SPOILER ALERT: This story contains delicate spoilers for “Lady of the Hour,” now streaming on Netflix.
“Lady of the Hour” screenwriter Ian McDonald faced a new challenge in his sophomore role: telling a true crime story that felt “crucial and useful.” Fortunately, the stranger-than-fiction story of Rodney Alcala, who won “The Courting Game” during a 1978 appearance amid a spate of serial killings, was ready for examination.
“There are so many things out there where a serial killer attacks a group of women and there is absolutely no reason to tell it,” says McDonald. “There was something about it that felt like it could very well be socially and culturally related now. You often hear people say, ‘Rodney is like Ted Bundy,’ which I feel is implying that he is handsome and well-mannered. But he was really very different: he was a chameleon. He was good at pretending he was something he wasn’t. That’s exactly what I found interesting, because it was the culture that routinely seemed otherwise, and that empowered him.”
Directed by Anna Kendrick, who also stars as Cheryl, an actress who chooses Alcala to win the game show, the film premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival and premiered on Netflix on October 18. tops the streaming service’s list of most-watched films, which could very well be a testament to a compelling story combined with unconventional storytelling.
McDonald says an important factor in crafting the script was narrowing down which victim interactions he wanted to portray, as Alcala could have killed up to 130 people.
“That was the thing that changed the most while creating this,” he says. “It was less about ‘Which patient might we want to write about in relation to the specific person?’ and even more so that the way you open and close a film says a lot about the film’s intentions thematically and has a big dramatic impact. You can do this chronologically, where you start with the first murder and then move on to the most recent. You can do this thematically and find specific events that you feel build on each other in a revealing or character-based way. How does each crime reveal something new about the killer? It was a cross between the last two – that’s where we landed.”
In recreating the murders, McDonald and Kendrick are determined not to show a gratuitous amount of violence, but also not to sanitize McDonald’s horrific crimes.
“Any of the moments of violence were something that really agonized for me because this is not (David Fincher’s influential 1995 crime thriller) ‘Seven.’ I really like ‘Seven,’ but in this movie, just because it’s a true crime story, you use the information that these were real people,” he says. “That they had families and their worlds were taken from them. You just have to remember to do it in a way that responsibly reveals the killer for who he was, and shows exactly the darkness he represents, without being gratuitous. It’s a difficult line to walk, but it was something I took very seriously. There was a lot of, ‘Add this line, shorten this line’ – chopping and changing just to make sure the story was all there.
This empathy for the victims also resonated with the script’s point of view, as the characters interacted with Alcala’s increasingly sinister nice-guy act. One standout scene — in which Cheryl leaves a bar with Alcala and then walks away as he casually follows her — was written with empathy by McDonald.
“Men also find themselves in compromising situations, usually with other men,” he says. “When things suddenly feel strange and uncomfortable, and possibly threatening. I have been in some scary situations, and on this level, I was able to significantly draw on my personal experience. But it’s not the same either, because I’m 6’1”, 200 pounds. It will definitely always be different. At this point, it all comes down to simply listening. In the first few levels of the script, I reached out to a group of friends and said, “Hey, can we have lunch? Can you tell me stories about your experiences when you went on a date and it felt threatening or upsetting? What was that really like?” This is something that continued to be refined throughout the development of the script.”
In addition to this engagement, McDonald says Kendrick was also an active participant in exploring the film’s themes with him.
“There was a scene between the hitchhiker and Rodney,” says McDonald. “Anna came up to the script and said, ‘I really like that you’re writing for her with a lot of company, but you can give her less, because now she’s being very frank and kind of combative with him. The truth is that now we have to do that little dance where we are polite and placate, but without contradicting them. At this point, you just listen to people who have experiences that you don’t have and try to be honest and make sure that finds its way into the document.
Watch the trailer for “Lady of the Hour” below.