New life for a late Peter Bogdanovich film, plus the week’s best movies in L.A.
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Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Because of Sundance, I don’t think I ever mentioned the Oscar nominations here. (They happened.) On the day of the announcement, I spoke to Yura Borisov, the Russian actor nominated for his work in “Anora.”
This week we released another episode of The Envelope podcast. I spoke to RaMell Ross, director and co-writer of “Nickel Boys,” which was nominated for adapted screenplay and best picture.
Ross spoke about how he and co-writer Joslyn Barnes approached adapting Colson Whitehead’s novel, saying, “I think the more powerful the book, the more concise, the more economical the book, the more its mythology is rendered in every sentence, the more difficult it is to adapt it to cinema, because you can’t do everything. And if you take things out, you’re losing the power of the gestalt, essentially, of the larger gesture that they made. And so, yeah, Joslyn Barnes and I tried to figure out how to get to the spirit or the essence and then sort of leave the book alone and say Colson did his thing.”
In the same podcast episode, Yvonne Villarreal spoke to Arianne Phillips, nominated for her costume design on “A Complete Unknown.”
And both Glenn Whipp and Mary McNamara looked into the apparent collapse of the awards campaign for “Emilia Pérez” following an utter PR disaster from star Karla Sofía Gascón.
Bogdanovich’s ‘Squirrels to the Nuts,’ rediscovered
On Saturday at the Egyptian Theatre, the American Cinematheque will present the first screening of the newly restored director’s cut of Peter Bogdanovich’s final fiction feature. Released in 2015 as “She’s Funny That Way,” the film is now going by its original, intended title of “Squirrels to the Nuts,” a reference to Ernst Lubitsch’s 1946 movie “Cluny Brown.”
Actor Kathryn Hahn and other guests to be announced will be at the Egyptian for a Q&A moderated by Colleen Camp.
The origins of the director’s cut are complex — a saga unto itself. In 2020, James Kenney, an English professor in New York, discovered a curious videotape on EBay of “She’s Funny” that turned out to actually contain a largely finished version of Bogdanovich’s original cut. He reached out to Bogdanovich and was able to return it to the director.
“It’s crazy because nobody was supposed to have it,” said Oren Segal, who was Bogdanovich’s manager from 2008 until the director’s death in 2022. “It supposedly didn’t exist.”
“Obviously it would be impossible to think, as a huge Bogdanovich fan, that one day he’d be calling my house and thanking me profusely,” said Kenney. “And then we’d grow a friendship and somehow I’d be integral to the release of his last film, which, I would argue, supports the theory that he hadn’t lost his touch.”
In the film Owen Wilson plays Arnold Albertson, a Broadway director who has a habit of sleeping with escorts and then staking them money to do something else with their lives. After his encounter with Izzy Patterson (Imogen Poots, with a broad Brooklyn accent that now reads as shades of “Anora”), he enables her to pursue her dream of being an actor.
Izzy ends up cast in Albert’s latest production, alongside the director’s wife (Hahn), plus a star with whom she is having an affair (Rhys Ifans). Jennifer Aniston plays a bawdy therapist and the cast also includes Will Forte, Debi Mazar, Richard Lewis, Michael Shannon and Bogdanovich veterans Camp, Austin Pendleton, George Morfogen, Tatum O’Neal and Cybill Shepherd.
Once the director’s cut had been returned to him, Bogdanovich set to work on restoring his vision of the movie. After his death, Segal and Louise Stratton, Bogdanovich’s ex-wife and the film’s co-writer, took it upon themselves to see the project through, enlisting help from producer Frank Marshall, Adria Petty with the Tom Petty estate and music supervisor George Drakoulias, who was also a credited producer on the original release of the film.
The story of how “Squirrels to the Nuts” became “She’s Funny That Way” is perhaps a more conventional one: Following a poorly received test screening, producers on the film had Bogdanovich recut it and change the music, also adding a framing device involving Illeana Douglas and a finale cameo from Quentin Tarantino as himself.
“The producers asked for something and he delivered what they asked for,” sad Segal. “But he had a director’s cut, and the director’s cut is what he really wanted to go out into the world. And so this was truly his last effort, honestly, his dying wish, what he wanted before his passing, and something that we worked nonstop on to deliver this for him. And it was a lot of work.”
The team had to reverse-engineer the movie. After discovering that the postproduction house from which the tape originated still had the original files for the film, they then worked to put together the deliverables to give the film a final polish. Lionsgate contributed some funds to the project, with Petty and Marshall putting in money as well.
The new version of “Squirrels to the Nuts” will be available on VOD later this month.
“It’s everything that Peter wanted,” said Segal. “Every song, all the shots, just everything. I wanted him to have this moment. I know he would be so happy.”
Kenney described the difference between the two films as “night and day,” adding that the new version is “a graceful film made by a major filmmaker where the other one was this sort of cut-up choppy thing made under duress.”
