“The Lowdown,” FX’s shaggy noir comedy that stars Ethan Hawke as a self-described “truthstorian” — part dogged private eye, part muckraking freelance journalist — sprang from the imagination of Sterlin Harjo, a filmmaker and documentarian who was also responsible for the beloved FX comedy series “Reservation Dogs” (which he created with Taika Waititi).
Harjo was inspired by Lee Roy Chapman, a Tulsa, Oklahoma-based writer and historian who linked the town’s founder to both the Ku Klux Klan and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Harjo and Chapman worked together at the This Land Press, an independent newspaper in Tulsa.
“I saw that journalism and telling the truth and story could change a community, and somewhere deep in me, I just wanted to honor that,” Harjo told TheWrap for our latest digital cover story.
Especially in the later episodes of “Reservation Dogs,” Harjo had begun to play around with genre. “What I came to learn is you can say so much in genre that you can’t say just say in a slice-of-life [drama] or whatever you’re doing. I’ve always loved noir and I think that Tulsa is a perfect place to set a modern noir,” said Harjo.
After Harjo wrote the pilot for “The Lowdown” (then known as “The Sensitive Kind”), he passed the script to Hawke, who had been on “Reservation Dogs.” It was “under the guise” of getting notes, “because at this point we are friends and we read each other’s scripts.”
“I have one note for this screenplay, and it’s a big one — I should play that part,” Hawke remembered telling Harjo.
Harjo and the stars of “The Lowdown” — not only Hawke but Keith David, who plays a competing private eye who becomes an unlikely ally; Kyle MacLachlan, who plays a shadowy businessman running for governor; and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays MacLachlan’s sister-in-law whose husband (Tim Blake Nelson) died under mysterious circumstances — were gathered in Hollywood on a Saturday night to talk about the show’s inaugural season.
It was the night of the seventh game of the Western Conference NBA semifinals; Harjo was rooting for the Oklahoma City Thunder, but Hawke just wanted to know who would ultimately play the New York Knicks. (It was the San Antonio Spurs.)
Tripplehorn, who was born in Tulsa, knew that she wanted to be a part of the show immediately. (“Jeanne is Tulsa royalty,” Hawke confirmed.) Tripplehorn remembered reading Harjo (and Chapman, the character that inspired Hawke) in This Land.
“Once [Harjo] said ‘Tulsa noir,’ I got it immediately. If you’re from Tulsa, there’s a layer that you really get. There’s such a dark underbelly to Tulsa, things that didn’t come to light for decades, things that were happening around me, but when I grew up, it wasn’t a part of our history,” said Tripplehorn. “I found out about things later. I found out about the Tulsa massacre in 1997 in the New York Times and I went home, and I talked to my grandfather and my grandpa, and I said, ‘Nobody talks about this.’”
“Noir is my favorite genre,” said David, who days after our chat would receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, attended by John Carpenter (who directed him in “The Thing” and “They Live”), John C. McGinley (David’s close friend who starred with him in Oliver Stone’s “Platoon”) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
When David read it, he thought, I love this. “Because that was not immediately stated, you knew the character had to go deeper somewhere. This wasn’t it. I was like, I love this, I love this,” David explained. And he’s right — David’s character goes to some unexpected, oddly emotional places in the first season of “The Lowdown.” It goes without saying that if you haven’t watched it yet, please correct the error in your ways. God is judging you.
For MacLachlan, the appeal was also immediately apparent.
“It was so clear, when you read the script, the texture, the layers. I responded to the voices of the characters. No one sounded exactly the same. You knew exactly who you were reading, what they were saying, what they meant. This voice, this person who is creating this ultra-reality, I said, I want to be a part of that world,” MacLachlan said.
The experience of reading the “Lowdown” scripts, for MacLachlan, was unique.
“Often times you get something and you read it and you don’t really know where it’s going to go. And you keep your fingers crossed that it’s going to be interesting, that it’s going to develop and it’s going to grow. But that’s not always the case, as we all know. In this case, it was beyond anything I could have imagined,” said MacLachlan.
Hawke remembers reading the first scene between him and David set in a local Tulsa diner. He can’t recall the specifics of the scene but he does remember the feeling that it gave him.
“It was instantly hypnotic, mysterious and strange — who are these two guys? What is their relationship? I have no idea. And we didn’t really have the answers, we just knew we liked these people. And we knew Tulsa was interesting,” Hawke said.
He paused and Hawke nodded to Harjo, “You’re a wonderful writer. And we were going to find it.”
Harjo admitted he doesn’t know how other creators and showrunners make television, but he couldn’t imagine doing it any other way than the way they made “The Lowdown.”
“You have these amazing actors who have these deep thougths about these characters. They do so much work. All of a sudden the show becomes alive as you’re making it. I think you can feel that in the show. It’s such a good process. If I were miserable and a tyrant making this stuff, I wouldn’t want to do it,” Harjo said. “It’s such a collaborative process and we’re in it together.”
Every day before they started shooting, he’d get a call from Hawke with a suggestion, or pitching something different than what they had ready to go. Harjo would be elated. “That’s way better,” he’d often tell Hawke.
The “Lowdown” team took a moment to reflect on how the first season concludes.
“I appreciate that how the show ends isn’t on a close-up of any of our characters,” Hawke said. He gestured to his incredible cast. “It ends with a big wide shot of the city of Tulsa. That’s what the show’s about. Tulsa has all of America’s wounds right on the surface.”
“The culture has changed. We happen to be there to tell the story at the same time where a lot of people are doing a lot of great work. We have friends and people who are consultants on the show that are doing all of this work in that town to make it what it is and make sure that the truth doesn’t get buried again,” said Harjo.
This, to Hawke, is what being a “truthstorian” is all about.
“You can’t have forgiveness until you have accountability. We have to live in a shared truth where we can live in reality and then we can heal. But if we’re not living in the same reality, we can’t heal,” explained Hawke.
“The Lowdown” Season 1 is now streaming on Hulu.
