“She’s Funny That Way” wasn’t exactly the movie he set out to make, but the director’s cut was feared lost. How it came to be shown at MoMA is a complicated saga.
Cash from a dentist’s office. Urns with ashes. A set of Chuck Close holograms. These are some of the items that Eric Eisenberg, 54, said he had found in storage lockers. A self-described “full-time eBayer,” Eisenberg makes a living buying lockers in arrears at auction and then selling the goods online. In one such purchase, he came across a tape of a movie called “Squirrels to the Nuts” and added it to his eBay listings.
James Kenney, a 51-year-old English lecturer at City University of New York, is a lifelong fan of Peter Bogdanovich and had a habit of looking up the filmmaker’s work on eBay. He wasn’t originally searching for a tape, but after he found Eisenberg’s listing in 2020 — and another Bogdanovich expert deepened his suspicion that it might be something special — he recalled bargaining down the price to $100.
It was, most likely, the only screenable copy of Bogdanovich’s preferred cut of what turned out to be the final fiction feature of the director, who died at 82 in January. It’s a version that had been feared lost and will play for the first time publicly at the Museum of Modern Art beginning on Monday.
How the movie evolved from a cut that satisfied Bogdanovich, director of “The Last Picture Show” and “What’s Up, Doc?,” to a release that he was, by most accounts, resigned to — and how the tape of the earlier version came up for sale online — is a complicated saga.
At MoMA, moviegoers won’t see a completely polished movie; what’s on the tape wasn’t color-corrected and lacked a final sound mix and official credits. But Louise Stratten, who wrote the movie with Bogdanovich and was one of its producers, called it “the rough version of the director’s cut,” with all the scenes in place and no trims to be made. In the months before he died, Bogdanovich had been working on putting out a fully finished version of the cut that was on the tape, said Stratten, who was married to the director from 1988 to 2001. She said it will be available soon for home viewing.
By the time “Squirrels” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, it was called “She’s Funny That Way.” That version ran around 20 minutes shorter than the MoMA cut with a substantially different structure: It was told in flashback as a former prostitute turned movie star (Imogen Poots) recounts her story to a reporter (Illeana Douglas); it culminated in a cameo from Quentin Tarantino. The cast also featured Owen Wilson as a philandering stage and film director, Kathryn Hahn as his actress wife and Jennifer Aniston as a therapist with a flagrant lack of empathy. Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson served as executive producers.
“She’s Funny That Way” opened theatrically in the United States in August 2015 to a muted response. “There’s barely a whiz-bang punchline or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The New York Times.
But the “Squirrels” cut, assembled earlier, does not have that framing device with Douglas, which was the product of a reshoot. The humor is drier, the pace is more leisurely and characters like a judge played by Austin Pendleton have more screen time. How a private eye (George Morfogen) is connected to a playwright (Will Forte) is established earlier in the movie, allowing for a bigger comic payoff when all the principals finally converge at a restaurant. The ending is completely different. As Kenney noted in a blog post about his discovery, this version emerges clearly as a successor to other Bogdanovich pictures like “They All Laughed” (1981), another bittersweet ensemble comedy in which characters with intimate connections keep bumping into one another across New York.
But at a preview screening in New York in 2013, the response wasn’t as good as anyone had hoped. “We got some feedback about people thinking it was old-fashioned, and that a lot of parts of it were unbelievable in terms of characters being at the same restaurant at the same time — things you’ve kind of just got to go with,” said Pax Wassermann, the original editor, who is married to Bogdanovich’s daughter Alexandra.
Wassermann also recalled a producer’s anxiety over Aniston’s late entrance, almost 30 minutes in. Bogdanovich and Wassermann worked on the film in New York, but when the production set up a parallel editing bay in Los Angeles, with the editor Nick Moore (“Love Actually”) taking a pass at the movie, Wassermann quit, he said, so that Bogdanovich could be present for the editing on the West Coast and not feel pressured to stay with his son-in-law.
Moore, who spent several weeks on the edit before leaving for another commitment, recalled working with Bogdanovich as a “lovely time” and didn’t have any sense of a tumultuous production. “It was as difficult as they always are,” he said, “but it wasn’t monstrous.” Of Bogdanovich, he said: “I don’t remember him ever being distressed at all. Honestly, there were fireworks at times, but I always got the impression that he enjoyed that. He loved fighting for what he wanted.”
Peter Tonguette, an occasional contributor to The Times who is the author of “Picturing Peter Bogdanovich,” which features extensive interviews with the director, corresponded with the filmmaker throughout the making of the movie and viewed 10 cuts in all. He characterized what happened during the editing as a “committee approach” in which Bogdanovich chose to “try to be part of that committee,” participating in the reshooting and reshaping process even if he regretted the changes.
It had been many years since Bogdanovich, who also made documentaries, had a fiction film in theaters that he wrote and directed, Tonguette pointed out. “Peter had gone to war with studios before,” he said, “and I think he felt it had really hurt him in the industry.” Tonguette recalled that Bogdanovich forwarded him a detailed note he had written proposing changes as late as May 2014, as proof that he was committed to improving even a watered-down film at a granular level. “A compromised hit is better than no hit at all, so he wasn’t going to go against the movie,” even though it wasn’t the movie he wrote and shot, Tonguette said.
Kenney said it was clear when he watched the “Squirrels” cut that it was different from the start — and better. “Whether it’s a four-star film or a three-star film, it’s a four-star talent working at full caliber,” he said.
Stratten remembered getting a positive response from the “She’s Funny That Way” audience at Venice, but added, “Every time we would watch it together, we would just say, well, there’s a better movie there.” The recovered “Squirrels” cut, she said, is “the movie we intended to make.”
She and Bogdanovich suspected the tape had come from the editing bay in New York, before the changes in Los Angeles. Harbor Picture Company in SoHo, where editing took place, is indeed listed on the tape label. It is also, by Eisenberg’s estimate, “about 150 yards” from the Manhattan Mini Storage where he bought the locker. (He remembered walking over.)
Several messages left at Harbor and emails to company representatives went unreturned.
“It sounds kind of like a comedy within a comedy,” Stratten said. “It almost sounds like it’s a part of the movie.”
Even before Kenney got a digital copy of the tape to Bogdanovich in November 2020, Stratten said, they had been trying to find out what materials still existed. “It’s incredible that this happened while Peter was alive, because Peter and I wanted to do a director’s cut, and then this fell into our laps as if it was just a huge gift,” she said.
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