Kenney, who has hosted a series of screenings of the version of the film he discovered, added, “It might be nice for some people to sit back and watch a movie where they can just laugh. I wouldn’t call it an art film. It’s a knockabout screwball comedy, but I think it’s definitely a work of art.”
Petty had gotten to know Bogdanovich while he was making “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the 2007 documentary on her father, musician Tom Petty, and remained in touch after the project was done. (She and her dad, both movie buffs, shared many of Bogdanovich’s books on filmmaking.) Bogdanovich would call her regularly as he was working on the “Squirrels” project in the time before his death.
“It’s a romantic comedy of the highest order,” Petty said of the filmmaker’s vision of the film. “Everything that he studied from [Billy] Wilder and [Ernst] Lubitsch is in there. And even though some moments fall flatter than others, it’s pretty great to see some of the greatest actors of that time when the film was being made execute something that harkens back to that kind of storytelling.”
For everyone involved in bringing “Squirrels to the Nuts” back to life, this has been a final gift to a cherished, departed friend.
“I feel in some way he’s going to know it got finished,” said Petty.
Bogdanovich’s final film, a 2018 documentary on Buster Keaton, “The Great Buster: A Celebration,” is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel. The New Beverly Cinema will be screening two more Bogdanovich films, 1972’s “What’s Up, Doc?” and 1992’s “Noises Off,” Feb. 14-16.
‘Dinner in America’ in L.A.
The film “Dinner in America,” written and directed by Adam Carter Rehmeier, has become one of the more curious case studies of recent years. After premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and being self-released in 2022, the movie has a fandom that’s only grown over the years, largely catapulted by social media.
The film follows a punk rocker named Simon (Kyle Gallner) as he crosses paths with a shy young woman named Patty (Emily Skeggs), becoming an offbeat story of acceptance.
Though it’s currently available for streaming on Hulu, a series of pop-up screening events around the country have been drawing crowds. “Dinner in America” is going to play at a number of Laemmle theaters this week, with Rehmeier, Skeggs and Gallner at some screenings. (A few have already sold out.)
Points of interest
‘Altered States’ in 35mm
Ken Russell’s 1980 film “Altered States,” starring William Hurt, Blair Brown and Bob Balaban, will be screening tonight in 35mm at Brain Dead Studios. Based on a novel by Paddy Chayefsky, the film follows a scientist (Hurt) who begins doing experiments with sensory deprivation. “Altered States” features wildly terrifying psychedelic imagery, often teetering on the brink of madness.
In a review of the film Charles Champlin wrote, “‘Altered States’ is a science fiction that moves from the not-impossible to the wholly preposterous (and the camp, the unworkable and the extravagantly nonsensical) in Guinness-record time. Disbelief does not so much have to be suspended as put down in a choke-hold. … Actually, as a piece of material, ‘Altered States’ seems cut closer to Ken Russell’s special gifts for visual enrichment (not to say conceptual outrage) than anything he has had in some time.”
‘Kansas City’ vs. ‘Philadelphia’
I have long felt that Super Bowl Sunday is one of the best days for going to the movies, because the theaters are usually pretty empty. The good people of the American Cinematheque had a similar idea when they programmed a double feature inspired by the two teams in this year’s big game, playing Robert Altman’s 1996 “Kansas City” along with Jonathan Demme’s 1993 “Philadelphia.” Those directors also happen to be two essential touchstone filmmakers around here, so the pairing seems particularly inspired.
“Kansas City” returns Altman to his hometown for a story of a kidnapping gone awry set against the backdrop of the town’s lively jazz scene. The cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Miranda Richardson, Dermot Mulroney, Steve Buscemi and Harry Belafonte.
In an interview with Don Heckman, who was then The Times’ jazz writer, Altman said, “It’s where I was born and grew up. And almost every character in every situation, except for the main story, was truthful. Not quite factual but truthful.”
As Kevin Thomas wrote in his review, “Altman, after all, is arguably our greatest still-active senior director — one whose work constitutes a distinct and stylish comment on American life. You just wish ‘Kansas City’ was more satisfying, especially since it comes so close to being successful.”
“Philadelphia” is a legal drama starring Tom Hanks as a closeted gay man who sues the law firm he used to work at, claiming he was fired because he has AIDS. Denzel Washington plays the lawyer who takes on his case.
Reviewing the film, Kenneth Turan wrote, “The air of do-goodism hangs like a pall over ‘Philadelphia,’ and nothing is so fatal to effective drama. The first major studio release to deal with AIDS, it is all too conscious of time past and opportunities lost, of being years behind the crisis. But one film cannot make up for an industry-wide history of timidity, and in attempting to this one inevitably hampers its own impact.”
The paper covered the film extensively, including a long profile of Hanks by Kristine McKenna and an essay by activist Larry Kramer titled “Why I Hate ‘Philadelphia.’”
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