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Ethan Hawke's newest FX show The Lowdown has sparked interest among viewers about the actor himself, Ethan Hawke, who plays behind character Lee Raybon, a tough-talking, real-to-life reporter digging into Tulsa's underbelly. The reason is obvious now: Raybon was based on Lee Roy Chapman, an actual citizen journalist, activist, and historian from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Even as the series constructs an imaginative account around Raybon's risky investigations and moral quandaries, its larger conceit, to reveal newly uncovered facts about the history of Tulsa, is nothing but borrowed wholesale from Chapman's exemplary archival work and local history enthusiasm.
But one thing should be kept in mind that The Lowdown is not Chapman's life. The series takes only artistic motivation from his work. Chapman never experienced violent conspiracies and noir-inspired trysts like Raybon experiences on television. Rather, his real work was research, documentation, and reporting that shook the memory of Oklahoma's past.
Who was Lee Roy Chapman
Lee Roy Chapman (1969–2015) was an artist, author, and public historian from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who was committed to recording Oklahoma's hidden and painful pasts. Frontier and IJNet say that Chapman was a citizen journalist who uncovered hidden stories of race, politics, and identity in Tulsa.
His 2011 investigative series, "The Nightmare of Dreamland: Tate Brady and the Battle for Greenwood," for This Land Press exposed ties between founder Tate Brady and the Ku Klux Klan. The story was one of what inspired Tulsa to its final decision to name Brady Street and the Brady Arts District after him.
Chapman's show made him an independent teller of the truth and "truthstorian" to the public. His co-workers and friends just referred to him as a man who was ferociously committed to truth and accuracy, a reporter who dug through archives, flea markets, and dusty libraries for Tulsa's hidden stories.
How Lee Roy Chapman inspired The Lowdown
Creator Sterlin Harjo was attracted to his own long-standing fascination with Chapman's archival efforts. Harjo has spoken about how Chapman's efforts, that is, his constant pushing of forgotten bits of Oklahoma history onto the cultural agenda, were an idea germination for The Lowdown.
Lee Raybon, the hero of the show, is a stand-in for Chapman's harrying mind and commitment to staying on track, although one ratcheted up by the show in nefarious, fictional ways. Raybon, in The Lowdown, is a "truthstorian", a reporter who uncovers hidden local history to fight corruption and his own ethical failings.
The character is obviously based on Chapman's actual commitment to uncovering overlooked stories, but the series added drama by adding made-up conflict, conspiracy, and crime motivation with no bearing on actual events in Chapman's life.
Chapman's real legacy
Along with his journalism, Chapman also founded the Center for Public Secrets in 2008, an Oklahoma repository in Tulsa that tries to keep "overlooked, neglected, and misunderstood" Oklahoma history alive. The center carries on where he left off today, IJNet continues, charting local history that mainstream repositories used to sweep under the carpet.
Authors, historians, and artists who shared his independent nature and singularity of intent valued his work. Colleagues and friends, as they were quoted in The Read Frontier, remembered Chapman to be "a truth-teller committed to revealing history's forgotten voices."
Through previous humble conditions and personal adversity, he persisted in seeking facts, shattering myths, and reimagining Tulsa's perception of history.
Fact vs. fiction in The Lowdown
While Lee Raybon, played by Ethan Hawke, is as inquiring and ethic-conscious as is Chapman, the series takes monumental amounts of artistic liberties with the history. The Lowdown places Raybon in film noir-styled, frequently danger-laden standoffs with political crime and murder investigations involving all inventions.
Chapman's real work was archival, journalism, and history in substance, not criminal investigative. And the series's use of "truthstorian" and in Raybon's title to this piece is fictionalized but truth-telling by Chapman. FX and Harjo have not sold The Lowdown as a rigid biographical recount but a fictionalized recounting based on the substance of Chapman's life and Tulsa's buried histories.
In short, The Lowdown plagiarizes Lee Roy Chapman's life inspiration as a springboard for its premise but gives a suspenseful, fictional spin to that premise. Chapman's digging up documents and efforts to lay out Tulsa's beneath-the-surface histories brought the show's primary concepts, truth, memory, and moral nuance to life.
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Lee Raybon might perhaps live in some noir duplicity of his own life, but his code of honor, that stern insistence on confronting ugly truths, forever resides in Chapman's authentic legacy. The Lowdown is therefore as much tribute as memoir to Chapman's abiding faith: that history, called loudly enough, can redeem a city's conscience.
Also read: The Lowdown release schedule: When do new episodes of the Ethan Hawke series come out?
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