Mike Makowsky has a confession to make. Prior to creating the Netflix limited series Death by Lightning, James Garfield was never on his personal Mount Rushmore of favorite U.S. presidents. “I knew almost nothing about James Garfield, aside from dimly recalling that he had been assassinated,” the writer-director reveals to Gold Derby. To be fair, that’s how most Americans remember the nation’s 20th commander in chief, who was shot by disgruntled supporter Charles J. Guiteau mere months after taking office and died not long after.
But seven years and one Emmy-contending series later, Makowsky can profess to being a Garfield expert, and he’s got the collection of history books and tchotchkes — including bobbleheads and Pez dispensers — to prove it. Debuting on Netflix in November, Death by Lightning has been quietly gaining ground in Gold Derby’s Emmy standings in recent weeks for both the show itself and star Michael Shannon, who offers a typically layered portrayal of Garfield.
“It’s just been a privilege to bring Garfield back into the consciousness in some small way,” Makowsky says now. “There is nothing dusty about the story of James Garfield. It has this contemporary resonance to it.”
Gold Derby: Prior to Death by Lightning, you made another period piece in the form of the HBO movie, Bad Education. But that took place in the early 2000s — this goes much futher back.
Mike Makowsky: Yeah, it was never necessarily my ambition to tell a story that took place in 1881! This all started in 2018 when I was at the “Buy two, get one free” table at my local Barnes & Noble, and I needed a third book, so I picked up Candice Millard’s book about the Garfield assassination, thinking: “I’d like to be on Jeopardy! one day — let me educate myself.” And then I ended up reading the entire book in one sitting! I was blown away; his story was tragic and moving, but also deeply funny. It just seemed too crazy to be true, and by the time I finished reading, I called up my agent and said: “I think I might need to try and make a TV show about the Garfield assassination.” And he was like, “F–k you, dude. That’s the least commercial idea you could ever bring me.” [Laughs]
But I was like a dog with a bone, and this story became my Roman empire. So I got on the phone with Candace and embarked on this journey. What always struck me about this story is that there’s an urgency to it, because it’s ultimately about two men at the opposite ends of the American social spectrum in a pre-fame era. We’re almost better equipped to understand what happened now than we were in 1881 — like why would this guy Guiteau [played by Matthew Macfadyen] have ever been compelled to kill his hero? There are so many colorful details and characters that telling it asa straightforward docudrama would almost be doing a disservice to the story.
Garfield and Guiteau spend much of the narrative apart, but they do have a pivotal handshake early on in the series. What was the importance of that moment for you?
I took a little bit of historical liberty there. Guiteau was not actually present at the time of the Chicago convention that made Garfield the Republican candidate. But it felt important to give them that moment. You’ve got one man who is literally on the cusp of falling upward the presidency before he can even realize what’s going on, and the other man is at absolute rock bottom and about to be institutionalized, Both were born into abject poverty, but Garfield is in many ways like a poster boy for the American dream. He rises upward purely on merit and Guiteau hopes that he can do the same, but instead just desperately courts greatness to catastrophic ends.
I had asked Michael Shannon this as well, but assassination is a relevant topic again and there’s a different tenor around the discussion now in the wake of cases like Luigi Mangione. Death by Lightning doesn’t excuse Guiteau, but it does suggest that he didn’t get the help he needed. In your mind, where’s the line between empathy and endorsement when it comes to depicting political assassins?
I don’t think that the show is at all an endorsement of political violence; it makes eminently clear that what Guiteau is doing is destructive and has a corrosive effect on our national spirit and collective humanity. Yet he was also clearly mentally ill, and when you have an actor like Matthew playing him, you can’t help but feel empathy because he’s so great at playing characters you can’t help but feel for in spite of themselves. There’s great tragedy to the fact that people at that time were not equipped to grapple with mental illness; instead men like Guiteau were roundly rejected, stigmatized, and humiliated.
Whether it’s true or not, I chose to take certain motivators that Guiteau alleged at face value. I believe that, at his core, he did want to help our country and then just got just staggeringly lost along the way. There were these gatekeepers who prevented him from helping as he tried to put his best foot forward. The version of Guiteau that we present is a person who is gripped by his zealotry, and should have gotten the help he needed. But he’s obviously still a monster, right? He robbed us of a potentially generational leader, and is very much the villain of the piece. It’s all quite tragic.
In another case of taking historical liberties, you invent a last scene where Garfield’s widow, Lucretia — played by Betty Gilpin — visits Guiteau before his execution.
Yeah, there’s no historical record of a meeting like that, but when you have an actress as great as Betty is you want to give her that moment. Lucretia was every bit her husband’s intellectual equal; they met at a university they were both attending where Garfield was the night custodian and she was the head of the school paper. At that point, she was only the second First Lady to have attended college at all. And she couldn’t even vote for her husband! After Garfield gets shot, we were able to have her step into that void and deliver these powerhouse monologues. It was deeply satisfying to be able to write those for Betty.
What’s the significance of Guiteau’s final words before his hanging?
If people know anything about the Garfield saga, it probably comes via the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins, which features Guiteau singing, “I Am Going to the Lordy,” which is a poem he wrote in real life. It was interesting to me to write a character who even in his final moments has seemingly learned nothing about reality. He’s so proud of this little poem, and believes it’s going to have some effect on the audience that will cement his legacy even though it kind of sucks! That’s why we give Matthew that last moment of clarity to play — Guiteau is finally able to discern that he’s not going to be remembered fondly. Another little bit of historical license, but one that felt important and meaningful to me.
Nick Offerman is terrific as reluctant vice president-turned-even more reluctant president, Chester A. Arthur. Was he always your first choice? And could we get a Chester Arthur miniseries next?
From the moment I started writing Chester A. Arthur, I had Nick’s voice in my head. Obviously he’s one of the funniest men on the planet, but he’s also capable of doing a lot more than just playing Ron Swanson. As for a sequel series, all I’ll say is that it was incredibly difficult to get a four episode limited series about James Garfield made! It almost feels like we almost pulled off a heist, and I just couldn’t be luckier that Netflix agreed to make this crazy show.
And if anybody wants to make the Zachary Taylor story, I’m available! I would love to see that show was well. But it’s harder than ever for these period stories to cut through the marketplace and attract eyeballs. Hopefully our show will be a positive contribution toward getting more of these things made in the future, but it was difficult. Maybe after this show, people will be lining up to see the further adventures of Chester Arthur, although he was only president for a very short time, and did a couple of less-than-savory things while in office as well that we didn’t have a chance to profile. He also died less than a year after leaving office, so it might be a bit of an anticlimactic journey. [Laughs]
Now that you’re a James Garfield expert, is there anything about his presidency that you think we should look towards today?
He was an outspoken, progressive advocate for racial equality and universal public education education opportunities as a means of achieving true racial equality in our country. Civil service reform was his major battle while he was in office, and really his lasting legacy is that in the wake of his death, Arthur passed these landmark civil service laws to end political patronage by which scores of government appointees were only hired based on the transaction of money and favors and loyalty tests. Without getting too into the weeds on politics today, we’re facing a real existential moment in the history of our civil service, and there’s a lot going on right now that’s very scary. Maybe we’d all do well to take a page out of Garfield’s book.
