For nearly a decade — ever since comedy legend Lily Tomlin played a salty septuagenarian in Paul Weitz’s “Granny” — I’ve been trying to find a copy of her one-man show, “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.” “
Well, the search is over.
Last week, on Friday night, Tomlin sat down with Jane Fonda, his “Frank and Gracie” co-star and frequent collaborator, at the first public screening of the newly restored film, which debuted at RescueFest — the first-ever screening of IndieCollect films that Recovered by the organization – in Los Angeles.
The landmark version (directed and photographed by John Bailey) was released in 1991, six years after Tomlin performed — and perfected — its live show at New York’s Plymouth Theater.
Reviewing Search in 1985, Frank Rich called it “the most truly subversive comedy produced on Broadway in years” in the pages of The New York Times, and while the show’s script — written by Tomlin’s wife, Jane Wagner — had been readily available for years, Billy’s film has become impossible to watch…that is, until Ed Carter (who was the Academy’s film archivist until the organization’s restructuring earlier this fall). Discover the original negative among a pile of reels salvaged from Deluxe Labs.
The restoration itself took three years, and was complicated by the fact that the negative was nine minutes shorter than Tomlin remembered. “They found 108 minutes, and I had to say yes to it, so I looked at the film and said, ‘There’s something missing,’” Tomlin told me upstairs before the event. “Then we discovered the other nine minutes that were missing, so they came back and found them printed and were able to marry her.”
For this Tomlin fan, the show was a revelation: a chance to see her play everything from Agnus Angst, the angry teenage runaway who rebels against society, to the trio of ex-feminists to Trudy, the Madison Avenue manager-turned-bag lady, who pushes a shopping cart She writes down deep thoughts on sticky notes, while musing about aliens.
“I play characters, I don’t play regular roles,” Tomlin explained. “At the time, it was huge for me, because it set me apart from others. I got amazing reviews.”
After the show, Fonda had a half-hour question-and-answer session with her old friend. “That’s why ‘9 to 5’ became what it was, because when I saw her in a solo show,” she told the audience, pointing to Tomlin. (To clarify: Fonda asked Tomlin to play Violet Newsted in the 1980 workplace satire after seeing her first Broadway production of “Looking Nice” in 1977.)
“I did my first Broadway show to legitimize myself,” Tomlin said. “I’m tired of spending one night on the road. Usually, I get booked for a night or two, leave the next day on the transport, read a great review about myself, say: ‘I wish we could just stay here’ and play for a while.
So she and Wagner came up with “Search,” in which Tomlin alternates between dozens of different characters over the course of 117 minutes.
“I was doing a tour in Lexington, Kentucky, and Jane sent me a bunch of one-inch-thick cards, and they were all Agnus cards,” she recalls. “That night, I did my usual show, and then I kind of read, because I couldn’t commit all the words to memory.”
Wagner gave her so much good material to try out years later, Tomlin was still getting notes from a fan who was there at the Lexington Opera House that night, complaining about how she and Wagner had ruined the show by cutting Agnus’ part. To make room for 11 other characters — like Trudy, who serves as the show’s distracted hostess.
“Trudy is a philosopher,” Tomlin told Fonda. “It’s like having a wisecracking fool, that theatrical conceit. Because Jane had always been interested in science and space exploration, she began creating different characters — with Trudy as the backbone of the show — trying to get the widest possible range of characters for one person to play and for many to play with. humanity as much as we can.”
During the years I spent searching for a chance to see “Search,” several ambitious theater organizations attempted to stage a production of it — and the challenge was to do so without Tomlin’s involvement.
Back in 2022, during her final year on “Saturday Night Live,” Cecily Strong gave it a shot — an ambitious accomplishment, and an equally crushing failure in this critic’s estimation. According to Tomlin, “When most people do a show, they’ll use 12 actors.” This was true for a 2016 production at the LGBT Center in Los Angeles. “Everyone embraces this project, but more often than not, they turn away from it. They cannot control it in time.
Wagner wrote the characters for Tomlin, and the two crafted them for several months. This process has been documented in another extremely rare film, Lily Tomlin: The Film Behind the Show by Joan Churchill and Nick Broomfield, which provides valuable insights into the pair’s writing and rehearsal process.
Tomlin is proud of the live Broadway production, but is grateful to have the 1991 film restored. “You’re never satisfied,” she said. “That’s why I like to work live, because no one really remembers it, except very superficially, and every night you have to do it again and try to improve it.”
According to Independent Filmmaker Project founder Sandra Schulberg, the version shown at RescueFest — which was supervised by Cameron Hafner and Ciara Kane of IndieCollect, with audio restoration by Nick Bergh of Endpoint Audio Labs in Burbank — is almost complete and should be ready for theatrical re-release . Release next year.
In theory, “Research” may seem like a time capsule, but in fact it resonates with new relevance today, as when Agnus says: “I must have missed most of the things that made America great.”
What struck me about the ten characters Tomlin plays in Searching is how she treats each of them as a real person. Sure, they’re meant to be funny, but Tomlin inhabits each one of them — from Trudy the homeless woman to Brandy and Tina, prostitutes tired of interviewing intellectuals — with both love and empathy.
As she told Fonda: “This issue of empathy is a big one for people who don’t have it.”
At the end of the Q&A, Fonda asked her friend if she saw any signs of intelligent life in the universe right now, and Tomlin replied, “Well, Julie… I see a lot of intelligence, but we’re applying that intelligence very stupidly.” It is difficult to fully endorse it.