Today in Oh God I Really Needed Some Good News, Gal Gadot will star in a limited series about Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood It Girl and inventor who developed frequency-hopping radio signals, or as we know it: wifi. (She shares the patent with George Antheil, they had an amazing work relationship, Lainey and Duana should investigate.) Hedy Lamarr has had a resurgence lately, as science nerds have resuscitated her reputation as a scientist and inventor—even after they broke up, Howard Hughes provided Lamarr with a laboratory, so great was his respect for her acumen. She was lately featured on Drunk History, and there is a fabulous documentary, Bombshell, about her life, her Hollywood career, and her contributions to science. You can stream Bombshell on Netflix, or, if you’re in Canada, the CBC documentary channel is airing it on 8/22.
Gadot will star in and executive produce the series, along with showrunner Sarah Treem, of The Affair fame (I look forward to fighting with Duana over who gets to cover this series). Diane Kruger has also been trying to get a show about Hedy Lamarr off the ground, but that project seems stalled. Honestly, I hope they both make series about Lamarr, she deserves it. Our world wouldn’t work without her. Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS—it’s all dependent on Lamarr’s work. Not to mention what she did for aviation! But then she was also a huge Hollywood star! And besides being a big science brain, she was amazingly, scathingly witty. She delivered one of the most devastating reads of all time: “Any girl can be what is called ‘glamorous,’ all she has to do is stand still and look stupid.” And then there’s the part where Lamarr, who was Jewish, pretended to be her own maid and fled her Nazi-adjacent first husband in the dead of night on a bicycle. This woman lived a LIFE. So I’m glad this will be a series and not a two hour movie; the bicycle escape is an entire episode unto itself. A single movie cannot contain all of Hedy Lamarr’s magnificence.
