elements of her successes and fail-
ures trying to solve the case, and how it af-
fected her physically and psychologically. If
she was able to do it in the book, it was hard
for me to shy away from it in a portrait of
her. I wanted her courage, I guess.”
Garbus said that Oswalt “shared end-
lessly” with her and her team.
“He wanted us to be able to get into Mi-
chelle’s head,” she added. “That is a huge re-
sponsibility. What do you include, what do
you not include? How much of Michelle’s
discussion about addiction do you show?
This is not a cop-out because I don’t think
there’s one answer.”
Good documentarians must balance
ethics with entertainment: They don’t want
to sacrifice integrity, but they also need to
keep viewers viewing. Amy Hobby, the ex-
ecutive director of the Tribeca Film Insti-
tute and a producer of “What Happened,
Miss Simone?,” recalled that she and Gar-
bus — who cited Janet Malcolm’s “The Jour-
nalist and the Murderer” as one of her fa-
vorite essays — often talked about how to
deal with sensitive material.
“She has a road map for that and is aware
of the ethical decisions she’s making,”
Hobby said. “It’s important to her.”
Garbus has often used her films to exam-
ine the major fault lines underlying Ameri-
can ideals, institutions and rituals, having
delved into subjects including health care,
politics or the media. (For her 2018 Show-
time docu-series “The Fourth Estate,” she
embedded herself for 16 months at The New
York Times.) Several of her past works have
shined a light on the criminal justice sys-
tem: Her directorial debut feature, from
1998 (with Jonathan Stack and Wilbert Ri-
deau), “The Farm: Angola, USA,” goes in-side a Louisiana state penitentiary on the
site of a former slave plantation; earlier this
year, she oversaw three episodes to the Net-
flix docu-series “The Innocence Files,” di-
recting one herself.
“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” creates discom-
fort and suspense in part by playing off the
discrepancy between the horror of the
crimes and the placidity of the suburban lo-
cales. Asked if the series, the first true-
crime series overseen entirely by her, was
another examination of systemic dysfunc-
tion, Garbus hesitated.
“In some ways there were systemic fail-
ures in the investigations of these murders
and rapes — first the rapes, of course, were-
n’t taken seriously enough,” she said. “But
thinking about Michelle, there’s a larger
story about a society of avoidance we are
living in. There is not a lot of time for intro-
spection, which can be painful and hard.
“Michelle was not alone; there are so
many Americans from richest to the strug-
gling who rely on prescription drugs and
are addicted. The silence around it makes
things quite worse.”
It’s hard not to wonder how Garbus, her-
self, manages to maintain a modicum of
sanity and forbearance.
“Avoidance,” Garbus said, laughing. “I
don’t have a procrastination thing, so I can
kind of complete, which I think is really im-
portant because otherwise things will
haunt you. And my kids keep me grounded
and give me tremendous joy, and so I man-
age to compartmentalize.” (She lives in
Brooklyn with her two children and Dan Co-
gan, her husband and partner in the produc-
tion company Story Syndicate.)
Exploring vastly different subjects simul-
taneously helps, too. Garbus is working on a
project about voter suppression with Lisa
Cortés, as well as a film about the French
oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who died
in 1997. But even that isn’t all fun and under-
water frolics.
“He was diving and being paid by oil com-
panies,” she said. “He’s involved in some
level of destruction of the sea floor. But as
time goes on, he becomes a totally different
person, this extremely important voice in
terms of conservation.”
“That shift, like the Nina Simone shift,”
she added, referring to the singer’s activism
during the civil rights movements, “is inter-
esting to me.”Looking Into a Hunt for Stolen Lives
Liz Garbus adapts a best seller
on the Golden State Killer.
By ELISABETH VINCENTELLIBRYAN DERBALLA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESROBYN VAN SWANK/HBOJESSICA KOURKOUNIS/NETFLIXLiz Garbus, top, who has
turned a book by Michelle
McNamara, center, into a
new HBO series. Above,
Garbus with Amy Ryan,
who articulates McNamara’s
voice in the series.An HBO series tracks
Michelle McNamara’s
quest to solve the case.