On Wednesday, December 7th at 7:30 PM, Huntington’s Cinema Arts Centre will screen the recently discovered director’s cut of Peter Bogdanovich’s final theatrical feature film. Originally released as She’s Funny That Way, the director’s cut is now known as Bogdanovich’s “lost film”, and features the directors original edit and title: Squirrels to the Nuts. The screening will be followed by a post-film discussion and Q&A in which the film scholar who discovered the film, James Kenney, will detail his discovery and the process of making the film available to the public.
Heavily cut, substantially reshot, and burdened with a painfully explicit voice-over narration, Peter Bogdanovich’s final theatrical feature was released in 2014 under the title She’s Funny That Way and quickly disappeared from view. Miraculously, Bogdanovich’s full original cut, running 123 minutes and titled Squirrels to the Nuts in homage to Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, was saved from oblivion by James Kenney, a CUNY English instructor, who discovered a high-definition video master of the Bogdanovich edit on eBay.
In its full, free-floating form, Squirrels recovers Bogdanovich’s elegance, airiness, and ability to smoothly manage a large cast of characters. This ensemble romantic farce centers around a Brooklyn sex worker and aspiring actress, Isabella (Imogen Poots), and how she unwittingly affects the interconnected relationships between a Broadway director (Owen Wilson), his leading lady wife (Kathryn Hahn), her suave co-star (Rhys Ifans), an obsessive judge (Austin Pendleton), and a thoroughly unprofessional therapist (Jennifer Aniston), among many others. At heart the film is a McCareyesque comedy of remarriage, with the stage director (Wilson) fighting through serial infidelities to make it back to his patient wife (Hahn), who herself is being pursued by the scruffy Brit film star (Ifans). However, the peripheral characters—particularly Pendleton’s lovesick judge and Aniston as the world’s most indiscreet therapist—add some wonderful, darker notes to Bogdanovich’s rich comic tapestry.
