I Am The Night: 10 Things Fans Totally Missed

Created by Sam Sheridan, TNT’s six-part miniseries I Am The Night drew middling ratings and reviews upon its release in January of 2019. Starring Chris Pine and India Eisley, the series tracks the mysterious past of Fauna Hodel, a teenage girl in 1960s Los Angeles desperate to discover where she comes from and who her parents are.

The confusing and complicated crime story is very easy to get lost in due to the circuitous twists and hairpin turns it takes with each passing episode. Even fervent fans of the show have some difficulty keeping up with certain details.

10 Original Title

While the show is primarily centered on the infamous unsolved Black Dahlia (Elizabeth Short) murder case of 1947, I Am The Night was originally titled One Day She’ll Darken after the 2008 memoir One Day She’ll Darken: The Mysterious Beginnings of Fauna Hodel.

In missing this detail, fans failed to realize this story was less about the central murder case of the Black Dahlia and more about the mysterious birth certificate of Fauna Hodel (Eisley) and the dogged pursuit of her true identity.

9 Patty Jenkins

While fans should know that Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins helmed the first two episodes of I Am The Night (reuniting with Chris Pine in the process and collaborating with her husband/showrunner Sam Sheridan), her inspiration to tell the story isn’t as well known.

According to an interview with Indiewire, Jenkins almost declined the project due to the dark subject. “I walked away from my lunch with her (Hodel) overwhelmed by the darkness of the story, thinking I don’t know if I can take this on – yet the light overshadowed the dark because of Fauna Hodel.”

8 Real-Life Characters

Unless fans are familiar with the real-life criminal case, they will not be able to differentiate between fictional and nonfictional characters in I Am the Night.

In addition to Fauna Hodel, her vile incestuous grandfather George Hodel (Jefferson Mays) was a real controversial doctor in the 1940s. Other nonfictional characters include Fauna’s adoptive mother, Jimmi Lee Greenwade (Golden Brooks), and Tamar Hodel (Jamie Anne Allman), Fauna’s biological mother who gave her up for adoption before feeling to Hawaii. Also, Big Momma (Ebony Jo-Ann) was Jimmi Lee’s real biological mother. Even the gorgeous Sowden house was a real place.

7 Jay Singletary

Given the number of characters based on real-life people, fans missed the fact that several others were partial or total fabrications. For instance, Jay Singeltary is an amalgam of every film noir gumshoe going back to the 1940s. Singletary was created to help marry the memoir with a dramatic narrative series.

Other fabricated characters on the show include Jay’s tertiary foe, Sepp (Dylan Smith), as well as the shady LAPD Detective Billis (Yul Vazquez). Corinna Hodel (Connie Nielsen) is a substitute for George’s temporary real-life wife, Dorothy Hodel.

6 Story Inspired Unreleased Film

Even the most ardent fans of I Am the Night are unaware that the entire life story of Fauna Hodel inspired an unreleased movie made in 1991 entitled Pretty Hattie’s Baby.

Hodel earned story credit for the film, which was adapted into a screenplay by Rod McCall. The great Alfre Woodard starred as Hattie, a black woman who adopts a white baby whose birth certificate claims she’s biracial. Also starring Charles S. Dutton, Jill Clayburgh, and Tess Harper, the film has yet to be released 20 years later.

5 Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece

During the fourth episode, Happening, Corinna Hodel is seen assisting a group of artists by sitting still as they cut pieces of clothes from her outfit. Those born after 1964 likely had this reference fly over their head.

The artistic exercise is lifted from Yoko Ono’s 1964 experimental exhibit, “Cut Piece.” Ono first debuted the performance piece in Kyoto in 1964 and has since debuted across the globe, most recently in 2003 (Paris).

4 Additional Directors

In addition to Patty Jenkins, both Carl Franklin and Victoria Mahoney directed the successive episodes of I Am The Night. While that’s easy enough to spot in the credits, fans may not make the connection between the show and the director’s previous work.

For instance, Franklin directed the 1995 film Denzel Washington movie Devil in a Blue Dress, a 1948 detective story set in Los Angeles around the time of the infamous Black Dahlia case. Victoria Mahoney’s debut feature Yelling at the Sky also chronicles a troubled young woman dealing with an abusive father.

3 Matthew Jensen

While it’s easy to notice the reunion of Patty Jenkins and Chris Pine on the show, it’s much harder to spot the presence of Jenkins’ longtime cinematographer, Matthew Jensen.

Jensen shot the first two episodes of I Am the Night, directed by Jenkins. Jensen also served as DP on Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman 1984, lending a shorthand between the two collaborators in a way that marks Jenkins’ distinct visual style.

2 The Ending

After all the knotty twists and confounding turns the series took to get to its revelatory finale, many fans were still left scratching their heads. This is due to the discrepancy between the facts of the real case and the fictionalization of the series.

In the end, Fauna learns that she is the byproduct of an incestuous affair between George Hodel and his daughter, Tamar Hodel. This has not been confirmed in reality, although many still believe it to be true. According to Fauna’s uncle Steve Hodel in a YT comment, the series is “95%  fiction and about 5% based on” Fauna’s memoir.

1 Companion Podcast

Released in the middle of the miniseries, a tie-in podcast called Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and The Black Dahlia was produced by TNT and Cadence13.

Running from February 13th to April 3rd, 2019, the eight-part podcast is presented by Fauna Hodel’s great-granddaughters, Yvette Gentile and Rasha Pecoraro. The two women detail their family history at great length with interviews among several relatives, shedding new light on the case. Root of Evil was nominated for best crime podcast of 2020 by iHeart Radio Podcast Awards.