The period setting required McDonald and Kendrick to reconstruct Alcala’s Dating Game appearance for today’s viewers. “He’s charming by 1978 standards, but 2024 audiences would watch that and be like, ‘He’s a serial killer,’ ” McDonald says. “We wanted to make sure that modern audiences basically got to experience the same kind of emotional journey that Sheryl did, so we fictionalized his dialogue in service of pairing it a little bit more with modern sensibilities.”
Sheryl also got a slight update, with inspiration from another episode of The Dating Game. “I saw one … where there was a woman who was asking questions that were clearly combative,” McDonald says. “She was trying to pick a fight with the host, saw the show as sexist, and she really disapproved of it, and she was making that disapproval known by the questions she was asking.” McDonald transposed that bachelorette’s style onto Sheryl’s character — fictionalization with a core of truth.
How is Rodney Alcala caught in Woman of the Hour?
Alcala is undone by Amy (Best), the runaway he picks up in San Gabriel. After driving her into the middle of the desert, he assaults her and — in a perverse moment of self-pity — breaks down into tears. “The story where the young drifter wakes up after having been attacked, and she looks over at him, and he’s crying — there’s a way in which I still don’t quite know what to make of that,” McDonald says. “I don’t think these sorts of people are really capable of empathy. So I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s probably something more [like] shame or embarrassment on some level.”
Whatever motivated Alcala’s tears, it gives Amy an opportunity to escape. She flips the script on her would-be killer and begs him not to tell anyone about what has happened, which somehow convinces him to spare her. Then, once they pull into a gas station, she runs for help.
Deep in the desert, Alcala is finally arrested. It’s a landscape that Kendrick returns to multiple times throughout the film, especially in her depictions of the murders. “It felt important to me to connect these women to nature for several reasons, but one of which was, I kind of wanted to put them in places that spoke to the vastness of their life beyond this moment,” she says. “It’s a 90-minute movie. There’s only so much screen time that everybody can have. And I wanted — in spite of the way that we’re meeting them — I wanted their environment to reflect the beauty and the fullness of their whole life before that and what they should have had after.” 
Leah Gallo
What happens to Sheryl in Woman of the Hour?
Sheryl, as played by Kendrick, lives after suffering through a date with Alcala, barely avoiding his violent nature. It’s a small victory for women in the midst of his crime spree. After appearing on The Dating Game, Sheryl decides she isn’t cut out for Hollywood and moves home — but not before standing up for herself one more time, with her pushy neighbor (Pete Holmes).
“Ian and I were debating whether maybe there’s a little bit of dialogue or a conversation between Sheryl and her neighbor at the end of the movie, and nothing was feeling right,” Kendrick recalls. “And Ian suddenly suggested like, ‘Well, what if Sheryl just stands her ground in the hallway, and he has to move around her?’ I think I threw my highlighter across the room — I was so excited.”
It’s a moment that defines the final act of Woman of the Hour. McDonald “has this great way of illustrating the complexity of a victory that’s small, but it’s meaningful to that character,” Kendrick says. Amy and Sheryl, for all the pain they’ve been through, will push on.
